Tag Archives: Food

The Food and Farming Transition: Toward a Post Carbon Food System

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More and more scientists are pointing to the fact that the end of the cheap oil era will require us to fundamentally change the prevailing current food and agricultural system; a system that has become addicted to and dependent on fossil fuels. This week I came across a report entitled “The Food and Farming Transition: Toward a Post Carbon Food System” published by the Post Carbon Institute earlier this year.  Although the report focuses on the United States, its contents applies to many other parts of the world as well. In this well accessible and readable report the authors not only point to the key vulnerabilities of a food system resting on an unstable foundation of massive fossil fuel inputs but also to the seeds of transition toward a post carbon food system:

The seeds of the new food system have already been planted. America’s farmers have been reducing their energy use for decades. They are using less fertilizer and pesticide. The number of organic farms, farmers’ markets, and CSA operations is growing rapidly. More people are thinking about where their food comes from.

These are important building blocks, but much remains to be done. Our new food system will require more farmers, smaller and more diversified farms, less processed and packaged food, and less long-distance hauling of food. Governments, communities, businesses, and families each have important parts to play in reinventing a food system that functions with limited renewable energy resources to feed our population for the long term.

Food, agriculture and cities

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Recently the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has published a brochure and briefing note about food and agriculture in and around cities. Like many international public bodies, national governments and NGOs the FAO is concerned about the social, economic, ecological and health consequences of the concentration of the world’s population in and around large cities. In the brochure the FAO states that there is an urgent need to invest in urban food programmes: 

The 4th World Urban Forum cited the need for policies and interventions to ensure that the increasing number of urban poor do not get left behind. The food dimension of poverty in urban areas still has not been translated into sufficient policy action in many countries. Rural-urban linkages will become increasingly important. Urban policies also need to acknowledge the role of urban and peri-urban agriculture in urban development, ensure urban food supply and strengthen livelihoods of poor urban producers. This includes removing barriers and providing incentives for urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) as well as improving natural resource management in urban and peri-urban areas. … A paradigm shift in both urban and agriculture development, planning and policy formulation is required in order to ensure access to urban food security, improved environmental management and enhanced rural-urban linkages.

In order to broaden the approaches and to gather new insights for cities both of developing, intermediate or developed countries,  the FAO’s Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum) has opened a debate which is, in terms of contributing to the debate, only open for FSN forum members. However, everyone can read contributions to the debate. Furthermore, for those interested in this topic, I can highly recommend the website of the FAO’s Food for the Cities Initiative. It contains a lot of interesting fact sheets and publications about the multiple aspects related to food, agriculture and cities.

Stadslandbouw in perspectief – Tilburg als voorbeeld

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Cover Zelfvoorzienend TilburgEen groep studenten van Wageningen Universiteit heeft in opdracht van de Brabantse Milieufederatie een kort onderzoek uitgevoerd naar de mogelijkheden om het aantal voedselkilometers in de gemeente Tilburg te reduceren. Dit onderzoek is een vervolg op een eerdere verkenning van een andere groep Wageningse studenten naar voedselconsumptie in Tilburg, waarover ik op 24 april een blog schreef. De effecten van het toepassen van volkstuinen in de gemeente en de huidige voedselconsumptie van inwoners zijn hierin onderzocht. De afgelopen weken heb ik deze groep begeleid. Het rapport dat zij hebben gemaakt n.a.v. hun onderzoek is via deze link te downloaden. De belangrijkste uitkomsten van hun onderzoek zijn samengevat in de vorm van een persbericht:

Duizenden inwoners van de gemeente Tilburg kunnen worden voorzien in de jaarlijkse behoefte aan groenten en fruit door het aanleggen van volkstuinen in verschillende woonwijken. Door grasvelden rondom flatgebouwen en andere gebouwen te gebruiken als volkstuin zijn de bewoners in staat, dichtbij huis hun eigen (biologische) voedsel te verbouwen.

Voedselkilometers, het aantal kilometers afgelegd door voedsel, zijn in de gemeente Tilburg onnodig hoog. Aardappelen, appels, tomaten en melk worden buiten de grenzen van de gemeente gehaald. De CO2 uitstoot van het geconsumeerde voedsel is derhalve zeer groot. Door een tekort aan land- en tuinbouwgrond in de gemeente Tilburg is het echter niet mogelijk om in de toekomst in de gehele consumptie van de bewoners van de gemeente Tilburg te voorzien. Het vergroten van de mate van zelfvoorziening door een aanpassing van de benutting van de land- en tuinbouwgrond en het uitgeven van extra grond voor de verbouwing van aardappelen, groente en fruit, verkleint de CO2 uitstoot aanzienlijk.

 “Urban agriculture”, het verbouwen van aardappelen, groente en fruit binnen de grenzen van de stedelijke omgeving kan toegepast worden voor het verminderen van het tekort aan land- en tuinbouwgrond. De gemeente Tilburg beschikt binnen de stad over een groot aantal hectare grond geschikt voor de verbouwing van aardappelen, groente en fruit op volkstuinen.

Grasvelden en platte daken in woonwijken kunnen worden toegepast voor de verbouwing van aardappelen, groente en fruit. Buurtbewoners zijn hierdoor in staat om lokaal verbouwde producten te consumeren en de CO2 uitstoot aanzienlijk te verminderen. In totaal kunnen ruim 5100 bewoners jaarlijks worden voorzien in de voedselconsumptie van aardappelen, groente en fruit door het toepassen volkstuinen in woonwijken. Dit is meer dan zes keer de stadsschouwburg Tilburg vol.

Foodprint Sitopia

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Foodprint logoOn Monday 3 November Stroom Den Haag (an independent centre focusing on the urban environment from the visual arts, architecture, urban planning and design) organized a small workshop as part of its program entitled ‘Foodprint – food for the city”. Foodprint takes place over the course of several years and focuses on the influence food can have on the culture, shape and functioning of the city, using The Hague as a case study. With a series of activities Stroom aims to increase people’s awareness of the value of food and to give new life to the way we view the relationship between food and the city.

The Hungry CityThe Foodprint program commenced on 25 March 2009 with a lecture by Carolyn Steel, author of the book “The Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives“. In this book she gives a beautiful account of the role of food in shaping urban development. In a nutshell she shows that the size and shape of cities were directly related to the amount and kinds of food that the rural hinterland could provide. For a long time this implied that there was a food provision related barrier to urban growth. However, with the introduction of modern production, transportation, processing, preservation and storage technologies, global agriculture became the city’s hinterland and thus the ‘natural barrier’ to urban growth disappeared. According to Carolyn Steel on her blog:

“One important consequence of this was that urban authorities began to loosen their grip on the food supply, relying more and more on commercial companies to feed the urban population. That might have seemed a good idea at the time, but the result today is that we are totally reliant on trans-national corporations to feed us, who have no civic responsibility and no interests at heart other than making money. That puts them in an extremely powerful position – especially when you consider how difficult it is to feed cities as large as those we now live in.”

Carolyn Steel shows, like others have done as well from complementary and partly overlapping perspectives (e.g. Tim Lang, Michael Pollan, James Howard Kunstler), that most contemporary urban dwellers have become disconnected from and ignorant about food provision and are too a large extent, if not completely, dependent on a global industrialized food provisioning system that is intrinsically unsustainable.

The Hungry City ends with a chapter about the future, in which the author asks how we can use food as a tool for re-thinking cities and the way we live in them. For this, she introduces the term Sitopia (a word based on a combination of the Greek words Sitos, meaning food, and Topos, meaning place, hence food-place):

“The world is already shaped by food, so we may as well start using food to shape the world more positively.”

At the workshop we (i.e. Carolyn Steel, people working at Stroom Den Haag, scientists of different universities, architects, etc…) mainly discussed ideas and exchanged information about ongoing activities that are in one way or the other related to the notion of Sitopia. For me it was very interesting to exchange visions and experiences with disciplines (in particular visual arts and architecture) I normally do not interact with in education or research. And there was a shared desire to find ways to really collaborate, for instance by participating in each other’s projects. Although no concrete future plans were made, I do believe that workshops like this as well as the sustainable food planning conference I organized a month ago are the seeds of new interdisciplinary networks focusing on sustainable urban/regional foodscapes.

To learn more about Carolyn Steel’s vision on food and the city, I highly recommend her recent talk at the TED conference in Oxford.

Can farmers inform policy about multifunctional agriculture?

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By Leonardo van den Berg (MSc. student International Development Studies, Wageningen University) & Klarien Klingen (graduate International Land and Water Management, Wageningen University).

On the 8th of October we participated in the mini-conference about multifunctional agriculture organized by the Rural Sociology Group. We would like to share some thoughts about the conference and relate them to our thesis research experiences in Brazil.

Gianluca Brunori spoke of the benefits of multifunctionality in Tuscany. Here, farms are not merely production spaces rather:

  • Educational sites where children learn about biodiversity and breeds of animals.
  • Sites where farmers are community leaders and negotiate with public institutions.
  • Sites where food quality is negotiated with consumers and subsequently created. This not only entails consumers’ feedback on wine but also farmers educating consumers on what other parts of a cow are edible.

These thoughts turn past and present public concerns of educating farmers upside down and coincide with our thesis experiences in Brazil, where we studied a movement of innovative peasants. Here, farmers refused to be assigned a role as a poor class and instead re-established their role as experts over production, consumption and the environment. Their knowledge, farming systems, and achievements surprised social and natural scientists.

Roberta Sonnino and Katrina Rønningen focused on state policies. Sonnino criticised the little support UK policy grants to multifunctional agriculture. She argues that the UK equates best value with low costs. The few developments in multifunctional agriculture have occurred despite rather than thanks of state action. An exception is the Scottish case where an increase in organic and locally produced school meals gained €150.000 of regional revenues. Rønningen showed us another picture: in Norway multifunctionality has been embedded in society for a long time. She says it started with market demand and that it is now supported by policy: the government aims at having 20% of the food locally produced by the year 2020. Farming as a profession is highly appreciated by the public: farmers are seen as managers of cultural heritage and as producers of healthy food.

Two things struck us about these two cases. First, the UK case shows how difficult it is to penetrate the neo-liberal armour that defines not only political but also much of our own rationality. Policies are often perceived as an obstacle rather than as enabling factors. It was this hostile context in which Brazilian peasants operated. Through diversification, agroecology, and community forms of exchange these peasants have increased their autonomy enabling them to pursue their own values. Second, the case of Norway gives us a taste of the role public policies could play in the valorisation of farmers as (re)producers of healthy food, nature, landscape, biodiversity, and public health. That most governments are lacking this is no secret, even according to a market oriented, middle size farmer in our research area:

I could fence a water source, buy some wire and provide some poles. If it were more, how do you say; all this imprisonment of all that is commerce, if it were more humane, looked more at the human side, I think there would be more left and all of society would gain from this (interview November 2009).

In short: we would argue that that the lessons from the third world should not be underestimated. Our experience learns that some of these cases may be running well ahead of theory and policy practice.