Frederik Moberg: Around the world, innovative agroecological farmers increasingly challenge the dominant industrial way of farming. Combining local and scientific knowledge, they put resilience thinking into practice to feed growing populations and cope with climate change, water scarcity, market volatility, and more.

Twelve years ago, in 2006, Haregu Gobezay was unemployed and her family with six children relied on her husband’s salary to cover all their expenses. Today, Gobezay and her husband manage a 12-hectare farm with mango, orange, mandarin, and avocado plantations in Mereb Leke District of the Tigray Region in northern Ethiopia. They also keep a few dairy cows, and chickens for egg production.

They no longer rely on a single crop. The finger millet they used to grow often suffered from weed invasions and termites, and the yield was low due to thin and nutrient-poor soils. Now they grow a wide range of different crops. This has helped them tackle many challenges, and made it possible for them to employ almost a hundred people and make a good profit from selling mango and other fruits.

Agroecology has the explicit goal of strengthening the sustainability of all parts of the food system, from the seed and the soil, to the table, including ecological knowledge, economic viability, and social justice.

Gobezay started with planting vegetables; she then added fruit trees, and peanut plants as cover crops that fertilise the soil by fixing nitrogen from the air, with the help of bacteria living in their root systems. Eventually, she brought in dairy cows and started cultivating pasture plants such as alfalfa, Rhodes grass, and elephant grass under the trees.

To improve soil fertility further and to increase soil organic matter, the family now prepares compost in 20 big pits. In addition, a biogas plant on the dairy farm produces bio-slurry compost and energy for cooking.

The family also uses “push-pull” technology as an additional source of income. The technology was developed in Africa to control Striga weeds and insect pests, particularly stemborer moths, without using chemical pesticides. It involves growing maize, sorghum or mango trees together with flowering plants such as Desmodium that repel, or “push”, the pests, and planting other plants such as elephant grass around the crops to attract, or “pull”, the pests. Desmodium eliminates Striga weeds and repels the stemborers, which are instead attracted to the elephant grass. By growing Desmodium, the family’s farm has become a source of seeds for scaling up the push-pull technology in the whole region.

Haregu Gobezay runs an agroecological farm in Ethiopia. Photo courtesy of A. Gonçalvés

More and more farmers around the world are turning away from chemical-intensive single-crop farming in favour of production methods based on diversity, local inputs of for example compost, and ecosystem services. This kind of “agroecological” farming has seen a revival in recent years as a response to the many challenges facing agriculture globally. There is growing evidence that agroecological farming systems keep carbon in the ground, support biodiversity, rebuild soils, and sustain yields, providing a basis for secure livelihoods.¹

Today’s agriculture produces enough food for the global population, but it has not given everyone everywhere access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food. Agriculture has also contributed to soil degradation, a misuse of natural resources, and the crossing of crucial planetary boundaries that have kept Earth in a relatively stable state for the past 11,000 years, since before agriculture was invented.

Agriculture takes up almost 40% of the planet’s ice-free land surface, accounts for 70% of the freshwater used in the world, and produces about 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions.² The current food production system increases humanity’s dependency on fossil fuels and contributes to climate change. Meanwhile, climate shocks and extreme weather events can cause food price volatility that affects both consumers and producers around the world – hitting hardest in poor countries.

The agricultural system has also doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus around the world predominantly through the use of chemical fertilisers, causing severe water quality problems in rivers, lakes, and the ocean. It is also the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss. A growing number of international studies and assessments stress that more attention, public funds, and policy measures should be devoted to the agroecological approach in order to avoid these negative environmental impacts.^3-7

Biodiversity is key for soil health and fertility, and resilience. A multitude of organisms inhabit the soil, decomposing organic matter and making nutrients available. Illustration: E. Wikander/Azote

Strengthening the resilience of farmers

Agroecology is the “ecology of the food system”⁸ and a farming approach that is inspired by natural ecosystems. It combines local and scientific knowledge and applies ecological and social approaches to agricultural systems, focusing on the interactions between plants, animals, humans, and the environment. Agroecological methods can also help farmers cope with climate change by enhancing resilience.

Agroecology has the explicit goal of strengthening the sustainability of all parts of the food system, from the seed and the soil, to the table, including ecological knowledge, economic viability, and social justice. To reach this goal, agroecological methods strive to minimise or exclude the use of fossil fuels, chemical inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides, and large-scale monocropping – cultivation of a single crop on vast tracts of land.

An agroecological approach includes a number of agricultural methods, such as diversification of crops, conservation tillage, green manures, natural fertilisers and nitrogen fixation, biological pest control, rainwater harvesting, and production of crops and livestock in ways that store carbon and protect forests. It also emphasises the importance of local knowledge, farmer empowerment, and socio-economic regulations, such as environmental subsidies and public procurement schemes.

Agroecology has become something of a buzzword in recent years, and the big question is: can agroecological farming feed a global population estimated to reach almost 10 billion people in the coming decades? A growing mound of evidence says yes – the approach can help change the world’s food production for the better, and produce enough food to feed the world.

“Today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilisers in boosting food production where the hungry live – especially in unfavourable environments,” said Olivier De Schutter in 2011, in his role as United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food.

De Schutter and many others have also concluded that agroecology is a good way to increase the resilience of farming systems. But few have really investigated in depth how agroecology and resilience are linked in practice among smallholder farmers around the world.

In 2014 André Gonçalves, a professor of agroecology at Instituto Federal Catarinense in Brazil and technical advisor at Centro Ecológico Brazil, took part in the third international resilience conference in Montpellier in France. He became increasingly fascinated with the concept of resilience and wanted to incorporate it into his work on agroecological farming methods.

After the conference, he decided to organise a series of field trips around the world together with the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SSNC) and their partner organisations, to look for practical examples of how agroecological methods affect farmers’ resilience.

The field trips took place over several years and took him to Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, the Philippines, Sweden, and various places in his home country Brazil. His travels resulted in new insights into how innovative farmers and organisations have been using agroecological approaches to cope with the challenges of climate change and other disturbances, such as degradation of soils, pest outbreaks, chemical pollution, and escalating prices of chemical inputs such as pesticides and fertilisers.⁹

Rainwater harvesting is one important strategy in Ethiopian agroecological farming that builds resilience to drought. Photo: A. Gonçalves.

Connecting agroecology and resilience

Gonçalves quickly concluded that agroecology is not a one-size-fits-all solution, instead it is about taking the local socio-economic and ecological conditions into consideration.

“In my definition agroecology is all about values such as social justice and economic aspects. Otherwise, it would be reduced to the technical dimension,” Gonçalves says. To capture these aspects his analysis focused as much on social and economic measures as on ecological ones to strengthen agricultural resilience.

In 2016 he organised a workshop at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), gathering practitioners and scientists from around the world to take a closer look at how agroecology and resilience thinking relate to each other. He co-organised the workshop with Karin Höök, a senior consultant and expert in agriculture and environment at NIRAS Sweden. She has collaborated with Gonçalves since the early 2000s. Through her previous work as head of the international department at SSNC, Höök became interested in resilience thinking and how it can be applied to make agriculture more sustainable.

“Resilience theory is extremely interesting and relevant for agricultural development, but it has often come across as more of a popular buzzword than concrete real-world applications,” Höök says. “Now that is changing and we see more and more concrete tools and practical examples of how it can contribute to sustainable agricultural development.”

In 2016, Elin Enfors Kautsky, researcher and research coordinator at the SRC, co-authored a paper suggesting different ways to put resilience-based interventions into practice in agricultural landscapes.¹⁰ The authors concluded that improving ecosystem services and the resilience of agricultural systems to a changing climate, extreme weather events, pest outbreaks, market volatility, institutional changes, and other pressures is critical to achieving a range of the UN’s sustainable development goals.

Following the workshop, where Gonçalves also met Enfors Kautsky, he continued to compare his observations and experiences from the field trips with the seven principles for building resilience,¹¹ which have become increasingly popular in analysing resilience and putting it into practice. The comparison revealed that certified organic farming and other agroecological approaches often go hand in hand with resilience thinking, and tended to improve both farm revenues and household income. For example, Gonçalves saw many examples of the first resilience principle in the extensive use of diversity of crops, farming techniques, and livelihoods.

The Tumaini Women Group in the Gatuanyaga Village, Kikuyu community, one of the communities that Andre Goncalves visited during his field trip, is an example of broadened participation, cooperation and social-environmental responsibility to improve living conditions. André Gonçalves is fourth from the left in the back row. Photo courtesy of A. Gonçalves.

Building resilience in agroecology

Gobezay and her husband in Ethiopia are by no means the only ones working for a diversity-based farming system. In Uganda, Gonçalves met Vicent Ssonko and Yakubu Nyende, who grow organic pineapples together with bananas and a variety of other plants such as beans, maize, and groundnuts. If the international market for organic pineapples collapses, they will still earn an income from selling bananas at the local market. Beans and groundnuts are important components of a balanced diet, increasing food security and nutrition. They also fixate nitrogen and improve soil fertility, without the need for chemical nitrogen fertilisers.

Diversity is also used to tackle other challenges. Pepito Babasa, a Philippine rice farmer from the Southern Luzon region, often experiences typhoons and floods. He makes sure he plants a diversity of different rice varieties known to withstand floods and droughts to secure his harvest.

The second principle of building resilience – managing connectivity – manifests in many ways in agroecology. Gonçalves found examples ranging from how farmers had access to markets to sell their crops, to the distance of their fields to the habitats of pollinators, and natural enemies of pests. Recycling nutrients and organic matter from one field to another is also an important way of managing connectivity in the agricultural landscape. An example of where this is put into practice can be seen in farmers making and using compost as a natural fertiliser on agroecological farms in Ethiopia. Agroecological methods also support ecological connectivity between the agricultural landscape and the surrounding forests in the Brazilian and Ugandan agroforestry systems that integrate crops, trees, and animal husbandry.

Using compost for maintaining the fertility, organic content, and water-holding capacity of soils is also an example of the third resilience principle – managing slow variables and feedbacks. In Ethiopia, the Tigray region’s innovative use of compost has earned world recognition for transforming an area suffering from impoverished soils, erosion, and droughts into increased harvests and incomes while improving groundwater levels, soil fertility, and biodiversity.

Gonçalves also found that farmers had a good understanding of the fourth principle: the landscape as a complex adaptive system. “To adopt agroecological practices simply requires a certain degree of complexity thinking,” he says. “While industrial agriculture is based on a linear approach and a cause and effect relationship, organic and other forms of agroecological agriculture requires a holistic view of agricultural production.”

A plant disease or pest outbreak in industrial agriculture, for example, might be seen as a direct consequence of a virus or insect, and would be controlled by using pesticides. Smallholder agroecological farmers, however, perceive diseases and pests as consequences of management, with many possible causes such as soil fertility, water availability, plant variety, and seasonal shifts.

Learning, participation, and decentralised governance – the fifth, sixth, and seventh resilience principles – were often strongly linked to each other in the farming systems Gonçalves visited. For example, the Ecovida Agroecology Network in Brazil brings together more than 5,000 farmer families in the three southernmost states of the country – Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul – in a network that promotes agroecology and sustainable, resilient use of natural resources. The farmers organise peer-to-peer learning and encourage broad participation that includes poor landless smallholders, larger farmers, and food-processing facilities.

The Ecovida network’s structure and distribution is also a classic example of polycentric governance. The network is divided into several self-governing organisations that interact, manage, and enforce rules within certification and sustainable agriculture. All individual members have a vote and all decisions in their respective organisations are taken collectively.

Similar networks connecting learning, participation, and polycentric governance were present in many other places visited by Gonçalves: PELUM is a network of civil society organisations working with grassroots communities in Kenya and nine other African countries; MASIPAG is a farmer-led network of people’s organisations in the Philippines; NOGAMU is an umbrella organisation of producers, processors, and exporters of the organic sector in Uganda; and there were several networks and organisations that promote sustainable farming in Ethiopia and in Sweden.

Agroecological approaches often go hand in hand with resilience thinking. André Gonçalves’ research has looked at how the seven resilience principles manifest in practice in agroecological farming. Illustration: E. Wikander/Azote

A shift in the world’s food system

Gonçalves concludes that “actively applying resilience thinking is an important basis for the agroecological farming in the case studies, making smallholder farmers less dependent on loans, fossil fuels and chemicals”.

He believes that agroecological and resilience-building approaches to agriculture are feasible alternatives to chemical-intensive monocultures, and that these methods will be crucial for reaching sustainable development goals. Several other researchers have reached similar conclusions.

Line Gordon, deputy director of the SRC, led a study published in the Environmental Research Letters journal in 2017¹² that looked at how food production has influenced human health and nature from the 1960s until today. The researchers propose eight ways to rewire the world’s food system and rethink how we produce our food, concluding that “we need to rewire different parts of food systems, to enhance information flows between consumers and producers from local to global scales, influence food-system decision makers, and re-connect people to the biosphere through the culture of food”.

Their suggestions include many agroecological aspects and call for better recognition and understanding of the many ecosystem services and social benefits that food-producing systems deliver beyond food itself, such as pollination, water filtration, and recreation.

More recently, the director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, José Graziano da Silva, also called for healthier and more sustainable food systems, mentioning agroecology as a way forward. During his opening remarks at the 2nd International Agroecology Symposium in Rome in April 2018 he said: “We need to promote a transformative change in the way that we produce and consume food. We need to put forward sustainable food systems that offer healthy and nutritious food, and also preserve the environment. Agroecology can offer several contributions to this process.”

Graziano da Silva’s statement resonates with an article published in 2014 in Solutions magazine,¹³ where a group of leading resilience researchers argued that efforts to improve short-term efficiency and optimisation in food production may be setting us up for a bigger fall down the road. “An agriculture that causes long-term or widespread environmental crises is not resilient, no matter how economically successful or how much food is produced, making its profitability and productivity irrelevant,” they wrote.

The group of researchers, led by Elena Bennett from McGill University in Canada, concluded that agriculture needs to be both resilient and sustainable, and this requires radically new approaches to agricultural development. A narrow focus on increasing production efficiency may reduce resilience, for example by degrading soils and making crops more vulnerable to pest and disease outbreaks and climate shocks. The food production system instead needs approaches and methods that produce sufficient quality and quantities of food while supporting healthy ecosystems.

Agroforestry systems mix crops, trees and animals, and provide resilience by e.g. strengthening ecological connectivity with forest fragments, maintaining biodiversity and managing slow variables like soil fertility and water quality. Photo: K. Höök.

Thinking less about bigger crop yields and more about resilience and sustainability also requires new metrics for evaluating the food system. This is also emphasised by Gonçalves and recently echoed by environmental economist Pavan Sukhdev in Nature where he wrote: “I never fail to be astonished at the inadequacy of the metrics we use to evaluate [food] systems. The most common yardstick is ‘productivity per hectare’. This measure of the yield or value of a particular crop relative to the area of the land on which it was grown is too narrow. We need alternatives that account for the interacting complex of agricultural lands, pastures, inland fisheries, natural ecosystems, labour, infrastructure, technology, policies, markets and traditions that are involved in growing, processing, distributing and consuming food.”

So, even though an agroecological transformation towards more resilient agriculture might come at an initial cost, it will make it possible to maintain human well-being for the long-term. A growing number of resilience researchers and practitioners argue that it is the only way to provide a diet that is healthy for both people and the planet.

The many farmers Gonçalves visited around the world represent the opportunities of this shift from a narrow productivity focus to a food production system that is both more sustainable and resilient. To be effective, it is also important that such approaches that challenge our current farming system are included in the training of next generations of farmers around the world.

“We must invest much more in resilience through participation and education of youth, for example by integrating agroecological approaches in the curricula of schools, training centers, farmer field schools, school gardens, and also at university level,” Gonçalves concludes.

Lead photo: Vicent Ssonko grows organic pineapples together with bananas and a variety of other plants such as beans, maize, and groundnuts. The pineapples are sold on the international market, and bananas on the local market. Beans and groundnuts contain important nutrients for a balanced diet, they also fixate nitrogen and improve soil fertility. Photo courtesy of A. Gonçalvés

Credits

Editor: Marika Haeggman; Top editor: Ida Karlsson  Reviewer: Jamila Haider

The text of this article is in the Creative Commons, but the images are copyright as indicated in the captions.

The post Farming with nature appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From the notes to the video:

There’s something amazing growing in the city of Detroit: healthy, accessible, delicious, fresh food. In a spirited talk, fearless farmer Devita Davison explains how features of Detroit’s decay actually make it an ideal spot for urban agriculture. Join Davison for a walk through neighborhoods in transformation as she shares stories of opportunity and hope. “These aren’t plots of land where we’re just growing tomatoes and carrots,” Davison says. “We’re building social cohesion as well as providing healthy, fresh food.”

The post How urban agriculture is transforming Detroit appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This article by Pål Steigan was originally published here. Translated by Graham Healey.

The paintings of goatherds and farm animals amongst the ruins of infrastructure and temples from classical Rome are like pictures of people moving among the remains of a high-tech civilisation that they no longer have the ability to match. The city of Rome had at its height a population of a million people. That required a very advanced infrastructure for water and food supply, transport, goods delivery, trade and so on. The city was, at the time, the foremost example of a building materials industry, that had the capacity, and level of competency, to deliver the enormous amount of building materials that such a city required.

When the empire collapsed, the infrastructure was no longer maintained. The aqueducts broke down and towns and cities lost their water supply. Roads and bridges deteriorated and were not repaired. Goods transport and trade was reduced from a surging river to a quiet brook. 1200 years after its days of glory Rome was a ruined town with a population of less than 10.000.

The Etruscans, and later the Romans, had drained swamps to increase food production. Thereby they also removed malaria. But when the empire broke down, the drainage ditches were no longer maintained and malaria returned. It wasn’t until the 1930’s, after the fascists came to power, that the swamps were drained again and malaria disappeared from Italy again.

The ’empire’ of today is extremely vulnerable

We, who live in a a time when another empire shows many of the same tendencies towards disintegration that the Roman empire had towards the end, have all reason to give it some thought.

The Roman emperors mixed more and more lead in the silver coinage (denarius), so that eventually there was almost  no silver left. That was the hyperinflation of the time. Roman citizens no longer wished to fight in the army, so the army became based on mercenaries. The word soldier comes from this. A soldier was someone who received money to fight (solidus – gold coin). In order to pay the soldiers more money had to be minted. The empire’s wars were expensive and the empire was large, so the problem was solved by minting coins that were ever more worthless.

The world is dominated today by the American empire. It affects everything about global production, the money system, world trade, agriculture, the energy system and so on.

The empire passed it’s high watermark around 1971. That is when USA gave up the gold standard. After that the empire’s growth was built on printing more and more paper money, and now digital money. But the empire is also based on the rest of the world accepting these symbols as the real thing. US wars in the 21^st century are largely financed by selling American government securities to China, in other words on China lending money to the American state.

The globalized production and trade system is finely tuned to deliver goods and components just-in-time. Norwegian meat production for example is dependent on a boat arriving at Fredrikstad with soya from Brasil once a month. If the boat did not arrive there would be a full-blown crisis in  Norwegian meat production.

When the so-called horse-meat scandal broke in 2013 the Financial Times showed how the European trade and transport systems for meat work.

Slaughterhouses are capital intensive and energy demanding, and therefore there are fewer and fewer slaughterhouses delivering to a more and more global market. The margins are paper thin, so they cut corners wherever they can.

The big supermarket chains want to buy the cheapest food raw materials available at any one time. Their brokers are continually on the phone to make best wholesale purchases. FT quotes professor Karel Williams at the Manchester Business School, who explains how refrigerator trucks queue up in front of the slaughterhouses in the Netherlands at the end of the week, with the drivers having no idea where they are going until the last minute. Each broker has 10-20 slaughterhouses he buys from. One week he buys from one place and the next week from somewhere else. The deals are made at the last moment for the driver to get his delivery orders. “We have a continual European trade where animal parts are driven around in 40-ton trailers.”

FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation – UN) says that there are something like a quarter of a million edible plants that could be cultivated. But humanity has become dependent on just 3% of them.

The worlds food supply is dependent on 150 plant species. Three quarters of all energy we get from plant food comes from just 12 of them. Competition and the need to increase production has resulted in a drastic reduction in genetic diversity. The system also demands more and more energy, minerals and rare raw materials at an exponentially increasing rate.

This makes today’s empire extremely vulnerable. Agriculture may well experience crises similar to the Potato Famine that hit Ireland in 1847, when a million people died of starvation. It is easy to imagine how devastating and dramatic it will be.

In short: when this system collapses, it will, just as in the Rome empire, experience the collapse of much of the critical infrastructure. It will simply not be possible to feed as many people as before. The result can be widespread starvation disasters to an extent that humanity has never seen before. There are 37 megacities in the world today and the largest of them have over 30 million inhabitants. If there is a breakdown in water supply, or energy or food delivery, then such cities will become uninhabitable.

Food and water are fundamental. Without food and water we cannot live. But many of our systems are also extremely dependent on oil and rare earth minerals that there are less and less of. When this system collapses, it could easily have dramatic consequences. The example of the Roman empire shows that it might well take a long time before anything else takes its place.

It is easy to show that today’s growth based capitalism is living on borrowed time. It is a long way from being robust or sustainable. On the contrary it is very vulnerable and unstable. This is one of the reasons that it is necessary to work towards replacing the system as soon as possible and learning how to run society in a healthier and more sustainable fashion.

Globalists of right and left bemoan the fact that people turning their back on the globalism they have preached for decades. They are turning instead to populist politics and are so “reactionary” that they want to preserve their nation states, local production and more. But it is the globalists who are playing Russian roulette. It is their system that has made us so extremely vulnerable. To ensure food-security and viable local communities, to restore the broken metabolism between society and nature, is what is truly progressive. That is the future, and we need to urgently get rid of the empire and it’s economy of spongers and freeloaders.

If we don’t then perhaps landscape painters in a few hundred years time will be painting goat-herders grazing their animals under the twisted remains of skyscrapers and motorway bridges.

The post It hurts when empires fall appeared first on P2P Foundation.

All these and much much more make up the Sustainable Development Goals – the globally agreed wish list for saving the world and building a better future. If you haven’t heard of them, you’re not alone. Their public outreach leaves a bit to be desired. In any case, they make up the UN’s development agenda up until 2030.

In this post, I’m going to introduce you to what the SDGs are, what’s good about them, and my one problem with the SDGs that actually drives me crazy every time I think about it.

What are the SDGs

The Sustainable Development Goals (aka SDGs or Global Goals) follow on from where the Millennium Development Goals left off, in 2015. They will guide the development priorities for the UN and its agencies, the aid budgets of most wealthy nations and major development charities up until 2030, when it’ll be all change all over again. Here’s the full list:

• Goal 1  End poverty in all its forms everywhere
• Goal 2  End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
• Goal 3  Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
• Goal 4  Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
• Goal 5  Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
• Goal 6  Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
• Goal 7  Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
• Goal 8  Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
• Goal 9  Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
• Goal 10 Reduce inequality within and among countries
• Goal 11 Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
• Goal 12 Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
• Goal 13 Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts*
• Goal 14 Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
• Goal 15 Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
• Goal 16 Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
• Goal 17 Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

As you can see, they’re… Let’s call them ‘stretch targets’.

The SDGs. Image credit: Reedz Malik

Others more cynical than I have called them a utopian wishlist more suited to a letter to your fairy godmother than a serious policy statement, or words to that effect. But you know what they say about ambitious goals: even when you don’t hit them you still end up doing pretty well. And to be honest, aren’t these exactly the things we should be aspiring to?

What is amazing about the SDGs

Before I get on to my one glaring problem with the SDGs, I want to take a moment to consider what’s so good about them, particularly in comparison to the old Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

They apply to the whole world

.No country has locked down 100% of this stuff. The UK certainly hasn’t. These goals are for every country to work towards, and kisses goodbye to the patronising old development model of ‘developed’ countries that have apparently got it all worked out (yeah, right) and ‘developing’ ones who need help.

They’re holistic

.They cover a lot of ground because they understand that poverty and wellbeing are complex, multi-faceted and relate to a lot of different things at once. I like the way the goals are not split up into environmental, social, economic, but instead many of the goals cover all three aspects of sustainability. Goodbye silos.

They’re inclusive and collaborative

When the goals were being drafted, diplomats from each country got to contribute and they also engaged with charities, scientists and academics for their contributions. You may not have been consulted or even told about them until now, but compared to other high-level global policy, this was very inclusive.

My one problem with the SDGs

So the SDGs sound wonderful, right? They do. Really, they do, and overall I think they are a fantastic thing that will do a lot of good in the world. But there’s one problem that I think people should be aware of (and I want to get it off my chest).

One of the goals is liable to contradict the others. Yes there will always be trade-offs and that’s understandable, but in my opinion, one of these goals sticks out like a sore thumb because it just doesn’t fit.

Goal 8 calls for ‘decent work and economic growth’ and I take issue with it for several reasons.

What’s wrong with Goal 8?

Problem 1: it’s a means not an end

This may just be me, but I can’t stand it when you have a list of things and one doesn’t fit with the others. Like if you had a whole list of your favourite books and one of the list items is ‘Waterstones book token’. What the hell is this?! A book token isn’t a book, it’s just a way to get more books! Goal 8 is kind of like the book token here. It isn’t a goal in itself, it’s at best a means to reach other goals. As this article on postgrowth.org puts it: “Growth that is at best a means to reach certain welfare goals is redundant as a development goal in itself.”

Problem 2: Growth doesn’t necessarily benefit the poor

Problem 1 on its own would just be a grammatical pet peeve. What makes it problematic is that it isn’t even a very effective means to achieve the other goals. In fact sometimes it can do the opposite. The most important goal of all the SDGs is to eradicate extreme poverty. The thinking is obviously that economic growth helps with this – but that isn’t actually necessarily true. Of all the wealth produced by growth since 1990, the poorer 60% of the world population only received a pitiful 5% of it. And that’s not even the poorest, that’s over half of all humanity. The very poorest people who need it most got such a tiny sliver it’s almost nothing. Growth is a very inefficient way of helping the poor out of poverty because the vast majority of the wealth goes to the rich, a slice goes to the middle class and the poor just get some crumbs. So, Goal 8 could easily conflict with goals 10 (reduced inequality) and Goal 1 (no poverty).

Problem 3: Growth probably isn’t compatible with a safe climate

There’s no hard evidence that economic growth is compatible with the kind of emissions cuts we need to keep climate change to below 2 degrees. The only time global emissions went down is when we had the 2008 global crash and recession. People get all excited about decoupling when they see that the UK’s economy grew while our direct emissions went down, but that figure for direct emissions doesn’t include ‘embedded emissions’ in consumer goods, and it doesn’t include aeroplane flights or international shipping. We have seen that emissions can hold steady while growth rises, but we need emissions to go down, and fast, and we just don’t know that that can happen with growth. If not, then we need to prioritise climate action (Goal 13) rather than growth (Goal 8).

Problem 4: it shouldn’t be 2 in 1, it’s already an important goal

Unlike the others, goal 8 is a double whammy: decent work and economic growth. They obviously thought those were a natural pair, but they could easily be in conflict, as a company that abuses its workers could make more profit and so contribute more to economic growth. Well-paid workers contribute more to growth than poor ones, because they have more spending power, but healthy workers could contribute less to growth than sick and stressed ones because they won’t be paying for medicines and therapies. All this is because of what a strange and unhelpful metric GDP growth is. Decent work – good jobs that are useful and fulfilling with fair wages and rights – is already a very important goal. Why stick something else in there as well? The way it stands, Goal 8 could even come into conflict with… Goal 8.

Problem 5: it gives companies/governments a loophole to keep doing the same

As well as being unnecessary and counterproductive, the growth part of goal 8 also gives regressive companies and countries a loophole where they can say ‘we’re working on the SDGs!’ when they’re doing anything that will boost growth, even if it goes against the other goals. A study by Ethical Corp found that Goal 8 was in the top 3 of the SDGs that corporates are most keen to engage with. I recently saw a major brand boasting on their website that they were making progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 8. Like… Every other company out there.

The SDGs also sidestep deep systemic issues (but that’s understandable)

The Sustainable Development Goals were never going to be perfect. They have flaws because they are trying to make progress from within the capitalist system we have. They sidestep fundamental causes of poverty like structural readjustments, unfair debts, unfair trade deals, and of course the history of colonialism. They seek to bring the poor and ordinary up, but don’t dare to mention the elephant in the room: that the elite have too much. None of this is surprising and I don’t think the drafters of the SDGs or the UN can be blamed for that. They weren’t going for a radical political statement that would be divisive. They wanted to get everyone on board. Like sustainable development itself, it’s very hard for anyone to disagree with the SDGs as a whole. That means that as well as the UN, charities and governments, they have also had excellent buy-in from corporates, with the likes of Unilever, Coca Cola and H&M using them to inform their ‘corporate responsibility’ and sustainability work. 46% of corporate reps said their business would engage with the SDGs, according to a survey by Ethical Corp. Their engagement is worth a little watering down, given their immense scale.

Conclusion

The SDGs represent real progress. They give everyone across sectors a common language for sustainable development and gets everyone on the same page. They represent a clear roadmap on where we collectively want to go from here. The progress they aspire to can be best realised if we ignore growth and work on the things that matter – which are summed up perfectly with all the other goals.

Photo by Davezilla was taken

The post My one problem with the Sustainable Development Goals that drives me crazy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Eddy Adams of SIX interviews P2P Foundation researcher Penny Travlou at the Unusual Suspects Festival in Glasgow, where she spoke passionately about the work she’s been involved in with refugees in Greece.  This interview was originally published in Social Innovation Europe’s Magazine.

As part of our Beyond Crisis Collection, Eddy interviewed Penny to learn more about this work of using food making and sharing to support migrant integration in Greece.

To get us started, can you tell us briefly what you’ve been doing and how you got involved?

I am a cultural geographer and ethnographer based in Edinburgh. I have an academic post in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh. Since 2010, I’ve been doing research on creativity as a collaborative and sharing knowledge practice within various emerging networks.

I started my research with digital practitioners and artists, but currently I am working with nomadic co-living communities, hackers and refugees. I know that it may not make much sense, but all these diverse groups have one thing in common: they are on the move; they are nomadic. Of course, we cannot compare the experience of Northern European web designers – for example – who cannot afford to live anymore in London and Paris with that of the Syrian refugees who are forced to leave from their country due to the war. However, they all form a nomad transient citizenship which in my view is very influential in the way Europe will be shaped and experienced in the years to come.

So last February, I moved to Athens for 5 months as part of my research leave. There, I met the co-living/co-working community unMonastery which had just moved to Athens too. I decided to focus my research on this community, but as they were creating a network within the city I ended up researching that instead! That’s how I got introduced to Jeff Andreoni, an unMonasterian and great connector with whom I organised my first pop up kitchen event last April. Jeff is a food enthusiast who has been organisingdinners in Athens for years to get locals and immigrants together. In this event, we collaborated with an Eritrean refugee, Senait who is a professional cook, but who didn’t have the ‘know-how’ to start her own business in Greece. Senait would like to open a restaurant in Athens in the near future. Our pop up event was held in a beautiful neo-classic house in the centre of Athens. We hosted 100 people, served 15 different dishes and home-brewed non-alcoholic beer all made by Senait and provided live African music.

That made us think that such small-scale events can be a great way to give job opportunities to newcomers i.e. immigrants and refugees and get them feel part of the Greek society and culture. From that event onwards, we got collaborated with and participated in other immigrant collective pop-up events. In the summer, we set up the African Collective Kitchen “OneLoveKitchen” with a group of cooks from Senegal, The Gambia, Sudan, Nigeria, Eritrea and Ethiopia. We collaborated with the African United Women Organisation and Nosotros: the free social centre. All our events have been self-organised without any formal funding. We have organised small pop-up dinners in houses and roof terraces, have served food in a solidarity economy festival and have catered for two conferences. Since September when a great influx of Syrian refugees has been arriving in Athens, some of us have also been involved in daily collective kitchens preparing food for a housing squat for refugees and other similar initiatives. Jeff and I are now working on the Options Foodlab, a professional kitchen and co-working space for food training which we hope to set up soon.

Why do you think food is such a good connection point with refugees?

What I always say when people ask me why I got involved in such a project is to think of where the words ‘company’ and ‘companion’ come from. They both derive from the Latin word ‘companio’ which means one who eats bread [pane] with you. Thus, food making and sharing is a social act and a means of exhibiting respect for an existing or future relationship of reciprocity. Food making is about hospitality and connectivity. There is not a better way to bring people together: you don’t need linguistic cues to connect with others. With this perspective, we can think food as an object of exchange, a gift that can be shared and exchanged.

Tell us a bit more about the migrants you’ve been working with. Are most of them new arrivals? Where have they come from – and do they see themselves settling in Greece or moving to other parts of Europe?

Most of the immigrants and refugees we are working with are from Africa and have been in Athens for a couple of years. Some have gained refugee status and others are still trying to get their asylum status. Most of them have daily jobs such as working in cafes and restaurants, busking, house cleaning and looking after elderly patients. They are all underpaid. Then, there are the ones who are unemployed or do small jobs from home (e.g. making and selling bread in their community, hairdressing, mending clothes etc.) Nonetheless, most of them would like to stay in Greece for long and making plans for settling down and opening their own businesses. Only two of our cooks left to Northern Europe in the summer when the Macedonian borders were still open.

What barriers are they facing, in terms of social and economic integration?

The list of barriers that refugees and immigrants face upon their arrival in Greece is very long. Don’t forget that Greece is still within a financial crisis and austerity-ridden environment. Thus, the problems that refugees experience are even harsher: hostility and suspicion from locals, unemployment, homelessness and difficulty to assimilate new cultural values. Some of the people we work with have escaped from extremely undemocratic regimes, faced imprisonment and torture before arriving to Greece, so for them it is very important to move on from their past and make a better living. Unfortunately, in most cases, they find themselves trapped within a bureaucratic system which is difficult to penetrate and get the necessary papers and documents in good time.

Often, building a trusted relationship is the key to successfully working with vulnerable marginalised communities. How have you done this in Athens?

I fully agree with your statement: trust is the glue for good and long-lasting relationships. In our case, I think we have succeeded to make good friends and business partners because we have tried to avoid hierarchies within our group. We are true believers of collaboration, peer-to-peer learning and horizontal power structures: we are all equal within our network of collaborators. Of course, this is not easy to maintain and there is not a magic recipe either. We also had our failures: there were instances of conflict among our group. How could you bring together people of so many different cultures, political ideologies and religious beliefs? We’ve been working with Muslims and Christians, old and young, women and men, anarchists and new agers, people of different sexual orientations, basically with very different people. Thus, conflict should be expected and welcome in the group. It’s a way to go forward: of understanding people’s differences and positionalities. What though has made us continue is ‘trust’ amongst one other: the belief that we are all equal and part of a solidarity network.

Who have been your key allies and supporters on the ground? In Greece when there are so few resources, where has your support come from?

So far, we’ve been working as self-organised autonomous initiative without any formal funding. Most of us work as volunteers in the foodlab and pop-up events. In fact, only the cooks are paid via donations that the guests give. We have also got a small grant from OuiShare, the global community for a collaborative society.

In the past, we tried to make partnerships and collaborations with local authorities and public organisations but without much success. Due to the financial crisis, there is a lot of resentment on what they can offer financially to initiatives like ours. We also tried to collaborate with NGOs, but again as they also face an uncertain future, they cannot commit to new projects.

Our closest allies and supporters are people who know well our work and ‘trust’ us, other self-organised initiatives and collectives.

Looking at the work that’s been done so far – although it’s a loaded term – where’s the innovation in your opinion?

In a few words: ‘human capacity’ and ‘solidarity’. All our work is based on developing a strong network of supporters and volunteers and sustaining relationships within the network. Each of us has a distinct role within the project according to our skills. Some maintain the online communication, write blogs, organise the events, and others do the shopping and help the cooks. We also care for each other, we try to ensure that we are all in good health and happy. Thus, innovation is in collaboration and sharing. We co-create the pop-up events.

And what are the plans for the future? How can you build on what’s been done so far?

At the moment, we are working on our business plan as we would like to see our project becoming more self-sufficient (not depending only on donations). We are looking at all different business options from setting up a social enterprise to a company for-profit. This is not an easy task as the business environment in Greece is not very good at the moment. We are also looking for a space to use as our co-working hub where we can cook and organise pop-up events.

How transferable are the approaches that you have developed? What can other cities take away from this work?

If you don’t mind I will change your question a bit and ask first what people in bottom-up initiatives in other cities can take from our work. Well, this is easy to answer: commitment, enthusiasm and belief that you can change things if you get together. You can only succeed if you collaborate and share knowledge practices and skills. However, city top-down level support is more than welcome. It will make projects like ours have a future: it will provide financial stability to those who need it e.g. the refugee/migrant cooks. We also cannot always depend on people’s goodwill to help for free; this will only sustain precarious labour.

If people reading this want to help or get involved, what can they do?

There are two ways that people can help our Options FoodLab: if they are in Athens, they can come in touch with us and get involved in the organisation of our pop up events. Then, they can of course help us raise money to purchase cooking equipment and set up our space.

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Learn more about Options FoodLab and see other examples of migrant integration in our collection.

The post Options Foodlab: How food making and sharing is supporting migrant integration in Greece appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Help build an open database for food growers everywhere

Every day more of us are growing our own food. The number of people growing food in the US doubled from 2008-2013. Other countries are seeing similar growth.

As growers, we need information suited to our local climate.  Most books and websites are surprisingly bad at this, so instead we rely on local networks of growers: neighbours, family, or other people who grow food nearby.

When we started Growstuff, we reviewed dozens of crop databases and gardening websites, looking for food growing advice that:

• had specific local growing advice
• for people anywhere in the world
• was relevant to small-scale home food gardeners (not just big farms)
• and was available under an open data license

Sadly, most gardening websites claim control of all the data in them, so that you can’t use it except for a single, limited purpose.  You agree to share your data with them, but they don’t share it with you in return. There’s no way to download the whole database, or build something new on top of it.

Terms of service from one of the sites reviewed by Growstuff.

We need a community-based solution, to serve everyone.  It needs to reflect real-world growing practices that small-scale food growers use.  It needs to be global, and cover all regions, climates, and conditions.  It needs to be free for anyone to use for any purpose, and stay free forever.  And it needs to be built collaboratively.

We believe the way to build a worldwide database is to crowdsource food-growing information from individual growers, then make the data available in aggregate form under an open license.

About Growstuff

Growstuff is a platform for gathering and sharing crowdsourced food-growing data, under an open license, which means anyone can use it at no cost and for any purpose: from personal record keeping to building mobile apps or researching growing trends worldwide.

Growstuff’s website already has real growers and real crop data.

We have members all around the world, around 370 crops in our database, and we’re growing every day.

Growstuff’s database of about 370 crops is maintained by volunteers.

As our members record what they’re growing, we learn from them.  Our data grows with each person who records their own activity.  We currently track planting, harvesting, and seeds.

We use this information, along with each grower’s location, to see patterns and learn how and where people grow each kind of crop.

Growstuff’s information on growing lettuce: locations, planting advice, pictures.

As well as displaying this information on our website, we also provide it in several other formats that anyone can use: downloadable CSV files to load into a spreadsheet program, or via a JSON API (Application Programming Interface) to help software developers access our database.

Our code is 100% open source (check it out on Github), and our data is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license that allows anyone to use it, even for commercial purposes.  This ensures that Growstuff will always be free and open.

Along the way, our inclusive community has offered mentoring to help dozens of contributors improve their software development as well as their food-growing skills.  We have a fantastic reputation as a welcoming and supportive communityfor new developers, especially from under-represented groups in the tech and open source fields.

We want everyone to use our data

Growstuff’s data can be used for any purpose at all!  For instance, anyone can build:

• A harvest calculator to show you how much money you save by growing food
• Emailed planting tips and reminders based on your location and climate
• A map showing how food-growing patterns change over time in a region
• Web apps, mobile apps, apps embedded in specialised hardware gadgets — anything is possible

We want to improve our API (Application Programming Interface) to make it easier to build apps like these. We’re also going to work with the developer community, from mobile app creators to data scientists, to help them use our API.

Here’s what we’ll deliver over the course of this project:

• Consultation with the API developer community
• An improved “version 1” API, with advanced query options and more complete data structures
• A suite of well-documented code examples and demos showing how to use our API and data
• Educational materials for developers and others interested in using Growstuff’s open data

 

Our qualifications

Growstuff’s not vaporware.  We are an established open source project, and have built a great platform with mostly volunteer contributors.  Our team have bucketloads of experience as developers, API users and creators, data designers — not to mention food growers!

 

Alex Bayley, Growstuff’s founder and lead developer, has been developing open source software since the 1990s, and led developer relations for Freebase, a giant open data repository acquired by Google in 2010.  Her vegetable garden and fruit trees provide much of the fresh food for her household.

Frances Hocutt, who will be the main API developer on this project, has recently worked for the Wikimedia foundation developing a gold standard for API client libraries, including work with the Wikidata API.Growstuff has previously received support from:

• Pinboard
• Awesome Foundation
• Permaculture Victoria
• New Enterprise Incentive Scheme

What people are saying:

“On the internet, it’s generally our personal data that’s cultivated, harvested, and converted into profits. Perhaps freely sharing data might be the thing that sets Growstuff apart. After all, gardeners have always been good about sharing their bounty.” – Grist

“I think food gardening is a natural fit for the kind of community-first approach Growstuff wants to pursue. I jumped at the chance to pick a project coming out of this friendly, highly collaborative world, and I can’t wait to see what it grows into.” –Maciej Ceglowski, Pinboard

I’ve had such a great time working on @growstufforg. Props to @Skudand the other Growstuffers for such a well run project.

— Marlena Compton (@marlenac) September 3, 2014

Help us meet our goal

We are trying to raise $20,000 to improve Growstuff’s API and help people use Growstuff’s open data.

The funds will go towards:

• Paying two experienced software developers to work on the project (approx. $16,000)
• Fulfilling crowdfunding rewards, fees, etc (approx. $4,000)

We have structured this campaign as “flexible funding”; if we raise less than $20,000 we will pay our developers for a proportionally smaller amount of their time.

Stretch goals:

• up to $40,000: pay our developers for more of their time on the API project
• $50,000: support an intern under either Rails Girls Summer of Code or Gnome’s Outreach Program for Women to work on Growstuff in 2015 (includes paying the intern and the Growstuff team member who supports them). Growstuff is well known as an supportive and welcoming project, and we’re very keen to help mentor an open source novice in this way.

Risks

Growstuff is not vaporware. We’re an established project, with experienced developers. However, as with any crowdfunding campaign, there’s always a risk that something will occur to prevent us delivering our project.  We foresee that the most likely risks are as follows.

Insufficient funds to complete a useful amount of work

We have structured our campaign with “flexible funding” because we believe that even if we do not meet our overall goal, it is still worthwhile for us to do a smaller amount of work on improving our API, building demos, etc.  However, there’s a chance that if we do not meet our goal, a scaled-down effort may mean that our API is not as useful to third-party developers.

Illness, injury or other unavoidable personal crisis

If Frances or Alex are unable to deliver the planned API work for these kinds of reasons, we’ll make every effort to find other developers to do the work, or to re-scope the project and deliver meaningful benefits with the resources available.

Insufficient third-party developer interest

We’re planning to work closely with developers to establish their needs and preferences, and to develop API features that meet their requirements.  A lack of engagement from third-party developers would make it harder for us to improve our API.

Technical risks

Growstuff’s source code and infrastructure are well managed.  We do not foresee any technical risks such as downtime, lost data, etc, however such things are always possible and should be noted as a slight risk.

Other ways to help

Become a Growstuff member – it’s free!

Sign up for Growstuff, then use it to track what you’re growing and harvesting.  Your data will help growers near you and worldwide.

Get involved in the Growstuff project

We welcome contributors from all backgrounds and levels of technical expertise, including food-growers and gardeners interested in having input into the project.

Some links to get you started:

• Growstuff Talk (discussion forums for Growstuff project contributors)
• Github (source code)
• Wiki (project documentation)

Spread the word

Help us get the word out about this campaign.  Tell your friends, family, or local gardening club.  Word of mouth can really make a difference!

Visit Growstuff’s crowdfund campaign page to help them reach their goal!

The post Project of the Day: Growstuff appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From the Campaign Page:

We are building the Open Food Network to put control of the food system in the hands of farmers and eaters. Join Us!

The Open Food Network is an open, online marketplace that makes it easy to find, buy, sell and move sustainable local food. It gives farmers and food hubs easier and fairer ways to distribute food, while opening up the supply chain so eaters can see what’s going on.

It’s good for farmers, good for eaters and good for the food hubs, local businesses and communities that want real food.

We are proudly open source and not for profit – creating software with and for the global fair food movement. Contribute now to get this platform launched for use by farmers and food hubs in Australia, with the software available for use all around the world!

We know that OFN has the potential to really disrupt our food systems – in a good way. But we need you to get on board now and help make it happen.

How will OFN help fix the food system?

Lots of people are working to break the stranglehold that supermarkets and large agribusiness have over our food system. We’ve spent 3 years talking with many farmers, producers, eaters and local enterprises (like food hubs, independent retailers and co-ops) about how we can work together to take back control of our food. The Open Food Network is our response.

By turning the existing food system on its head, the Open Food Network provides efficient ways for buyers (hubs) to connect with many smaller sellers (producers) and distribute food into their communities.

GOOD for Farmers and Producers

There is currently a big gap between selling through “the big guys” or doing everything themselves to distribute directly to eaters e.g. setting up and running their own online store, farm gate sales and farmers’ markets. For many farmers, these are not enough and take time away from the important work of growing our food.

Farmers need scalable, sustainable systems for distributing their food.

OFN makes it easier for farmers to sell directly and possible for them to work together and with others (like food hubs) to streamline marketing and distribution, while maintaining full transparency and control. With the OFN, farmers have the freedom to set prices, choose who they trade with, when, how often and under what terms.

 

 

GOOD for Eaters

It’s time to reconnect with our food! We’re ready to abandon the supermarkets and get good, honest produce from people we know. But sometimes it’s hard work to shop and eat locally.

OFN makes it easy to access locally grown food direct from the grower or transparently through hubs. Just go online, find what’s near you and shop . .

It’s like an online shopping centre, full of local food!

 

GOOD for Communities and Food Hubs

“Middle men” matter . . the problem is when there are only two! We want every community to have many different ways to get sustainable, local food. Local food enterprises – like buying groups, co-ops or larger scale wholesalers, retailers (and everything in between) can make this possible.

OFN provides simple online ordering and shopping tools that make it easy to set up a hub and start moving food – while keeping the farmers and prices transparent all the way through. It removes admin barriers to small and medium sized food hubs working with local farmers

The OFN provides an ultra-flexible system for food hubs, enabling communities to set up what they need. Food hubs using OFN have complete freedom over:

– Your customers – whether they are households, buying groups, institutions, food service etc

– Your mark-ups and fees – OFN has a flexible fee structure so you can set it up how you want it, easy, transparent, independent

– Who you work with – OFN supports diverse networks, partnerships and social enterprise, with relationships and flexible fee structures

 

 

The Open Food Network:

– is an online marketplace that farmers and local hubs can use to distribute food

– makes it easier to find, buy, sell and move sustainable local food

– is software that helps organise the trade and distribution of locally grown food

– lets you manage your ordering, scheduling, payment and delivery cycles

– lets eaters order locally grown food from their chosen hub

– puts eaters in touch with the people who grow their food

– lets farmers list their own produce, set their prices and tell their own stories

– basic trading is free for farmers and eaters to use

– is proudly open source and not for profit

 

Explore! demo.openfoodnetwork.org

Tipping Point Goal: $25,000

Total Funding Goal: $100,000

The post Project of the Day: The Open Food Network appeared first on P2P Foundation.