Michael Pollen's food rules

This RSA animation of a talk by Michael Pollen is an excellent, succinct reason why agriculture has to change.

Michael Pollan's Food Rules from Marija Jacimovic on Vimeo.

food movements unite!

Food Movements Unite! is a new book edited by Eric Holt-Giménez and Annie Shattuck. It provides a sector by sector road map for bringing the tremendous transformative potential of the world’s food movements together into a powerful transnational force capable of ending the injustices that cause hunger.

Food Movements Unite! from Food First on Vimeo.

Congratulations to Food First for bringing together such an extraordinary range of contributors, and for facilitating a vision of a different food future.

The right to food in Canada: inputs to the forthcoming mission to Canada of the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food

On 27 October while on mission in Korea for the United Nations Development Programme I along with several others received a request from the Office of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food to provide inputs to frame his forthcoming mission to Canada in May 2012. As none of what I have said is confidential, I thought I would share what I think should be the focus of the mission:

i. Issues
a. continuing food insecurity is a fact of life across much of the country – the use of food banks was at a historic high in 2010 and growth was most rapid in the fastest-growing part of Canada, Alberta. More information can be found at http://www.cafb-acba.ca/default.aspx and in particular Hunger Count 2011, available at http://www.cafb-acba.ca/getmedia/34ebd534-14db-4bed-96d2-4fcadd5d9a33/HungerCount-2011-web-print-friendly.pdf.aspx?ext=.pdf. There are systemic violations of the right to food in Canada.

b. the threat to small-scale 'family' farming across the breadth of Canada continues to rise as high costs and low incomes facilitate the ongoing consolidation of large-scale export-oriented farms. More information can be found at http://www.nfu.ca, who as recently as May 2011 produced a policy brief on these processes for Ontario, available at http://www.nfu.ca/briefs/2011/farm_ontario.pdf. Despite being a massive producer of food, Canada does not have food sovereignty.

c. in western Canada the threat to small-scale 'family' farming has been deepened by the Federal Government's Bill C-18, the Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act. This bill abolishes the sole-purchaser role of the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) (which also buys barley), which currently negotiates bulk commodity prices on behalf of western grain farmers with the global grain-buying companies to whom the CWB sells. The clear intention is to enable global grain-buying companies to buy directly from farmers, forcing them into competition with each other, and thus driving down prices. While this will benefit large-scale farms that reap economies of scale, small-scale grain farmers incomes' will fall. More information can be found at http://www.nfu.ca, while the Government's position can be found at http://www4.agr.gc.ca/AAFC-AAC/display-afficher.do?id=1318619331542&lang=eng. Bill C-18 will make securing food sovereignty more difficult.

d. the consolidation of corporate concentration in input provision, food traders, processors and supermarkets is ongoing in Canada. This is clearly documented every year in Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's An Overview of the Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food System, a summary of which can be found at http://www4.agr.gc.ca/AAFC-AAC/display-afficher.do?id=1295963199087&lang=eng. The complete report must be ordered from the ministry. The issues surrounding corporate concentration in the food system are similar in Canada to those facing some other developed capitalist countries, and stand in clear contradiction to the concept of food sovereignty.

ii. Populations
a. aboriginal Canadians living in more remote parts of the country witness specific violations of the right to food. Food is much more expensive than in urban Canada, and particularly perishable fresh food. This can be documented at http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100035941, although the data is not current. Also of note is the dated http://www.gov.mb.ca/ana/food_prices/2003_northern_food_prices_report.pdf. One result of expensive fresh food is a need for food baskets to rely on processed foods, which in turn produce a concomitant tendency towards food-based health problems. For example, the link between food security and aboriginal diabetes is explicitly recognized (http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=3067091&Language=E&Mode=1), and has resulted in Federal government intervention (http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fniah-spnia/diseases-maladies/diabete/index-eng.php).
b. in addition, over the past few decades environmental changes have reduced the supply of indigenous foods and indigenous food knowledge has more generally declined amongst aboriginal Canadians (http://www.fao.org/wairdocs/other/ai215e/AI215E04.htm). This compromises the ability of aboriginal Canadians to achieve food sovereignty.
c. in many parts of Canada access to indigenous foods requires access to lands from which aboriginal Canadians were expelled long before the 21st century. Thus, ongoing land claims across the country have implications for the right to food amongst aboriginal Canadians (http://ainc-inac.gc.ca/eng/1100100030285, http://www.aboriginalcanada.gc.ca/acp/site.nsf/eng/ao20009.html)

iii. Programs and initiatives
a. the interest in food access, quality and production issues amongst urban Canadians in their late teens and early twenties and in tertiary education is quite remarkable, where there is a growing explicit awareness of food sovereignty as a means of achieving the right to food (for example, http://www.mealexchange.com/). Canadian civil society takes food issues very seriously.
b. in addition to the National Farmer's Union (http://www.nfu.ca) and Slow Food Canada (http://www.slowfood.ca/) there are a number of civil society groups organized around food (for example, http://foodsecurecanada.org/; a comprehensive list can be found at http://www.foodstudies.ca/organizations.html)
c. the Toronto Food Policy Council is widely recognized as a model for community mobilization around improved access to and control over the local food system (http://www.toronto.ca/health/tfpc/).

I am looking forward to the Special Rapporteur's mission with great interest.

slow food

I went to a very interesting event yesterday, organized by Slow Food Toronto, which sought to bring together slow food practitioners in the food services industry, slow food distributors, and slow food producers. It was principally a networking event, in a city where, according to the moderator, the debate over food and locality is more strongly developed than in any other city in North America.

Several things were striking about the event. First, there was a clear recognition that economics matters. Simply put, the premium on a piece of craft-raised meat is 30 per cent, which means the ability to 'buy in'--literally--to this movement is a function of income. This was not what the participants wanted, but they recognized it as a reality--as they also realized that the bulk of the audience did not reflect the diversity of a city like Toronto. Second, the participants realized--although some did not voice it--that in promoting slow food and local food production systems, a principle opponent was corporate agriculture, whether it is the 'standardized differentiation' of modern post Fordist industrial agriculture, or 'big organic', a label that the participants were particularly eager to use. There is a clear tension in the food system, between those that promote local systems of production and provisioning, and those that seek to deepen processes of global integration and the corporate food regime. How that tension plays out, in the everyday, is far from clear, as corporate food producers are more than happy to co-opt--as the experience of big organic, many of which were, at one time, small organic, make clear. Thirdly, as Phil McMichael has noted, so well, the members of this food movement do not realize that they are part of a global movement that is trying to reclaim control over the system governing food production and provisioning, a movement that is led, currently, by Via Campesina, and which takes, as its point of entry into the global politics of resistance to corporate agriculture, 'food sovereignty'.

These are interesting times. It is striking how many of the contradictions of globalization revolve around food: poverty and inequality being expressed in not having enough to eat, in a world that produces more than enough for all; the industrialization of food demonstrating how commodification extends, even when it is at the expense of human health in the North, in the form, particularly, of the northern obesity crisis; the way in which biotechnologies are developed so as to cement further corporate control over the global food system; climate change being witnessed in food production crises in the South, with the possibility that this will deepen, massively, in the next half century; and emerging from this, the possibility of conflict and, indeed, an end to progress, if--and yes, this is a big if--if agriculture, globally, were to collapse. It has happened before, and it could happen again. In other words, how we, as individuals, position ourselves within our own systems of food provisioning expresses our relationship to many of these contradictions, our own way of trying to navigate the choppy waters of globalization.

Of course, people at the meeting yesterday did not all see this, in all its fullness. But many did. They are well aware that redefining our relationship with the dominant system of food provisioning is an act against the corporate control of the food system, and indeed, current forms of globalization. What they are not aware of, I thought, was the extent to which this is truly a global movement.