Transition towards a Food Commons Regime: Re-commoning Food to Crowd-feed the World (PDF Download Available).

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Khushboo Balwani: Here’s the problem: The rapid expansion of cities is breaking the relationship that people have with the food ecosystem. Although the problem is receiving attention by some city officials, and they are adopting new sustainability programs and policies, it is a time-consuming, top-down process with an uncertain impact. What if with a bottom-up approach of small, local actions citizens can engage with could have a massive impact? Cities are centers of enormous energy and resources, and, by leveraging connections with friends, families, neighbors, and local community groups, it’s possible to create sustainable and affordable food systems.

Here’s how one organization is working on the problem: Back in 2007, a woman in a small town called Todmorden, in the northern part of England, dug up her prized rose garden. She planted vegetables, knocked down the garden wall, and put up a sign saying, “Help Yourself.”

This small action grew into a movement that has transformed Todmorden into a town in which citizens are reshaping their surroundings. The incredible edible Todmorden movement has turned all the public spaces, from the front yard of a police station to railway stations, into farms filled with edible herbs and vegetables. Locals and tourists pluck fruits and vegetables for free.

This novel idea, which is also called “open-source food,” promises a future with food for all. The project shares a participatory vision of “three plates” — community, education, and business. Schools grow food, businesses donate goods and services, and shops sell planter boxes.

Results:

• As a result of the huge success of the project, the Incredible Edible Network was set up in 2012 to attract grant funding and support the replication of the project globally. There are now 100 Incredible Edible groups across the U.K. More are popping up all the time around the globe.
• The initiative has opened up a new marketplace for local farmers as well as the tourism industry.
• The movement has also fostered a sense of community and responsibility among the local residents, interaction and bonding among the neighbors, and connections with spaces like police stations, cemeteries, and prisons.

Learn more from:

• Incredible Edible Network
• Incredible Edible Todmorden
• Shareable article

This case study is adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” Get a copy today.

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Jonny Gordon-Farleigh: Your new book, How to Thrive in the Next Economy, explores practical innovations in sustainability across the world. What stories would you pick out as the most instructive for the scale of change we need to see?

John Thackara: The sheer variety of projects and initiatives out there is, for me, the main story. No single project is the magic acorn that will grow into a mighty oak tree. We need to think more like a forest than a single tree! If you look at healthy forests, they are extremely diverse—and we’re seeing a healthy level of diversity in social innovation all over the world. Many people say we need to focus on solutions that scale, but to me that’s globalisation-thinking wearing a green coat. Every social and ecological context is unique, and the answers we seek will be based on an infinity of local needs.

JGF: What examples of inspiring stories can you give?

JT: The story of soil has been an epiphany for me. Soil is the largest living system on the planet; without it, we wouldn’t exist. But I only learned this a few years ago. At first I read a whole pile of articles and books, but it all came to life when I then went on a soil creation course in the Cevennes, the mountainous area in France where I live. Our teacher was a French agro-ecologist Robert Morez who has worked as an agricultural advisor in Africa for forty years. He showed us how to make a growing mound with a bunch of ingredients: bone meal, dried blood, crushed oyster shells, wood fire ash, onto a growing mound of wood, twigs, leaves, straw. Each layer is seasoned, as if with salt and pepper, by this powdery mix of minerals and biological activators. Robert told us we were learning “how to construct a bio-intensive planting mound”—but in my mind, I was making soil, rather than depleting it, for first time in my life.

JGF: There was a figure recently stating that we have around 100 harvests left.

JT: Yes, that figure was for British soil at the current rate of soil depletion. Other reports suggest that we are losing 3.5 tonnes of soil for every person on the planet every year. The numbers are either hard to grasp or just dispiriting, but either way, it’s enormous. But what I learned up the mountain is that we can restore soil because people in different regions of the world have been doing precisely that for a long time. On its own, soil formation is an extremely slow process— sometimes taking thousands of years—but a growing band of visionaries have discovered that the process can be speeded up dramatically if the right approach is followed.

JGF: Farming organisations, such as La Via Campesina, describe this approach as agroecology.

JT: Yes, they do. It’s an ugly word, I know, but it describes the practical wisdom of people who’ve been stewarding the land for generations. It’s not my job to tell La Via Campesina what language to use—the word make sense to their 300,000 members—but I think one of the things that we writers can do is come up with better words!

JGF: This leads into my next question: Early on in the book you remind readers to be careful of the words we choose to make sense of these new times. Noting, “one man’s energy descent, is another woman’s energy transition.” Words that I find unhelpful, and come to mind, are phrases such as ‘degrowth’. What language do you find alienating in the language around the new economy?

JT: I’m totally not a fan of ‘degrowth’. I’ve learned through experience that calling for people to give things up, voluntarily or otherwise, doesn’t work. Most people simply turn off when confronted by lists of prohibitions. I try, instead, to talk about kinds of growth we do need: land getting healthier, water getting fresher, air cleaner to breathe, communities more resilient. These kinds of growth add up to new kind of value.

JGF: You also write about healing the metabolic rift, a term that Karl Marx used to describe the loss of interdependency between social and ecological systems and the reason for recurring crises.

JT: The metabolic rift is another of the ugly green buzzwords that seem to plague us—but learning about the concept was another lightbulb-going-off-in-my-head moment. I’d spent half my life trying to figure out why even decent people who love animals and children persist in organising the world in such an obviously damaging way. An answer that makes sense is that we don’t experience the result of the damage that we do as visceral, embodied feedback. We don’t feel the pain felt by the earth because it happens somewhere else—out of sight and therefore out of mind.

JGF: Could you explain more about what the metabolic rift is?

JT: It’s not that our brains lack processing capacity—more, that they’re preoccupied by the wrong inputs. A combination of paved surfaces and pervasive media has shielded us from direct experience. Material progress itself has distracted us from the health of the natural living systems upon which we still depend—and, indeed, are a part. If you put it to someone—as I have done—that, without soil, humanity will quickly starve, they usually agree, nod sagely—and wait for me to change the subject. Few of the city-dwelling people I know ever touch, feel, taste or smell the stuff—healthy or otherwise. Our children are not taught about it at school. It’s the same with climate change, the loss of biodiversity, deforestation; or dying seas: Out of sight, out of mind. Why would we care?

The ways we understand the world are shaped by the political and economic system. As Jason Moore explains in his book Capitalism in the Web Of Life, the metabolic rift is not a regrettable side-effect of the modern economy; it’s written into its DNA. Our present economy has to grow in order to survive, and ceaseless growth entails ever-larger inputs of external resources and energy. Our problems started when we first travelled across the world to take other people’s minerals and resources—and that was 500 years ago. This is where the richness of the so called developed nations originates. The Spanish plundered wood from the Baltic region to build the ships in which they sailed off to the West Indies to bring back spices, and so on. A hundred million kilos of silver from Latin America provided much of the capital for Europe’s industrial revolution. Our bad behaviour dates back a long way!

JGF: Your book suggests that organising the world around bioregions is one way to close the metabolic rift?

JT: The notion of a bioregion appeals to me for a specific reason: Telling city people to take better care of nature has been one of my many failures as a writer. Intellectually, city folk buy the argument that growth should mean soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient. But in the absence of positive feedback from some distant place called Nature, people just don’t connect with my exhortations. I realised that a more compelling story, and a shared purpose, were needed. So I started asking people two questions: “Does your city know where its lunch is coming from? And is that place healthy—or not?”

With the prospect of missing lunch as motivation, I’m finding that the idea of a bioregion is an appealing way for city people to reconnect with living systems, and each other, through the unique places where we live. It acknowledges that we live among watersheds, foodsheds, fibresheds, and food systems—not just in cities, towns, or ‘the countryside’. The idea is culturally dynamic, too—far more than abstract words like sustainability, or resilience, or transition. A bioregion is about unique geographic, climatic, hydrological and ecological qualities. These can be the basis for meaning and identity, and people get that.

But beyond the idea in general, what most turns people on—especially designers and artists—is the sheer variety of work to be done in bringing a bioregion to life. Maps of a bioregion’s ecological assets are needed: its geology and topography; its soils and watersheds; its agriculture and biodiversity. The collaborative monitoring of living systems, the interactions among them, and the carrying capacity of the land, needs to be designed—together with feedback channels. Spaces and places that support collaboration need to be identified and, where needed, adapted—from maker spaces to churches, from town halls, to libraries. New collaboration and peer-to-peer platforms are needed to help people to share resources of all kinds—from land, to time and knowledge. New economic and business models need to be adapted and deployed, such as peer production, commons economics, and open value accounting. Novel forms of governance and discussion must also be designed that enable collaboration among diverse groups of people and enterprises. Every bioregion will need its own identity, too—what the bioregion looks like, and feels like, to its citizens and visitors.

JGF: Those subjects are pretty broad-ranging. Are you suggesting that designers and artists are best-placed to take care of them all?

JT: None of these actions mean designers or artists are acting alone. Developing the agenda for a bioregion involves a wide range of skills and capabilities: The geographer’s knowledge of mapping; the conservation biologist’s expertise in biodiversity and habitats; the ecologist’s literacy in ecosystems; the economist’s ability to measure flows and leakage of money and resources. But in creating objects of shared value—such as an atlas, a website, a plan, a building, a landscape, or a meeting—I do think the design process can be a powerful way to foster collaboration among diverse disciplines and constituencies, yes. I’d also say that the service designer can bring something special to the creation of platforms that enables actors to share and collaborate. And—as you’ve shown so wonderfully in STIR magazine already—artists have a unique capacity to represent real-world phenomena in ways that change our perceptions.

GF: At the recent new economy summit we both attended in Bristol, I mentioned Charles Eisenstein’s claim that, “the city of New York, with over one million people, met all its food needs from within seven miles prior to 1850.” If you look at the scale of most UK cities, such as Bristol or Manchester, it’s a very possible project.

JT: It is very doable. Urban farming started off as a minority fad, but it’s quickly going mainstream in many northern cities. A lot of smart innovation to support urban farming is happening—but it’s not much about high-tech control systems. It’s more about new ways to share resources, and collaborate to get the work done. New kinds of enterprise are emerging: food co-ops, collective kitchens, community dining, edible gardens, new distribution platforms. The big change is an understanding that urban farming can encompass an archipelago of growing spaces within a 50-mile radius—a mosaic of growing situations that we can think about as a whole.

JGF: What examples could you give of urban projects that you experienced while writing the book?

JT: I’m very excited by a project called The Food Commons in the USA. This project marks a radical shift from a narrow focus on the production of food, towards a whole systems approach in which the interests of farm communities, the land, watersheds, and biodiversity, are all considered together as inter-dependent parts. The Food Commons is conceived as a kind of connective tissue that weaves connections between grassroots projects, on the one hand, and vital support services, on the other: legal, financial, communications and organisational.

Another great example is the city of Cleveland, also in America. It’s a classic rustbelt city that has lost large chunks of traditional industries. They have a particularly down-to-earth mayor who, when badgered by activists for the need for more urban farms, commissioned a three-year a peer-reviewed assessment of what could be grown on different patches around the city repurposed for growing food, such as abandoned lots, vacant buildings. The results surprised everyone. Something like 70% of all fruit and vegetables, and quite a big chunk of the dairy products, could be grown within Cleveland’s city limits. And that is without even venturing 20 miles outside the city. So now the Cleveland model, as it’s called, is almost a reincarnation of the new city model from the 1920s.

JGF: One of the big shifts you advocate in the book is to move beyond the language of ‘do less harm’ to the idea of ‘leaving things better.’ What inspired this change of approach in both thought and action?

JT: I had another transformational experience at a meeting of 200 sustainability managers at a famous home furnishings giant in Sweden. During 20 years of uninterrupted work on sustainability, they told me, this famous company has made thousands of rigorously-tested improvements that are recorded on what they call a “list without end.” The range of improvements I heard about was startling—even admirable—except for one fact: The one thing this huge company has not done is question whether it should grow. On the contrary: It is committed to double in size by 2020. By that date, the number of customers visiting their giant sheds will increase from 650 million a year at the time of writing to 1.5 billion a year. Sitting there, it hit me that there’s a problem with this narrative that concerns wood. The company, as the third largest user of wood in the world, has promised that by 2017 half of all the wood it uses—up from 17% now—will either be recycled, or come from forests that are responsibly managed. Now 50% is a vast improvement, but it also begs the question: What about the second half of all that wood? As the company doubles in size, that second pile of wood—the un-certified half, the unreliably-sourced-at-best half—will soon be twice as big as all the wood it uses today. The impact on the world’s forests, of one company’s ravenous hunger for resources, will be catastrophic. The committed and gifted people I met in Sweden—along with sustainability teams in hundreds of the world’s major companies—are confronted by an awful dilemma: however hard they work, however many innovations they come up with, the net negative impact of their firm’s activities on the world’s living systems will be greater in the years ahead than it is today. And all because of compound growth. This was the moment when I realised that it doesn’t matter how committed you are to doing less harm. If it is simultaneously committed to grow then they will inevitably leave things worse.

JGF: Throughout the book you look at ‘nonmarket work,’ life ‘without money,’ and the ‘commons of care,’ or what is sometimes known as the shadow economy. Commons advocate David Bollier claims “an estimated two billion people depend on various natural resource commons for their everyday survival—farmland, fisheries, forests, irrigation water, wild game.” And this figure dramatically increases when you add care and other forms of noneconomic activity. How much of a role can commons play in western economies, alongside co-operatives, social enterprises and other social business models?

JT: A gigantic amount. The commons is an idea, and a practice, that generates meaning and hope. I’m nervous of definitions—they cause endless disputes and also tend to freeze an idea in time —but I like the way Silke Helfrich talks about the commons as “all the things that we inherit from past generations that enable our livelihoods.” Seen through that lens, the commons can include land, watersheds, biodiversity, common knowledge, software, skills, or public buildings and spaces. The important thing is that the commons are a form of wealth that a community looks after, through the generations. The idea embodies a commitment to ‘leave things better’ rather than extract value from them as quickly as possible. They are the opposite of the impulse to monetise everything. And because the commons, as an idea, affirms our codependency with living systems and the biosphere, it also represents the new politics we’ve all been looking for to replace the industrial growth economy we have now.

None of this is new, by the way. The commons goes back an awfully long way. It describes the way communities managed shared land in Medieval Europe. Even earlier history, too, is filled with examples of communities managing common resources sustainably. Examples of water being shared as a commons date back 8,000 years. One of the things I’ve learned from the so-called undeveloped world is that the care-based economy has existed throughout human history—looking after each other, and the land, in a multitude of ways, many of which don’t involve paid-for work.

Writers like Hazel Henderson have been trying to refocus our attention on the care economy, writing 30 to 40 years ago. More recently, an important German writer called Ina Pratetorius has argued for a care-centered economy. In German the word care encompasses being mindful, looking after, attending to needs, and being considerate—caring for the world, in other words, and not only nursing and social-work activities or housework in the narrow sense. In a care-centered economy, the commonly held resources that enable us to look after each other, and nature, are part of the same story. Theodore Shanin, who has been called the peasant’s philosopher, makes a similar point: in terms of the land, the water and the air, so called peasants, farmers and poor people have been stewards of their commons for generations; modern, industrialised mass-production farming made it harder and harder to do their job. The care economy has always existed, and we now have the pleasant task to reinvent it for these new times.

JGF: The word ‘connection’ crops up a lot in the book. Is that a core theme?

JT: Too true, it is. I’m like an amateur EM Forster: Howard’s End opens with the words, “Only connect.” The word unlocks so many blockages. I’ve learned that too many of our most celebrated inventions have been the result of a design approach that strives for perfect, static, utopian solutions. These are different, in kind, from real-world ecologies that are dynamic and constantly changing. This habit of mind of ours is not limited to the engineering of hard systems; some visions of nature itself have been utopian in this sense.

Until recently, conservation research tended to focus on the individual species as the unit of study—for example, by looking at the impact of habitat destruction on an individual’s situation. I’m especially inspired by the work of the ecologist Jane Memmott. She has explained that species interactions may be much more important. All organisms are linked to at least one other species in a variety of critical ways—for example, as predators or prey, or as pollinators or seed dispersers—with the result that each species is embedded in a complex network of interactions. The extinction of one species can lead to a cascade of secondary extinctions in ecological networks in ways that we are only just beginning to understand.

The eco-philosopher Joanna Macy is another inspiration. She describes the appearance of this new story as the ‘Great Turning’, a profound shift in our perception, a reawakening to the fact that we are not separate or apart from plants, animals, air, water, and the soils. There is a spiritual dimension to her story—Macy is a Buddhist scholar—but her Great Turning is consistent with recent scientific discoveries, too—the idea, as articulated by Stephan Harding, that the world is “far more animate than we ever dared suppose.” No organism is truly autonomous. In Gaia theory, systems thinking, and resilience science, researchers have shown that our planet is a web of interdependent ecosystems. From the study everything from sub-microscopic viruses, yeasts, ants, mosses, lichen, slime moulds and mycorrhizae, to trees, rivers and climate systems, this new story has emerged. All natural phenomena are connected. Their very essence is to be in relationship with other things—including us.

For thirty years John Thackara has traveled the world in his search of stories about the practical steps taken by communities to realise a sustainable future. He writes about these stories online, and in books; he uses them in talks for cities, and business; he also organises Doors of Perception xskool workshops that bring the subjects of these stories together.

Interview by Jonny Gordon-Farleigh, originally published in STIR magazine no.12 Winter 2016 and reposted from STIR’s website.

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It’s a shame that so many brave books that imagine a post-capitalist world surrender to grandiose theorizing and moral exhortation.  It’s an occupational hazard in a field that is understandably wants to identify the metaphysical and historical roots of our pathological modern times.  But critique is one thing; the creative construction of a new world is another.

That’s why I found Thackara’s book so refreshing.  This British design expert, a resident of southwest France, wants to see what the design and operation of an ecologically sustainable future really looks like, close-up.  He is also thoughtful enough to provide some depth perspective, following his own motto, “To do things differently, we need to see things differently.”

How to Thrive in the Next Economy seeks to answer the question, “Is there no escape from an economy that devours nature in the name of endless growth?”  The short answer is Yes!  There is an escape.  As Thackara shows us, there are scores of brilliant working examples around the world that demonstrate how to meet our needs in more responsible, fair and enlivening ways.

He takes us by the hand to survey a wide variety of exemplary models-in-progress.  We are introduced to scientists and farmers who are discovering how to heal the soil by treating it as a living system.  We meet urbanists who are re-thinking the hydrology of cities, moving away from high-entropy engineered solutions like reservoirs and sewers, to smaller, localized solutions like wetlands, rain gardens, ponds and worm colonies.  Other bioregionalists are attempting to de-pave cities and bring permaculture, gardens, “pollinator pathways” and informal food systems into cities.

We also learn about a number of brave experiments in “social farming” – attempts to treat food and as a commons through ingenious new social systems, production value-chains and organizational designs.

The Food Commons in Fresno, California, is one bold attempt to re-imagine how a region links farms to distribution to grocery stores and restaurants.  The idea is to devise a whole-system approach that makes food more than an economic commodity.  It needs to be an integrated social system that aligns the interests of farm communities, local people, the land, watersheds, and biodiversity in one interconnected network.

The key in this particular case was the establishment of a Food Commons Trust that acts as an owner and steward of land, physical infrastructure and other commonly held assets, to be used for the benefit of everyone.  That way, profit can be used to benefit everyone (better working conditions, fewer pesticides, less expensive food for low-income people), instead of all that surplus value being appropriated by the shareholders of profit-driven companies.

There is even a chapter on commoning in the book, with a special emphasis on social money, the Latin American ethic of buen vivir, and “wild law.”

The “green thread” in this and other stories, explains Thackara, is “the efforts of people in diverse contexts to reconnect to their food – where it is grown, by whom, and under what conditions.  These practical, local and human-scaled activities are the seedlings of an alternative to an industrial food system that, as an extractive industry, is as cruel to people as it is to animals, and the land.”

Thackara’s tone throughout is that of a genial host: “Come, let me show you another inspiring initiative that could remake our economy and society.”  He does not over-sell the examples, however, but candidly acknowledges problems and complications.  With a light touch, he notes the thematic similarities among projects, suggesting their affinities.

I appreciated the intelligence and depth that Thackara brings to his examples.  He notes, for example, that the real problem with high-speed trains (HST) is that they don’t really save us time, while also creating lots of other problems:  “The problem – as with the interstate highway systems that came before – is that it [HST] perpetuates patterns of land use, transport intensity and the separation of functions in space and time that render the whole way we live unsupportable.”  HST leads to sprawling suburbs and a “space-time geography” that is alienating and costly in its holistic dimensions.

I do wish Thackara had spent more time speculating on how we might propagate the emergent new models.  We sorely need to accelerate the proliferation of small, local experiments into larger global movements.  We need to better understand how our search for economic and political change is invisibly linked to inner self-transformations that are still unfolding.  This is really the key – how to nourish aliveness.  At a time when everything is fair game for monetized extraction –  not just land and water, but language, culture, knowledge and even consciousness and lifeforms – we desperately need to develop new socio-economic organisms that can regenerate life on its own terms.  Life needs to be honored as our first priority, not as a secondary benefit of commodity-exchange.

But there is no question Thackara understands how a transformation will ultimately come.  He writes:  “Change is more likely to happen when people reconnect – with each other, and with the biosphere – in rich, real-world contexts of the kind I have written about in this book.  This will strike some readers as being naïve and unrealistic [because they presume that governments and policy must drive any change, as Thackara notes earlier].  But given what we know about the ways complex systems – including belief systems – change, my confidence in the power of the Small to shape the Big remains undimmed.”

Photo by PeterVermaercke

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Although cultivated food is a private food, several food-related elements are yet considered as commons, such as traditional agricultural knowledge accumulated after thousands of years of practices, agricultural knowledge produced by national research institutions, cooking recipes and national gastronomy, ocean fish stocks, wild fruits and animals, genetic resources for food and agriculture, food safety considerations and, more recently, maintaining food price stability and attaining global food security. Food and nutrition security should also be considered a Global Public Good (GPG), since it is neither rival nor excludable – unless we want starve somebody to death – but unfortunately food and nutrition security is yet an aspirational “situation”. But what about food itself?

Food, a limited but renewable resource essential for human existence, has evolved from a common local resource to a private transnational commodity. This commodification process, understood as the development of traits that fit better with the mechanized processes developed by the industrialized food model, is the latest stage of the objectification of food, a human-induced social construct that deprives food from its non-economic attributes just to retain its tradable features (durability, external beauty, standardisation). The nutrition-related properties of food were much undervalued in this process. The value of food is no longer based on its many dimensions (see below) that bring us security and health, including the fact that food is a basic human need that should be available to all, a fundamental human right that should be guaranteed to every citizen, a pillar of every national culture, certainly a marketable product that should be subject to fair trade and sustainable production and finally a GPG that should be enjoyed by all humans. Those multiple dimensions are superseded by the tradable features, being value and price thus mixed up. And everybody knows that only fools confuse price with value.

There are several implications of treating food as a mere commodity, and we just name a few of the most devastating. Food has many different uses other than direct human consumption as the best use of any commodity is where it can get the best price; a commoditised food is meant to be speculated with, no moral considerations seem to deter that. An out-of-control race for land- and water-grabbing for food production is taking place in vast areas of Africa and Latin America. Transnational corporations are major drivers of obesity epidemics from increased consumption of ultra-processed food and drink. And hunger is definitely not abated by means of GMOs or patented seeds.

Human beings can eat food as long as they have money to buy it or means to produce it. Some of those means are also considered as private goods (land, agro-chemicals) although not all (seeds, rainfall, agricultural knowledge). The enclosure mechanisms, through privatization, legislation, excessive pricing or patents, have played a role in limiting the access to food as a public good. The conventional industrialised food system is operating mainly to accumulate under-priced food resources and maximize the profit of food enterprises instead of maximizing the nutrition and health benefits of food to all of us.

The dominant industrial food system is increasingly failing to fulfil its basic goals: feeding people adequately and sustainably, and avoiding hunger. The ironic paradoxes of the globalised industrial food system are that half of those who grow 70% of the world’s food are hungry, food kills people (the hunger-related death toll is 3.1 million children per year, the single major cause of child mortality in 2011), food is increasingly not for humans (since more and more food is diverted towards biofuel production and livestock feeding) and food is wasted due to its low price and low considerations (1/3 of global food production ends up in the garbage every year, enough to feed 600 million hungry people). Hunger still prevails in a world of abundance and obesity is growing steadily, already becoming a pandemic. We humans eat badly.

It was amply believed that market-led food security would finally achieve a better nourished population. However, reality has proven otherwise as a food system anchored in the consideration of food as a commodity to be distributed according to the demand-supply market rules will never achieve food security for all. It is evident that the private sector is not interested in people who do not have the money to pay for their services or goods, weather videogames or staple food. None of the most relevant analyses produced in the last decades on the fault lines of the global food system has ever questioned this nature of food as a private good, produced by private inputs or privately harvested in the wild, and therefore the common understanding sees food access as the main problem. If food security is a good thing for every human and cannot be provided exclusively by one state, the two features of the political definition of a GPG, the food and agriculture private sector does not seem to be the best institution to provide that public good, as it cannot completely capture the utilities of its trade.

The standard economic definition of public goods is anchored on non-rivalry and non-excludability features. In political terms, however, excludability and rivalry are social constructions that can be modified by social arrangements. Goods often become private or public as a result of deliberate policy choices and many societies have considered, and still consider, food as a common good, as well as forests, fisheries, land and water. For instances, fishes are continuously produced by nature and by human beings, so it is no longer restricted in number as there is not a limited number of fishes on Earth. As long as the replenishment rate outpaces the consumption rate, the resource is always available and food is considered a renewable resource with a never-ending stock such as air. Therefore, the main features that traditionally have been assigned to food as a private good can be contested and reconceived in a different way.

Food is a de facto impure public good, governed by public institutions in many aspects (food safety regulations, nutrition, seed markets, fertilizer subsidies, the EU CAP or US Farm Bill), provided by collective actions in thousands of customary and post-industrial collective arrangements (cooking recipes, farmers’ seed exchanges, consumer-producers associations) but largely distributed by market rules. These collective actions for food share this multidimensional consideration of food that diverges from the mainstream industrial food system’s uni-dimensional approach of food as a commodity.

The re-commonification of food is hence deemed an essential paradigm shift for the transition from the dominating agro-industrial food system towards a more sustainable food system fairer to food producers and consumers. Along those lines, based on Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric governance, food as a GPG could be produced, consumed and distributed by hybrid institutional arrangements formed by state institutions, private producers and companies, and self-organized groups under self-negotiated rules. The transition will require experimentation at multiple levels (personal, local, national, international) and diverse approaches to governance (market-led, state-led and collective action-led). This commonification will take several generations and self-governing collective actions cannot do the transition by themselves, as food provision and food security shall involve greater levels of public sector involvement and market-driven distributions. Governments have a vital role to play in countering the tendency toward economic concentration, through genuine tax, credit, and land reforms to disperse buying power toward the poor, so as to maximize the well-being of their citizens and providing an enabling framework to enjoy the right to food for all. Two recent examples of governmental rules that may contribute to facilitate the transition are taxing meat to incentivise a reduction in consumption or overtaxing junk food with high contents of sugar, fat and salt as unhealthy products. Nevertheless, that leading role should gradually be shifted to the self-negotiated collection actions by groups of producers and consumers, as the State provision of food does not surpass the net benefit that consumers would receive through the self-organized and socially negotiated protection, production and use of their own resources.

Civic collective actions for food (or alternative food networks) are key units for this transition and they are built upon the socio-ecological practices of civic engagement, community and the celebration of local food. The commons are gaining ground as a third force of governance and resource management by the people as a supplement to the market and the state. Unlike the market, the commons are about cooperation, stewardship, equity, sustainability, and direct democracy from local to global, and they are mushrooming all over the world, mostly in urban areas and usually at local level.

Nowadays, in different parts of the world, there are many initiatives that demonstrate that a right combination of collective action, governmental rules and incentives, and private sector entrepreneurship yield good results for food producers, consumers, the environment and society in general, and the challenge now is how to scale up those local initiatives to national level. People’s capacity for collective action is an agency that can complement the regulatory mandate of the state and the demand-driven allocation by the private sector. Millions of people innovating have far more capacity to find adaptive and appropriate solutions than a few thousand scientists in the laboratories. It is interesting to note the collective actions for food share a consideration of food as a commons that radically diverges from the mainstream industrial food system that merely considers food as a commodity. Moreover, these collective actions for food also contribute to the reconstruction of the infrastructure of civic life that has been eroded by our individualistic growth-oriented behaviour, as Michael Sandel explains so well.

For those who love to find concrete recommendations out of theoretical narratives, some practical consequences of this paradigm shift would be to maintain food out of trade agreements dealing with pure private goods and thus there would be a need to establish a particular governance system for production, distribution and access to food at global level. That system would entail, among others, binding legal frameworks to fight hunger and guarantee the right to food to all, cosmopolitan global policies and fraternal ethical and legal frameworks, universal Basic Food Entitlements or Food Security Floors guaranteed by the State (i.e. one leave of bread for every citizen everyday), levelling the minimum salary with the food basket, a ban on financial speculation of food, or limiting the non-consumption uses of food such as biofuels. In any case, all those political implications are geared towards establishing a Universal Food Coverage, a social scheme paralleling universal health and education, the very foundations of the social welfare state. If it was possible in the XVIII century to propose health and schools for all, why not such absolute need as food for all in the XXI century? Prof. Amartya Sen is already campaigning for that goal in India.

Finding the adequate equilibrium between this tri-centric institutional setup to govern food production, distribution and consumption will be one of the major challenges the humankind will have to address in the XXI century, as long as the population grows and Earth’s carrying capacity seems to be surpassed by human’s greed for resources, as Ghandi once mentioned. A fairer and more sustainable food system is possible, but we need to reconsider the food narrative to be applicable to transit towards that goal. I do not expect to see this change during my lifetime, but I hope my descendants may.

The post Crowdsourcing the food commons transition: de-commodifying food one movement at a time appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This year my wife and I celebrate a monumental achievement in our life together.

We have successfully grown zucchini.

For eight years, we watched beautiful yellow blossoms form,  only to wither and die before any zucchini formed.  After settling into our third home, my wife planted her spring garden in January. Her zucchini plants flourished, then sprouted. We steeled ourselves for disappointment.  But the blossoms turned into finger sized squash.  And continued growing.

We have so much zucchini and yellow squash we don’t know what to do with it.  Which is a great way to meet neighbors.

In fact, that is value model of an organization called Food is Free.

Extracted from http://foodisfreeproject.org/about-us/

MISSION

The Food is Free Project started with one front yard garden. Less than 3 months later, the majority of neighbors on our pilot block host front yard community gardens.  We are documenting the process as we continue to expand, sharing our mistakes and successes, making the information open-source and available to anyone around the globe. Over 300 cities around the world have started Food is Free Projects and we invite you to start one in your community this season. It all starts with that first front yard garden or shared harvest. Let us know if we can offer any advice or answer questions.

Food is Free provides a platform for community interaction that opens doors to further collaboration and connection. Imagine driving down your street, where the majority of homes host a front yard community garden, neighbors come together for potlucks, establish tool-sharing and community composting programs while creating safer, more beautiful neighborhoods.

The Food is Free Project not only transforms neighborhood blocks, but has installed gardens at elementary schools, community arts spaces, farmers markets, churches and small businesses.

We are creating models for how to grow food in unused public spaces that provide opportunities for people to experience fresh, healthy, organic food, and the power of community when we come together for a cause that’s greater than ourselves. We want to learn what has worked for you so share your experiences and #foodisfree photos with us on social media.

Erin Garrison talks about Food Is Free Albuquerque founded and run by two mom's and their kids. For the last two… https://t.co/aMOc39YtZo

— Food is Free Project (@foodisfreeproj) April 25, 2016

Extracted from: http://foodisfreeproject.org/connect/

 GET INVOLVED

Thanks for sharing the vision and taking action in your community. We’re all in this together! Food is Free Project is an open-source project so we encourage you to take the first step to start a Food is Free Project in your community. It all starts with that first garden and from there things will evolve and grow. Stay in touch and let us know if we can offer advice. Plant a garden in your front yard or if you don’t have a yard grow some container veggies and set up a #foodisfree sharing table. Our actions ripple out and inspire others and this movement will grow like wildflowers. Share your #foodisfree photos with us and remember that together our ripples create waves of change.

Check out our PDF guide on “How to Start a Food is Free Project” to get started.

Photo by UU-Jackson

The post Project Of The Day: Food is Free appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From the Abstract:

” Then, using the food regime theory and exploring the developments in the industrial food system (mainstream) and the urban alternative food networks (AFNs) and rural food sovereignty movement (innovative niches), the author proposes a transition pathway (the re-commonification of food) towards a food commons regime in which primacy rests in its feature as human beings’ absolute need and the different dimensions of food are properly valued, in opposition to the corporate mono-dimensional valuation of food as a commodity. In order to crowdsource this transition, this paper argues the food sovereignty movement and the AFNs need to grow together, beyond individual organisations, to knit a different and bigger food web capable of confronting the industrial food system for the common good. This ongoing transition that will span decades is to be steered by a tricentric governance system (urban and rural civic collective actions for food, partner states and social private enterprises) that enables access and promote food in all its dimensions through a multiplicity of open structures and sustainable peer-to-peer practices aimed at sharing, co-producing and trading food and knowledge. Unlike the market, the food commons are about cooperation, sharing, stewardship, equity, self-production, sustainability, collectiveness, embeddedness and direct democracy from local to global. Shifting the dominant discourse from the private sphere to the commons arena will open up a whole new world of economic, political and societal innovations, not least the Universal Food Coverage.”

Photo by markus spiske

The post Essay of the Day: The Transition Towards a Food Commons Regime appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Description

“January 14, 2015 , panel on “Home on the Grange”:

“Grange Future” celebrates the history and contemporary expression of ‘the grange idea.’ From the 19th century populist movement that backed the early campaign for an “information commons” in the form of Rural Free Mail delivery, to public banking and Farmers co-op banks, this vital movement is re-emerging to confront information and agricultural monopolists of our own era. Severine von Tscharner Fleming leads a panel discussion with the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle and Matt Senate from the Omni Commons and Sudo Room Hackerspace.”

The post Podcast of the Day: Brewster Kahle and Matt Senate on the Revival of the Green Range Progressive Farming Tradition appeared first on P2P Foundation.