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

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 Those multiple dimensions are superseded by the tradable features, being value and price thus mixed up.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.