This article is also available in audio as part of the Green Wave podcast.

Written by Francesco Ajena

Increasingly, ‘smart farming’ has been making its way into farms across Europe and onto the political agenda. The European Union appears willing to provide a suitable environment through policies and funds which strongly facilitate the development of smart farming and data-driven business models in agriculture. In the recent CAP legislative proposal, precision agriculture and digitalisation are praised by the agricultural Commissioner Phil Hogan as a great opportunity to develop rural communities and to increase the environmental and climate mitigation impact of farmers. A new focus on Farming Advisory Systems — structures providing the training of farmers — is intended to prepare farmers to this technological leap forward.

What is smart farming (or precision agriculture)?

Smart farming, or precision agriculture, is a modern farming management concept using digital techniques to monitor and optimise agricultural production processes. For example, rather than applying the same amount of fertilisers over an entire agricultural field or feeding a large animal population with equal amounts of feed, precision agriculture helps measure specific needs and adapt feeding, fertilising, pest control or harvesting strategies accordingly. The means of precision agriculture  consist mainly of a combination of new sensor technologies, satellite navigation, positioning technology and the use of mass amounts of data to influence decision-making on farms. The aim is to save costs, reduce environmental impact and produce more food.

Without a doubt, the promise of more efficient farming, higher yields, and environmental sustainability sounds very attractive. But some might wonder how such market-oriented technologies will impact the agricultural sector. While mega-machinery, chemical input and seed lobbies push to fund these innovations through CAP money, serious questions are raised about who has access to these technologies, who controls the data and what is the environmental performance of these innovations.

Is precision agriculture the way forward to sustainability?

Smart agriculture is described by many EU policy-makers as the answer to make agriculture sustainable. While it leaves no doubt that precision agriculture performs better than conventional agriculture from an environmental point of view, there seems to be confusion about what sustainability truly is. An increasing scientific consensus emerged over the years around the fact that sustainability should encompass ecological, economic, and social aspects. Under these aspects, a brief analysis shows the limits of the impacts precision agriculture shall have on sustainability.

First of all, this new paradigm ignores ecological processes, being simply based on models for optimising conventional production and creating unintended needs. For example, optimising chemical soil fertilisation and targeting the amount of pesticides to apply in a certain area are useful tools in a context of conventional production only. Precision farming may help to reduce fertilisers and pesticide use, but it fundamentally assumes a sterile soil and impoverished biodiversity. In contrast, in a balanced agroecosystem, a living soil works as a buffer for both pest and nutrient management, meaning there is no need to resort to pesticides and fertilisers.

Farmers would be locked in hierarchically based tools and ‘technocentric’ approaches, obviously fitting to serve private profit

Secondly, smart agriculture, as currently developed, is not economically sustainable for most of the farmers. For the last 50 years mainstream agricultural development has progressed along the trajectory of ‘more is better’, imposing top-down chemical and bio-technology and energy-intensive machines. The logic of increasing production at all costs has led farms to grow and pushed farmers into debt. European farms are disappearing, being swallowed by few big farms. From 2003 to 2013, more than one in four farms disappeared from the European landscape. Along the same paradigm, digitalisation risks putting farmers in more debt and dependency. Farmers would be led to buy machines and give up their data. The collected data will then be owned and sold on by the machinery companies to farmers. These new market-oriented technologies governed by the trend of pushing to commodify and privatise knowledge would increase dependency on costly tools, mostly unaffordable for smallholder farmers, accelerating their disappearance.

Finally, the precision agriculture approach is not socially sustainable. The knowledge transfer mode of precision agriculture mainly follows a top-down procedure where innovation comes from private companies that develop and provide technological solutions. Farmers would be locked in hierarchically based tools and ‘technocentric’ approaches, obviously fitting to serve private profit, fostering a path dependency, and ignoring the potential of practice, knowledge sharing and participatory research. Moreover, the promises of digital technology and the big data agenda are mainly addressed to conventional, industrial-scale agriculture, allowing them alone to thrive at the expense of smaller ones.

A smart and truly sustainable way of doing agriculture is already here

During the last decade, agroecology has known large success, sparking transition across all the EU. Agroecology is a way of redesigning food systems to achieve true ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Through transdisciplinary, participatory, and transition-oriented research, agroeocology links together science, practice, and movements focusing on social change. While far from being an ‘agriculture of the past’, as some opponents have labelled it, agroecology combines scientific research and community-based experimentation, emphasising technology and innovation that are knowledge-intensive, low cost,and easily adaptable by small and medium-scale producers. Agroecology implies methodologies to develop a responsible innovation system that allows the technologies to respond to real user needs. It develops a systemic paradigm towards a full harmonisation with ecological processes, low external inputs,use of biodiversity, and cultivation of agricultural knowledge.

The resulting technology is as ‘smart’, ‘precise’ and performing as the one promoted by big data companies. Drip irrigation (a type of micro-irrigation), nitrogen fertilisation using mycorrhizal fungi, adaptive multi-paddock grazing systems (a management system in which livestock are regularly moved from one plot to another to avoid overgrazing), and bokashi composting (fermented organic matter) are just a few examples of advanced agroecologial technologies that correspond to the needs of adaptability, performance, and accessibility. Low-tech methods can be equally or more effective, are more appropriate for smaller or remote upland farms, and engender less debt or input dependency. The major part of equipment most of the farmers need is affordable, adaptable and easy to fix.

Are agroecology and digitalisation poles apart?

Considering the current agenda of big data and big machineries companies, yes, they are.But this does not mean digital innovations are unfit for agroecology. The main barrier to consider to the use of digital innovations in agroecology is related to their accessibility and the lack of autonomy of farmers. Agroecology is based on inclusiveness, it emphasises the importance of the dialogue between producers, researchers, and communities through participatory learning processes. A bottom-up approach, a horizontal integration, and a complete freedom of information are needed to support agroecological innovations.

Thus, opposing agroecology and digital technology would be critically wrong. Serious potential can be unlocked by combining digital tools to achieve the objectives of sustainable agricultural production. Farmer-to-farmer methods based on open-source information ruled by a horizontal exchange can be used to democratise the use of data. Crowd-sourced soil data can help farmers to share information and benefiting from it. An example of this is the app mySoil, which seeks to promote the distribution of freely available data through digital technologies. This project has developed a citizen science role for data collection, enabling users to upload their own observations about soils in their area. Sensors can help measure plant or animal needs, information can be transferred and shared among a farming community quickly, and new apps can help farmers selling their products directly and developing a more efficient community-based agriculture. The cost of specialised machines that manage sustainable soil cover and weeds, or composting, can be made affordable by promoting cooperative models and community connections among bioregions.

Agroecology is a way of redesigning food systems to achieve true ecological, economic, and social sustainability.

Examples of collaborative projects for the creation of technology solutions and innovation by farmers, such as l’Atelier Paysan in France, can be found allover Europe. These local innovations require an enabling environment that Governments are failing to provide. Atelier Paysan is a network of farmers, scientists, and researchers that have developed a bottom-up approach to innovation in order to integrate farmers’ knowledge and the development of new technologies adapted to agroecological farming. The aim is to empower farmers to take back control on technical choices. The starting point is that farmers are in the best position to respond appropriately to the challenges of agricultural development. With the support of technical facilitators and building on transdisciplinary and collective intelligence, farmers develop appropriate and adapted innovations. The technology is developed and owned by farmers, and the investment and the benefits are collective. Adapting digital technology to similar processes can spark transition in a much more effective way than obsolete top-down and technocratic approaches. If we want real innovation, we need to start daring to innovate the innovation process itself.

Involving users in the design of agro-equipments, creating financial incentives for innovative equipment purchase, sharing costs among cooperatives and farming communities, and training end-users on the high potential of these new technologies are pivotal aspects of adapting digital tools to agroecological innovation. These processes need the support of public investment to scale up. This shall be the role of the new CAP, in order to make its huge money flow legitimate. CAP money should serve inclusive innovation, in order to develop accessible and adapted knowledge. During the upcoming CAP negotiations, the future of 38 per cent of the European budget will be decided. Public money must be spent for public goods. It is not a matter of what kind of technology we want to support for our agriculture; it is a matter of who will benefit from his technology, farmers or private companies.

This article has been reprinted from the Greeneuropeanjournal you can find the original post here!

The original post included an embedded podcast that was not reposted here.

Featured image: “Rt. 539 Hay Field” by James Loesch is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The post AGRICULTURE 3.0 OR (SMART) AGROECOLOGY? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I said in my last post that putting good software and data into the hands of farmers can profit a local economy, and I’d like to back up that claim a little. I also hinted that the direction in which such data flows is especially important in an increasingly globalized industry, where in a few years we could reasonably expect to see most of the world’s farming data owned by one or two multinational corporations. In order for farming communities to wrest some control over their own data, I believe it needs to originate with food producers, then travel outwardly along the supply chain to the consumers, who consume that data just as they would the food.

Those are some fairly abstract terms, and I won’t pretend they’re at all unbiased either. But I believe there’s some hard, practical rationale for why farmers can profit from controlling their own data, and I can put it in terms that any farmer with enough business-savvy can understand: data adds value to the product, which means more value for the consumer, which means a better price for the farmer. Let me explain.

The Value of Data

There are a lot of ways farmers already know to add value to the food they grow: washing and bunching vegetables, making a nice display and signage at market, investing in a refrigeration unit for one’s truck, canning sauce from unsold or surplus tomatoes, etc. All these measures avail the farmer a higher price at the point of sale, either by having a fresher, more marketable product when it arrives, or by creating a new market for a product that otherwise might not have sold. Most of this value also ships with the product, meaning the value will be propagated down the supply chain until it reaches its final destination, even if it passes through a few more hands before it does so.

Reliable farm data can do all these things and more. There are some metrics which the end consumer will obviously value, and farmers can leverage those for a higher price. If a farmer can provide accessible, verifiable data regarding when the product was harvested, how it was grown, what environmental impacts could be measured during its production and the specific seed variety it was grown from, then she will find a large market of customers willing to pay a premium for the food associated with that data. That kind of data can be especially valuable to distributors and other partners further down the supply chain, where normally such information becomes more obscure the further it travels. There’s also the mere ability to verify a product was grown by someone within a small radius of the consumer, assuring them that their dollars are staying in the local economy.

These are all sources of value that traditional methods can capture as well, if not quite with the same granularity and level of persistence; however, I think the real value will be in the predictive power that data can provide, to an extent that other value-added practices can’t really replicate. This comes in especially handy with larger buyers, who have their own downstream markets to be concerned about, and who would truly value knowing a yield within a few percentage points and a harvest window within a matter of a day or two, all from perhaps two weeks out or more. If a farmer has a reasonable expectation that demand will outstrip her yield, and can predict that reliably enough ahead of time, she can offer a guarantee of availability, at a premium, to any interested buyers who order in advance. If instead she anticipates overproduction, she can offer volume discounts to potential early buyers, so that once the harvest date rolls around that abundance will be at a more manageable volume.

Through API’s (Application Programming Interfaces), this data could be propagated to buyers automatically, and prices adjusted the same way. For instance, in the case of overproduction, the sale window could be set to close once a certain number of bushels had been sold. Or if a certain quota isn’t met for premium orders, the price could be lowered after a given time. All this will help guarantee the best price for the highest volume of sales. The availability of this data via API’s also means that, once again, the value can be easily passed down the supply chain. A wholesaler or retailer with an ecommerce business can have the data relayed automatically to their website, and thus to their own customers. A chef can post a new seasonal item on his menu a week or more in advance and start promoting it via social media.

The Protocol vs the Data, Public vs Private

This raises a potentially contentious point regarding what data is made public and what is kept private. This inevitably comes back to who owns the data in the first place, but plain data, technically, cannot be copyrighted or patented, so once someone has access to it, there’s nothing to prevent them from sharing it however they see fit. It’s more a matter of who owns the computer the data is stored on, and what terms of service they’ve negotiated with the user. In that sense, farm data also cannot be made open source in strictly the same way that software or other creative works can.¹

If farm data was made publicly available from one source, and then a third party copies that data, there is nothing holding that third party to make the data or its derivatives freely available via their own platform. This means if a farmer publishes the data related to their wholesale prices and volumes via a free API, a distributor who connects to that API can still restrict access to that data via their own website, even excluding the very same farmer who grew the product. So if that farmer wanted to see what kind of markups that distributor was applying to the original wholesale price, she might have to pay a subscription fee, or perhaps wouldn’t be able to view it at all. At the same time, this doesn’t exactly create any guarantees of transparency for the consumer, who might also be restricted. Perhaps the distributor just wouldn’t be incentivized to pass that data along to the end consumer at all. We can’t just assume that opening up the data will automatically create better markets for the farmer and more transparency for the consumer.

So I’d like to clarify the difference between the need for open standards and public API’s, which I believe are absolutely essential for a transparent food shed, versus the caution which should be exercised when pushing for all farm-related data to be made public. This will take a bit of understanding of how API’s are used to store and transmit data, so we can distinguish them from the data itself. For our purposes, I’ll emphasize that API’s are mainly just the processes by which data is transmitted and stored, not the data itself. It’s the way that one computer application communicates to another.

To use an example of a human interface, rather than an Application Programming Interface, consider the process by which you log into your email account and view your inbox. You go to a URL, perhaps https://mail.gmail.com, then when the login page loads, you click on the field called “Email Address”, type your address in, then click on the field called “Password” and type it, and finally press enter or click a button called “Submit”. After that you can view your inbox, and access different mail items by a similar series of clicks. The process is the same whether it’s your inbox or your friend’s or your bosses, even though you lack the credentials to access your boss’s Gmail account (presumably). What’s most important is the process: the succession of clicks, the names of the fields you enter your credentials into, and the order in which all that happens. You probably don’t think about all those steps, but they’re all critical to a successful login attempt; if you entered your password into the wrong field, or clicked on the wrong button, you wouldn’t get to see your inbox.

API’s have similar protocols for accessing data and authenticating users, but instead of using a series of mouse clicks and keyboard entries, it uses a programming language. Like the human interface, the API is the same no matter who is logging in, and no matter the contents of their inbox. The only exceptions are the actual characters that make up your email and password, because they are themselves a type of data. They’re input data, whereas your inbox is output data. The interface needs to be flexible and generic enough to accept different inputs and respond with different outputs. If it just assumed the input data was the same every time, that the email and password were the same for everyone, then everyone would have the same inbox. This is why it’s important for any API to separate the data from the process. This also means that the process can be made public, while the data, including your password or an email from your significant other, can be kept private. Any programmer can access the Gmail API to write their own email app, but that doesn’t mean they can access your password or inbox. The same can be achieved with farm data, separating public API’s from the private data.

None of this means that there aren’t cases where it would be desirable to make certain farm data public, and perhaps expose that data over an API that is free for anyone to use, with or without credentials. But farmers, as both individuals and as businesses, have a reasonable expectation of privacy over some portion of the their data, just as a Gmail user expects the contents of their inbox will be kept (reasonably) private. Once a farmer puts a product onto the market, there are more compelling reasons to make some of that data public. For instance, it benefits both the farmer and the consumer at that point to have some level of transparency about the growing practices, freshness of the product, price, etc. Public API’s and open data can provide such transparency. Still, I think there is a strong case for leaving trade secrets, personal info, and other types of pre-market data at the discretion of the farmer to publish, whether freely or for a price, so she can thereby leverage that data for the type of value-added services I mentioned above. There needs to be a delicate balance struck between making our local farmers more competitive in a globalized market, while also making that market more transparent for the consumer.

Keeping Data in the Community

I think there is a huge need to talk about how we decide what parts of this data should be made public and what kept private, and I don’t expect to put much of a dent into that discussion here. I will assert, however, that this is something that should be decided at the community level, between farmers and the people eating their food. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the course we are currently taking.

As is well known by now, the trend among Big Data companies, like Facebook and Google, is to provide users with a nominally “free” or inexpensive service in exchange for the data they’re able to collect from those users. A similar trend is already taking over in digital agriculture, especially as big mergers like the one between Bayer and Monsanto aggregate more and more data into fewer and fewer hands. Angela Huffman, an advocate for anti-monopoly reform in the agriculture, writes in the Des Moines Register that the newly approved conglomerate “will have more in common with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica than meets the eye.” She goes on to say,

In recent years, large agrochemical companies, including Bayer and Monsanto, have been heavily investing in digital agriculture. This new platform involves collecting data from farms, then building mathematical models and algorithms aimed at giving farmers real-time information on how to grow and manage their crops. […] It stands to reason that if Bayer and Monsanto combine to increase their dominance over digital farming, they will use their near monopoly on farmer data to sell more of their chemicals and seeds to farmers.

This new data system, as it’s evolving, favors a dynamic where farmers get cheap services for analyzing their crop data, in exchange for giving away that data to Big Ag, instead of having the chance to leverage that data themselves. These services usually come bundled together with other products, like seeds, fertilizers and even tractors.

In 2015, John Deere & Company told a farmer that he would be breaking the law if he tried to fix his own tractor by accessing the firmware that controlled a faulty sensor. When it failed, that one inconsequential sensor would shut down the entire tractor and halt his farm’s production for two days while he waited for the replacement part to arrive. Cynics and digital rights advocates alike all thought this boiled down to Deere’s agreements with licensed repair shops and parts dealers, but Deere’s rationale for withholding the source code turned out to be something a lot more lucrative, as Cory Doctorow points out (video):

The first thing that happens when a Deere tractor runs around your field is that it does centimeter-accurate soil surveys using the torque sensors in the wheels. And that data is not copyrightable, because facts aren’t copyrightable in America. […] But because the only way you can get access to those facts is by jailbreaking the tractor and removing a thing that protects access to copyrighted works, which is the operating system on the tractor itself, […] it’s a felony to access that data unless you’re John Deere. So John Deere pulls that data in over the wireless network connections in these tractors, and then they bundle it all together and they sell it to a seed company. And if you want to use the centimeter accurate soil surveys of your fields to do automated, optimized seed broadcasting you have to buy seed from the one company² that licenses it. […] But it’s actually just the tip of the iceberg because if you are doing centimeter accurate soil surveys of entire regions you have insight into crop yields way ahead of the futures market. And that’s why John Deere committed PR-suicide by telling the Farmers of America that they didn’t own their tractors, that they were tenant farmers.

This case study in bad agricultural data policy perfectly highlights the concerns we should have for how farm data is used and collected, starting quite literally from the ground up. Before the seed even meets the soil, all of a farmer’s most critical data — which brings with it the power to increase yields, decrease waste and command a better price at market — is being siphoned away to large corporate data stores half a world away. Then the derivatives of that data are sold back to the same farmer who generated it with every pass of his tractor. We can’t blame Big Ag for concocting such a clever scheme to profit its shareholders, but we can learn from it. We can learn to take active measures to restore control of that data back to the local communities where it originated, and with it, return all the value it held.

We as consumers should also have a chance to say how this data is used. Do we want this data to boost the sales of the chemicals which run off into our backyards and are responsible for emitting one third of humanity’s annual contribution of CO2 into the atmosphere? Or do we want to leverage the full potential of farm data to eventually render the extensive farming technologies of last century obsolete, replacing them with smarter, cleaner, more efficient technologies that could save us from environmental catastrophe in this century?

An Alternative Model

Instead of being forced to buy seed from the only company that is licensed to provide services like precision planting, under a different model a farmer could shop around for seed companies that provide other data services. These services would include the ability to import seed data into the farmer’s preferred crop planning software at the time of purchase. Soil surveys could be taken with sensor widgets, which could be installed cheaply on even the oldest, non-computerized tractors and would include their own light-weight, off-grid networking capabilities. This data, combined with the integrated seed data, could be sent to publicly funded university extension programs, who could analyze that data and provide services to help farmers calibrate their machinery to optimize planting.

The benefits of this system over the John Deere model would be numerous. The farmer would get higher yield from each seed planted, which is a tremendous value in its own right, but retrofitting such hardware could also present significant cost savings, compared to the price of a new tractor with computer diagnostics built-in, some of which reach seven figures. Such an arrangement would also provide data to public research institutions, who could be trusted to anonymize and aggregate the data from a wider distribution of growers, and could publish the results of their analysis for others to use. Instead being used to push chemicals, this data could aid research into new intensive growing practices that are better for the environment, and could even help monitor the total soil health of vital growing regions. Plus, if anything ever happened to the sensors, they could be easily repaired by any third party, or by the farmer herself, because they would be built with open source hardware and software.

This data would continue to profit the farmer when she brought the product to market. Instead of giving Bayer/Monsanto the trade insights to hedge on commodities markets, the farmer could use this data herself to get the best price possible. Over time, the data from these soil surveys could be used to train programs that optimize prices, just as the extension’s analytical programs were optimized for planting. The planting data itself could be correlated with data from the National Weather Service to calculate the growing degree days necessary for each crop to reach full maturity. This would have a tremendous pricing advantage if the farmer could start offering more reliable delivery dates. Additional sensors on the farm could make these predictions even more precise, and if it was known that favorable weather conditions in her own micro-climate could bring her crop to market even a few days before other nearby farms, that could provide a real competitive edge.

Again, as I suggested above, forward-thinking distributors and retailers could receive this data and forward it to end consumers. The consumers would be able to anticipate having the spring’s first snap peas or strawberries weeks in advance, and could count down the days on the calendar. They could know when they were harvested and know just how many hours they spent in transit before reaching their table. That transit time could be reduced by innovative software for food hubs, and CSA programs and farmers markets, which could all pull data from such crop planning software and pass along the value.

We shouldn’t be skeptical about the technology itself — that it seems too futuristic or that modern farms wouldn’t have a practical use for it. That technology is certainly coming and will be used. A lot of it has already arrived. We should be skeptical about how that technology will be used, and who it will favor. Ultimately, whoever controls the data will determine where the value of that data flows. Will it all go to a few private interests and controlling shareholders? Or will it benefit the people growing the food, and those who are nourished by that food, as well as the environment that food depends on to grow? That is not a decision the technology will make for us, and it most certainly won’t be an easy one to make or execute. It’s a choice, nevertheless, which we need to make as a community, and it’s one we need to make soon, before others make the decision for us.

¹ There is, of course, a corresponding Open Data movement, which shares a lot in common with Open Source, but in a legal sense it operates entirely differently. Also, there is a myriad of different legal interpretations that I’m glossing over here, but a good primer, if you’re curious, is Feist v. Rural Telephone.

² Doctorow indicates that this seed company is in fact Monsanto, but I have been unable to verify that claim through other sources.

Originally published at jgaehring.com.

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By Jose Luis Vivero-Pol (Editor), Tomaso Ferrando (Editor), Olivier De Schutter (Editor), Ugo Mattei (Editor)

From the scientific and industrial revolution to the present day, food – an essential element of life – has been progressively transformed into a private, transnational, mono-dimensional commodity of mass consumption for a global market. But over the last decade there has been an increased recognition that this can be challenged and reconceptualized if food is regarded and enacted as a commons.

This Handbook provides the first comprehensive review and synthesis of knowledge and new thinking on how food and food systems can be thought, interpreted and practiced around the old/new paradigms of commons and commoning. The overall aim is to investigate the multiple constraints that occur within and sustain the dominant food and nutrition regime and to explore how it can change when different elements of the current food systems are explored and re-imagined from a commons perspective. Chapters do not define the notion of commons but engage with different schools of thought:

• the economic approach, based on rivalry and excludability;
• the political approach, recognizing the plurality of social constructions and incorporating epistemologies from the South;
• the legal approach that describes three types of proprietary regimes (private, public and collective) and different layers of entitlement (bundles of rights); and
• the radical-activist approach that considers the commons as the most subversive, coherent and history-rooted alternative to the dominant neoliberal narrative.

These schools have different and rather diverging epistemologies, vocabularies, ideological stances and policy proposals to deal with the construction of food systems, their governance, the distributive implications and the socio-ecological impact on Nature and Society.

The book sparks the debate on food as a commons between and within disciplines, with particular attention to spaces of resistance (food sovereignty, de-growth, open knowledge, transition town, occupations, bottom-up social innovations) and organizational scales (local food, national policies, South–South collaborations, international governance and multi-national agreements). Overall, it shows the consequences of a shift to the alternative paradigm of food as a commons in terms of food, the planet and living beings.

Reviews

“If you want to understand why the commons isn’t tragic, what gastronomy has to do with a democracy or what the practice and theory of a future food system might look like, this wonderful collection of essays is well worth reading.” — Raj Patel, food scholar, communicator and author of Stuffed and Starved, 2013 and A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, 2018

“The adoption of a holistic and complex vision of gastronomy is the only way to restore the true value of food. It is not only about production and consumption, but also wisdom, memory, knowledge and spirituality, traditional practices and modern technologies combined in an ecological interconnection between people and the planet. This book starts a needed and welcome reflection on the change in paradigm, and traces a possible pathway towards food sovereignty.” — Carlo Petrini, founder and president of the international Slow Food movement and the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Italy

“If we are really to transform the food system, we need bold ideas. Food as commons is one of them. If you are serious about exploring new ways of fixing the food system, read this book.” — Professor Corinna Hawkes, Director, Centre for Food Policy, City, University of London, UK and Co-Chair of the Independent Expert Group of the Global Nutrition Report

“Finally, a rich and rigorous assessment of food as a commons! This landmark collection of essays reveals how much we need to rethink the very language and frameworks by which we understand food and agriculture. The food we eat is not a mere commodity, it is the cherished, complicated outcome of culture, history, vernacular practice, ecological relationships, and identity. Insights on these themes can help us build new food systems that are stable, fair, and enlivening.” — David Bollier, scholar and activist on the commons, author of Think Like a Commoner, 2014 and co-editor of The Wealth of the Commons, 2012

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: the food commons are coming

Jose Luis Vivero-Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier de Schutter and Ugo Mattei

PART I: REBRANDING FOOD AND ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES OF TRANSITION

2. The idea of food as a commons: multiple understandings for multiple dimensions of food

Jose Luis Vivero-Pol

3. The food system as a commons

Giacomo Pettenati, Alessia Toldo and Tomaso Ferrando

4. Growing a care-based commons food regime

Marina Chang

5. New roles for citizens, markets and the state towards an open-source agricultural revolution

Alex Pazaitis and Michel Bauwens

6. Food security as a global public good

Cristian Timmermann

PART II: EXPLORING THE MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF FOOD

7. Food, needs and commons

John O´Neill

8. Community-based commons and rights systems

George Kent

9. Food as cultural core: human milk, cultural commons and commodification

Penny Van Esterik

10. Food as a commodity

Noah Zerbe

PART III: FOOD-RELATED ELEMENTS CONSIDERED AS COMMONS

11. Traditional agricultural knowledge as a commons

Victoria Reyes-García, Petra Benyei and Laura Calvet-Mir

12. Scientific knowledge of food and agriculture in public institutions: movement from public to private goods

Molly D. Anderson

13. Western gastronomy, inherited commons and market logic: cooking up a crisis

Christian Barrère

14. Genetic resources for food and agriculture as commons

Christine Frison and Brendan Coolsaet

15. Water, food and climate commoning in South African cities: contradictions and prospects

Patrick Bond and Mary Galvin

PART IV: COMMONING FROM BELOW: CURRENT EXAMPLES OF COMMONS-BASED FOOD SYSTEMS

16. The ‘campesino a campesino’ agroecology movement in Cuba: food sovereignty and food as a commons

Peter M. Rosset and Valentín Val

17. The commoning of food governance in Canada: pathways towards a national food policy?

Hugo Martorell and Peter Andrée

18. Food surplus as charitable provision: obstacles to re-introducing food as a commons

Tara Kenny and Colin Sage

19. Community-building through food self-provisioning in Central and Eastern Europe: an analysis through the food commons framework

Bálint Balázs

PART V: DIALOGUE OF ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES OF TRANSITION

20. Can food as a commons advance food sovereignty?

Eric Holt-Giménezand Ilja van Lammeren

21. Land as a commons: examples from United Kingdom and Italy

Chris Maughan and Tomaso Ferrando

22. The centrality of food for social emancipation: civic food networks as real utopias projects

Maria Fonte and Ivan Cucco

23. Climate change, the food commons and human health

Cristina Tirado-von der Pahlen

24. Food as commons: towards a new relationship between the public, the civic and the private

Olivier de Schutter, Ugo Mattei, Jose Luis Vivero-Pol and Tomaso Ferrando,

Text sourced from Routledge.com

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Mirella Ferraz:  Since 2013, the Network of Wellbeing, where I work, has hosted community potlucks in Totnes, a small town in the south of England. These potlucks, which are open to all, have been helping build friendships among residents since day one. We started the potlucks because we realized that there weren’t many avenues for local community members to participate in events that are accessible, affordable, and family-friendly. The community potlucks take place on the third Friday of each month at the local church hall. The premise is quite simple: just bring some food to share. Around 50-100 people of all ages, including children, attend these events. During holidays and festivals, the potlucks have attracted around 300 people. Often there is entertainment, such as live music, poetry readings, children’s activities, wool spinning, or cooking demonstrations that are led by local volunteers.

“It has been wonderful to see the Community Potlucks go from strength to strength, and help transform the town in the process,” says Larch Maxey, Network of Wellbeing’s community project manager. “When we started, very few people had even heard of a potluck, let alone been to one, now it’s become the default whenever an organization meets, when people have a party, or celebration, it’s a potluck.”

For five years, the Network of Wellbeing took responsibility for organizing the community potlucks, but recently, a group of local residents has taken on this responsibility. Now, the potlucks are run by the community for the community, Wendy Douglas, one of the volunteer coordinators, says. “Potluck suppers are a wonderful community event, open to everyone, and costing no more than the contents of the homemade pot of food for you,” she says. “It’s a great opportunity to meet other locals over a plate of delicious food. No need to be lonely or eat alone when there are events like this to attend. The Totnes Community Potluck has enabled me to meet many like-minded people, and I enjoy my involvement as a volunteer. I hope it will continue well into the future.”

The initiative is also helping tackle social isolation, one of the greatest issues of our times. “I love the simplicity of potlucks — open to everyone and a great way to help bring people together,” Maxey says. “Loneliness is as bad for us as smoking, and potlucks are a great way to connect people and overcome loneliness.”

If you are inspired by the idea of the community potlucks, but are unable to attend the regular events in Totnes, you could launch a similar event in your local community. If this is of interest, then check out the Network of Wellbeing’s Community Potluck Guidelines, which provide you with all of the information and inspiration needed to successfully organize these community-building events.  “We’re also happy to speak with you about our experience of this event, and provide any guidance that may be helpful,” Maxey says. Please get in touch with Maxey at [email protected] for any support you may need.

Have you listened to our new podcast “The Response“? It’s a riveting look into how communities help each other out after deadly natural disasters. Listen here:

Images provided by Network of Wellbeing

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This article was adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” Download your free pdf copy today.

Myriam Bouré: Up until a few years ago, the residents of Loos-en-Gohelle, a small town in rural northwestern France with over 6,000 residents, consumed imported industrial food products despite significant local production. In addition to the negative health impacts of their diet, this practice also hurt the local economy. In 2013, the town government of Loos-en-Gohelle started a project called VITAL as part of an ambitious program to improve the diets of Loos-en-Gohelle residents.

The project was built on an existing initiative called Anges Gardins, run by a local association that has worked on community gardens and food education for years. It is also part of a long-term, comprehensive transition to a diverse, sustainable local economy from one dependent on coal mining — an industry that vanished when the French government closed the region’s coal mines in 1990, in favor of cheaper imports. Food is viewed as a cross-cutting issue, capable of supporting transition in other sectors.

The policy has a two-pronged strategy to meet the goal. First, to stimulate the demand for local, organic food through education, gardening ambassadors, free produce from open food gardens, and more. The town government led by example, by shifting to 100 percent organic food procurement for schools and 15 percent for retirement homes.

Second, to encourage farmers to convert to organic farming and support food distribution. To help achieve this, the town offered farmers free access to land on the condition that they grow organically and that they convert some of their own existing agricultural land to organic as well, thus raising the share of lands grown organically to 10 percent. Terre d’Opale, another local association, coordinates the farmers to ensure diversity of local production and manage distribution. Distribution is handled weekly through a combination of an online store, delivery of food boxes to local collection points, and procurement through catering businesses.

The program has operated successfully for three years. As the program benefits the entire local food ecosystem, including consumers, farmers, food kitchens, and distributors, it continues to grow and serve more and more of the community.

View full policy here (French).

Learn more:

• Report on the VITAL project (French)

​Header image by Loos-en-Gohelle on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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An open farm day tour in Zsambok’s Organic Garden, Cargonomia’s organic farming partner. Credit – Logan Strenchock

The cooperative supplies more than 3,000 food boxes per year, with messengers cycling nearly 18,000 km while servicing a 27 km2 section of the city annually. This directly reduces the environmental impact of food production and distribution that at a global level accounts for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions as well as an alarming amount of food waste.

Cargonomia operates from a hub that serves as the messenger dispatch centre; food box pickup point; do-it-yourself repair workshop for bicycles, clothing and electronics; and logistics centre for sustainable urban transport solutions where community members can borrow locally manufactured cargo-bikes. The site also serves as a space for community activities that focus on sustainable transitions, community building and ways to find alternatives to limitless, consumerist growth.

Cargonomia illustrates that prioritizing relationship-building, direct interaction and community development can trigger substantial reductions in carbon emissions while delivering important positive social impacts. By lending its cargobikes to neighbours, music bands, non-governmental organisations and artists, it has helped generate a growing interest in alternatives to motorized vehicles in Budapest. The wider impact of this localized network is felt most within the community through regular activities offering citizens open spaces for learning and exchange, creating conditions for meaningful dialogues between neighbours, craftspeople and volunteers.

Vincze with a cargobike loaded with organic vegetables and bread on a delivery day. Photo Credit: Stefan Roch

“What inspires me most about this initiative is the systems thinking that underpins the initiative bridges urban/rural livelihoods, and attempts to orientate the solidarity economy towards concrete political activity.”

– Bertie Russell

Would you like to learn more about this initiative? Please contact us.

Or visit cargonomia.hu

Transformative Cities’ Atlas of Utopias is being serialized on the P2P Foundation Blog. Go to TransformativeCities.org for updates.

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There is a greater interest in creating more resilient cities where residents produce what they need, in order to minimize waste and dependency on industrial-scale food production and retailing. This, combined with individual interest to learn and reconnect with the food system, has given rise to a number of urban and community gardens. This bottom-up movement of urban agriculture is also seeking a structural support by policy makers. Several grassroot communities around the world are finding innovative ways to distribute the surplus food grown or cooked which otherwise would go to waste. —Khushboo Balwani

1. League of Urban Canners: Stewarding Urban Orchards

Planting an urban fruit tree is more than a lifetime commitment — it is an intergenerational civic responsibility. Each summer, in Greater Boston, a huge amount of backyard fruit falls to the ground and sidewalk, where it rots and creates a mess. Property owners and municipalities are often pressured to remove these “nuisances,” while many urban residents are struggling to access local and organic food sources. The League of Urban Canners has developed a network of individuals to map, harvest, preserve, and share this otherwise wasted fruit. They make agreements with property owners to share the work of fruit harvesting and preserving, as well as tree and arbor pruning. The preserved fruits are shared between property owners (10 percent), preservers (70 percent), and harvesters (20 percent). Each season the completely volunteer-run enterprise harvests and preserves about 5,000 pounds of fruit from a database of more than 300 trees and arbors. Myriad acts of cooperation sustain this urban commons, in which harvesters, property owners, preservers, and eaters learn to share responsibility, resources, and care for each other and their urban environment. —Oona Morrow

2. Restaurant Day (‘Ravintolapäivä’): Fostering Cross-cultural Gatherings Through Shared Meals

In big cities, people of many different cultures live in close proximity. However, there often aren’t enough chances for them to intermingle and experience the diverse traditions within their city. In an effort to bring people together and foster cross cultural interaction, local organizers in Helsinki, Finland, created “Ravintolapäivä,” or Restaurant Day. Initiated in 2011, it began as a food carnival where anyone with a passion for food was encouraged to run a “restaurant” in their private home or in public spaces for a single day. Even though the pop-up restaurants charge money for the meals, the emphasis is not on profit, but rather on community teamwork and cultural exchange. During the event, Helsinki is transformed by hundreds of these informal restaurants serving a wide range of cuisines in this city-wide street festival. The event is put on through distributed organization — individual volunteer restaurateurs are responsible for finding a location, managing the menu and invitations, and setting the meal prices. Now, Restaurant Day has become a global movement, with over 27,000 pop-up restaurants having served over 3 million community members across 75 countries. —Khushboo Balwani

3. Kitchen Share: A Sustainable Community Resource for Home Cooks

Kitchen appliances can be superfluous uses of money and cupboard space, especially for city residents with tight budgets and small homes. Yet interest in healthy eating is growing. More people are trying out unusual food preparation techniques, which can require unique appliances. Kitchen Share, launched in 2012, is a kitchen tool-lending library for home cooks in Portland, Oregon. It enables community members to borrow a wide variety of kitchen appliances such as dehydrators, mixers, and juicers. Members can check out over 400 items online using affordable lending library software from myTurn. With two locations in Portland, Kitchen Share helps residents save money, learn new skills from neighbors, and reduce their environmental footprint. As a nonprofit community resource for home cooks, Kitchen Share only asks for a one-time donation upon joining, providing affordable access to otherwise expensive and bulky items while building a more resource-efficient city. Learn about starting a lending library with this toolkit.—Marion Weymes

These three short case studies are adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.”

Cross-posted from Shareable

Photo by Artur Rutkowski on Unsplash

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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.

“Permaculture,” Blair says, “is based in systems thinking. But it’s hard to understand systems in general unless you understand one system well that you can abstract from. Unfortunately, in communities that are disenfranchised or under-resourced, there aren’t a whole lot of opportunities to get experience with well-functioning systems. Everybody can get some tomato plants and some worms and some soil, though, and have an extraordinarily complex system to work with and then scale up from.”

Students at Kelso, as well as members of the surrounding community who learn, design, and build at Incite Focus, often begin their permaculture education, then, in the garden, where they first learn how to operate effectively within the natural environment.

“On the one hand, the gardening projects our students work on are deep and rich enough to allow them to really understand what permaculture means and why it’s useful,” Blair says. “On the other hand, we’re in an environment in Detroit where people in very large numbers have been displaced from the position in the economy they had previously occupied and planned on continuing to occupy, and that’s because of a structural shift, not a temporary change. So how can we use permaculture to imagine what the future of Detroit for Detroiters could look like?”

That’s where the fab lab comes in. Blair believes that advances in digital production technology have reached the point at which, with an ecological approach to design and building in mind, people are now truly capable of producing most of the things they need. “Shelter, water, food, energy — these are all things that we can actually harvest and produce. They’re all around us; we’re just not properly utilizing them.”

Economically displaced Detroiters, Blair believes, should not wait for new industries to come along and absorb them into the workforce. Even if that were to happen, which he thinks unlikely, it would only return them to the fundamentally unhealthy, imbalanced system from which they were ejected in the first place.

“In permaculture,” he says, “you’re not a slave to the process. You’re a participant in the process. Behind a lot of this work is the idea of allowing people to have the opportunity to actually spend a reasonable portion of their time, a third of it, producing the things they need to live (furniture, for example, tools, even houses) themselves. Then you can spend a third of your time using the same tools to produce things that are useful for other people: community-based enterprises. Then you have another third left to to do the things that make you want to get up in the morning, usually the things your high school guidance counselor talked you out of.”

“If you’re not engaged in the rituals that touch your passions,” he says, “you’re not in a position to bring the best of yourself to anything that you do. In a large sense, then, this all comes down to creating an environment and cultural context in which people in Detroit are able to truly maximize our capacity as people.”

Read the complete article here.

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We recognize that many groups are actively working to develop alternative indicators for sustainability. We embark on this study to see if calibrating biocapacity may offer the kind of impact valuation for agriculture which does not exist in the market economy and its system of metrics.

Essentially, Biocapacity is the dynamic balance point between the number of organisms within a given area and the amount of resources that are needed to support them within this area. Thus, agricultural biocapacity indicates the degree to which the population of a bioregion is greater or lesser than the food that is available from the bioregion to feed it.

By combining scientific reason with place-based knowledge, culture and history, biocapacity provides a baseline for sustainability by showing how different interventions will effect different outcomes. This allows communities to develop evidence-based guidelines for organizing their own resource sufficiency while regenerating the ecology of their life-places.

Excerpts

On Bioregionalism in the Bay Area

Gradually, this eclectic group of naturalists began to call their field “bioregionalism” (bio is the Greek word for life; regere is the Latin word for a place to be managed). So, bioregionalism is essentially the idea of lifeplace — a way of extending the life of a community to the life of the biosphere through the ecological renewal of a particular area. The new bioregionalists wanted to combine local knowledge, beliefs and values with the unique characteristics of the climate and topography, the soils and plants, and the animals and habitats where they lived.

These ideas spread across the United States, but San Francisco was the epicenter for this people’s movement. They called on citizens to stop running away from the problems of industrial economy to better understand the land around them, the limits to its resources, and how this could help meet the needs of the diverse species who live there, including homo sapiens. Their vision was the development of new social and cultural relationships within the context of geographical communities.

Bioregionalism was a unique perspective for addressing major environmental challenges on a human scale. It acknowledged that solving large ecological problems by ‘thinking globally’ is much too disempowering for the average person. Although ‘acting locally’ is clearly the practical first step, it operates on too small a scale to impact environmental governance. The activities of localization simply don’t generate enough political power within small communities to stop centralized governments and markets from exploiting these decentralized life-places for their own ends.

The bioregionalists explained why there are so few decision-making organizations or networks at regional levels, where harmful ecological problems could be most effectively addressed. They showed how history and economics had prompted leaders to draw artificial local, state and national borders that seldom conformed to the ecological zones which overlap with them. Hence, natural boundaries have little correlation with our present political, economic and social boundaries and their institutions. To be sure, many ecological problems — involving personal and collective choices and action, as well as their cumulative effects on human lives — cannot be resolved within existing political jurisdictions. Ultimately, we become inhabitants separated from our own habitats.

How is cooperation over resources even possible if our geographical borders cannot be redrawn to protect and manage the environment? An engaged movement for a more ecological society cannot succeed without some kind of graphic image of the bioregional boundaries which are hidden from view. Such a map would focus on a region’s hydrology, geology and physiography, but also reflect its culture, history, present land-use patterns and climate.

From the Conclusion

Based on our research, most of the region will exceed its biocapacity to produce food for its growing population within two or three decades.

Industrial pollution, climate change, sea level rise, invasive species, water diversions and loss of wetlands are threatening enormous swaths of human habitat. Before 2050, the prodigious agricultural production of the San Francisco Bay Watershed will fail to produce sufficient quantities of agriculture for its population due to uncertain rainfall, flooded coasts and inlets, depletion of aquifers, topsoil loss, an export-led business model and a lack of cooperative dialogue among its political subdivisions.

Our study indicates that locally-produced calories have more monetary and ecological value when consumed in the same life-places where they are produced. Yet as long as the San Francisco/Oakland/Hayward MSA continues to import agriculture from elsewhere, the community will be impacted by rising food prices. Importing food into the dense population of the Bay Area will be possible until its food suppliers — foreign, domestic and regional — face their own supply limits for finite energy and raw materials and the breakdown of their own their fragile infrastructures.

When the Bay Area becomes too severe a strain on the bioregion itself, the reversal will be rapid. The external dependency on food will collapse and the capacity of the entire San Francisco Bay Watershed to sustain itself will be overtaken by extreme costs in food, water, energy and housing.

Why do we exploit our ecosystems instead of restoring them as life-places for habitation? This was the basic question raised in 1968. Now, ironically, San Francisco’s ‘back to the land’ diaspora could turn into a mass evacuation from the region as its resources continue to decline and its self-sufficiency falters. How this existential crisis is addressed in the San Francisco Bay Watershed — and in bioregions everywhere — will determine the ecological future of all life-places and our sustainability as a species. The question then will be, not how sustainable but how inhabitable is my own bioregion?

Still, if there’s any area that can break down the barriers between people and their land-place, integrating the human community with the ecological community, it’s the Bay Area — the spot where modern bioregionalism began and remains a vital part of the cultural memory. Community members are the very organisms that depend on environmental resources for support.

Now we must learn how to restore this dynamic balance. The issue is not if we have the will to do this, but how soon can it be done?

For more information, please contact James Quilligan or Patti Ellis at economicdemocracyadvocates.org

Photo by RhyoR

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