(14 mins) Darren Sharp – Australia is in the midst of a transition from an extractive economy led by the mining and agricultural sectors, towards a knowledge-based service economy. While digital innovation and startups are lauded for their ability to create jobs and stimulate the new economy, an extractive logic which privileges individual reward over mutual benefit remains dominant. Platform co-operatives provide an ethical bridge to the new economy through collective ownership and democratic governance of digital platforms to keep wealth and decision-making in the hands of value creators. Australia is home to a nascent cooperative platform ecosystem comprised of networks like the Commons Transition Coalition and enterprises including AbilityMate, AnyShare, bHive Bendigo, Geddup, Open Food Network and YLab. These system entrepreneurs and organizations are working in partnership with the communities they serve to bring an equitable and inclusive new economy to life.

Photo by Marko Mikkonen

The post Darren Sharp on the Emerging Ecosystem of Platform Cooperativism in Australia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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.

Bronwen Morgan, a researcher and expert in regulation and rights related to social activism and claims for social and economic human rights, recently approached us to share the following article. It deals with sustainable food systems, the sharing economy, and the ethos of legal infrastructure by using  the recent crowdfunding campaigns of Open Food Network (Australia) and FarmDrop (UK) as a window onto these issues.

At the end of the first week of August 2014, two different crowdfunding pitches closed almost simultaneously.  FarmDrop, based in the UK, had raised three quarters of a million pounds, which was not far from double their original goal, from 359 investors. Open Food Network, based in Australia, had raised Aus$35,877 from 398 investors. Peering through the windows opened up by these two initiatives gives a clear view of rather different trajectories of the burgeoning ‘sharing economy’.

Crowdfunding’s heady mix of creative expression, cultivating an audience of potential investors, media-savvy PR pitch, and technical provision of ‘due diligence’ information about business plans and risk seems appropriate to the somewhat contradictory ethos surrounding the spread and growth of the sharing economy. As William Deresiewicz argued in the New York Times in 2011 in ‘Generation Sell’:

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business…. The small business is the idealized social form of our time. Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan. 

The prism of the crowdfunding ‘pitch’ refracts diverse imaginaries of scale, and of ownership and control. Yet in the pitches for these two projects, scale is highly visible while questions of ownership and control are mostly shrouded or implicit. But both are important foundations of  the particular ethos of the practices that might spring up in their wake – and ethos, elusive as it is, is a vital facet of the kind of world that such projects aspire to create.

Both FarmDrop and Open Food Network aim to create and grow sustainable local food systems. Both stress the desire to create positive social change of a systemic kind, one that will disrupt the existing dominance of supermarket provision of food. They have not dissimilar structures – both provide a web-based platform that allows individual consumers to source food from local farmers, and to cut out or curtail the power of the ‘middleman’. Both emphasise the enlarged share of the final purchase price that will go to farmers as a key plank of their commitment to positive social change.

Their visions of the way in which they will grow, however, are quite different, a difference perhaps mirrored in the fact that FarmDrop’s largest investment was GBP100,000 while Open Food Network’s was Aus2500  –  as well as the sheer scale of difference in the total sums raised. FarmDrop aspires to establish a standardised model that will ‘scale up’ to a mass level, citing a quantified market share target of current UK supermarket sale volumes, and envisioning an ‘exit strategy’ of a public stockmarket sale where its potential valuation is compared to AirBnB, the ubiquitous sharing economy behemoth.  Open Food Network, by contrast, conveys  a hope of growing by variable replication, primarily through sharing the code of its web-based platform and fostering partnerships with small community-based ventures. It has already begun such partnerships with existing local food projects in Scotland and the South-West of England.

This difference is closely linked to the design of ownership and control in the two projects. Although there is much less overt discussion of this in the two crowdfunding pitches, one important feature stands out clearly – the open source nature of Open Food Network’s software platform. FarmDrop says nothing directly about this aspect of its pitch, but the exit strategy implies a closed intellectual  property model, as does the fact that Crowdcube, the funding platform, allows the sourcing of equity-based finance from venture capital as well as from so-called ‘mom and pop’ investors. Crowdcube also imposes a standard set of Articles of Association (not publicly available) upon funded projects, and FarmDrop is a private proprietary company controlled by its founders.

Interestingly, Open Food Network’s company structure is not made visible through the pitch (it’s a non-profit and registered charity) – but the pitch does communicate an important plank of ‘ownership and control’ very differently from FarmDrop – that of control over the sharing of surplus. FarmDrop proudly foregrounds a specific measureable – and very high –  proportion that will go to farmers – 80p in the pound – with 10p to the ‘Keeper’ who coordinates the local pickup, and 10p to FarmDrop itself.  Open Food Network, meanwhile, gives no specific proportions but leaves it up to the farmer to set the price. While FarmDrop’s ‘pitch’ thus seems markedly redistributive (at least, compared to supermarkets) , the more important – and less obvious – point is that Open Food Network delegates control over prices to farmers, while FarmDrop retains it. Given that FarmDrop is a private proprietary company, its promised generosity in terms of distributed proportions to farmers could change in the future. Nothing is built into the legal model of private proprietary companies to prevent this, and FarmDrop’s tagline – “The simple principle of missing out the middleman powers everything we do” –  sidesteps the issue that the platform is a middleman – and potentially a massively powerful one.

Of course, Open Food Network’s pitch is partially silent on ownership and control, at least in terms of the technicalities of legal models. But its commitments to open-source software and delegated price control communicate an ethos that extends what is shared, and on whose terms, more widely than the FarmDrop pitch. Open Food Network’s approach not so much cuts out middlemen as supports multiple small locally empowered networks that subscribe to the transparency of the platform.

Debates over the political and social implications of the sharing economy would be energised and clarified by the combination of a greater appreciation of ethos on the one hand, and more overt, transparent discussion about the legal models that will give structure to the visions glimpsed through the window of crowdfunding. These are linked issues. In a whimsical but provocative reflection on the foundations of sustainable practices, Ivan Illich argues that modern discussions of scale are blind to issues of proportionality and balance that cannot be captured by numbers or quantitative measurement. He remarks: “In his treatise on statecraft Plato remarks that the bad politician is he who confuses measurements with proportionality. Such a person would not recognize what is appropriate to a particular ethos, a word that originally implied a dwelling place, later something like “popular character.”

In the context of this quote, it is perhaps fitting that FarmDrop chooses to highlight a numerical measure of farmer income, while Open Food Network delegate the general power of setting prices. More broadly, the general ethos of the Open Food Network project leaves much more room for the ‘particular ethos’ of different configurations of growers and customers to evolve, particularly on questions of ownership and control. The ethos of FarmDrop could be interpreted as one that to preserve the comfort and convenience of the shopping relationship while personalising it and at least appearing to shrink its scale.  Yet when the ‘back-systems’, particularly the financing, ownership and control and legal governance of projects are designed as FarmDrop’s seem implicitly to be, such projects become potentially very similar to the mass-scale commodification the project appears to reject. All the same, the extent to which none of this is up front and centre in the crowdfunding pitches suggests there is more debate to be had here.

As experience has shown, growth and success down the line bring issues of underlying legal infrastructure painfully into contentious view. When CouchSurfing, once the more ‘open’ and ‘truly sharing’ version of AirBnB, went through some contentious governance change, angry couch-providers directly raised the importance of such issues as ‘asset locks’ within corporate governance structures. This is more than just a technical question, and more even than a political one, though it is certainly that. As important is the ethos of how particular models, or any modern ‘template’ structure, is embedded in practice. To quote Illich again,  “To consider what is appropriate or fitting in a certain place  – this is “a delicate task” requiring that we “retrieve something like a lost ear, an abandoned sensibility”.

What would our lost ear hear, our sensibilities regain, if sustainable local food projects matched the design of ownership and control to the sense of fit and appropriateness of each place the project were implemented? What kinds of models would encourage such a sense of appropriate fit – cooperatives, community interest companies, benefit corporations? Illich views “a certain sensitivity to the appropriate as the necessary condition of friendship”.  As we peer through the window of crowdfunding pitches, which of the models offered us will make possible a relationship of friendship – that infinitely variable shared good, capable of expansive deepening but never of being ‘scaled up’ – to the earth? Ethos matters, and the legal infrastructure of ownership and control of sharing economy projects is a too-little-discussed facet of the sharing economy.

The post Peering through the Crowdfunding Window: Sustainable Food, Sharing Economies and the Ethos of Legal Infrastructure appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From the Campaign Page:

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

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

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

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

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

How will OFN help fix the food system?

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

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

GOOD for Farmers and Producers

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

Farmers need scalable, sustainable systems for distributing their food.

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

 

 

GOOD for Eaters

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

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

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

 

GOOD for Communities and Food Hubs

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

The Open Food Network:

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

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

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

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

– lets eaters order locally grown food from their chosen hub

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

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

– basic trading is free for farmers and eaters to use

– is proudly open source and not for profit

 

Explore! demo.openfoodnetwork.org

Tipping Point Goal: $25,000

Total Funding Goal: $100,000

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