Choose your food story for the week. “May fall in shop price marks third year of decline… fresh food fell by a record 1.9%”. Or, meanwhile, a Nestles vice-president tells Milan’s Expo 2015 Roundtable that damage had been done by industry driving costs lower and lower. The Expo Milan 2015 theme was Feeding the planet, energy for life. The event was arranged by the UK The Guardian newspaper and the Irish Food Board, Bord Bia.
Lower fresh food prices have obvious health as well social and political attractions - but at what price? Sustainability has become an unavoidable adjective in many policy sectors. It is transforming from rhetoric to imperative as crisis deepens. Nowhere is this clearer than in food production and distribution – both farming and food-chain-marketing methods. In my French commune as elsewhere the tension continues between economic viability and maybe survival in a time of austerity, and custodial conservation of our shared inheritance. Using less herbicide and pesticide; leaving fields fallow to recuperate; sustaining good crop rotation when world food prices favour a single crop, be it wheat, barley, rape-seed (canola), or above all maize to feed beef cattle: these seem to be unaffordable extravagances when economics shorten vision.
The Milan roundtable addressed ‘making a business case for sustainability’ – somewhat as wildlife conservationists in Britain now try to reconcile and ally the hunting with the bird-watching (RSPB) community to sustain an environment essential to both interests: pragmatism or unholy alliance?
The panellists at this policy forum included some usual and welcome suspects: intergovernmental World Bank EU and FAO, nongovernmental, and the food industry. The word ‘partnership’ is common. Do we welcome and trust the Sustainable Agricultural Initiative (SAI), an arrangement coming from the likes of Nestles and Unilever, Danone and Coca-Cola?
The rolling back of the State and part of its regulatory apparatus seems unstoppable. In the same Guardian issue of 2 June 2015 a lead government test-bed authority is described as ‘on a mission to make itself disappear’, outsourcing to shrink its staff from 3,200 to 332 people. Global corporatisation in the food industry appears to negate local food security and food-miles considerations. If you can’t beat them however, do you join them in partnership, as this Roundtable tends to imply?
The Guardian discussion is heartened by the concept of shared value, and the way that some global food companies are now supporting smallholder farmers so that value is shared by producers and consumers instead of flowing merely to shareholders. Massive global retailers seem to be turning increasingly to local franchises, closer to local communities, customs and preferences. In provincial France the origin of food in the market powerfully determines whether or not to buy: French rather than Spanish or Moroccan, but also local-Burgundian rather than from further afield. Small appellation wine producers still sell at the cellar door and to local caves and restaurants. Some farmers are still ‘custodians of an asset’ who know every inch of the land and the names of each cow.
This Roundtable may not entirely convince anti-corporatists like myself; but it does suggest that CSR (corporate social responsibility) in moving beyond its early rhetorical comfort zone. The report also addresses the demand side, notably rising demand for grossly non-sustainable beef production. This This takes us into the cultural and behavioural change addressed by James Powell on OTB earlier apropos ‘nudge’.
These may be no more than straws in a rising wind of lost species diversity and climate change; but they prompt me, maybe all of us, to think outside normal dichotomous assumptions about where to look for improvement, if all players in the chain of food production and supply make permanent sustainability non-negotiable. This is not to say that localisation of production and consumption, changing attitudes to diet and food waste, and the chemical mismanagement that creates new chemical-resistant diseases, matter less.
There is a crucial place for the local community no less than national government in learning how to understand and manage ‘place’ as a sacred custody asset. Can Pascal assist local as well as national policy leaders and activists to understand, to be open to new modes and partners, and so to act effectively?
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Think global act – or as in this case dig - local is not a new thought. It’s a good slogan. It is also something that a lot of people attempt in quiet ways in many countries, deep down in civil society-land. The question is whether and when this will become an irresistible groundswell; and what part do different kinds of learning come to play. How do local solutions accumulate to redress global disorder, directly or via social media, political process and action?
Solutions locales pour un desordre global
Here’s an example that may surprise you. It illustrates local communal activity, and community as well as individual learning. You might reasonably not expect to find 120+ people turn out to watch a two-hour film, Solutions locale pour un desordre global,on a sunny Sunday afternoon in a small provincial French town; especially after an hour visiting the local Horticulture and Paysage College in Tournus, then two hours on the street and pavements outside the small La Palette cinema discovering and comparing local initiatives both ‘alternatives et gourmandes’. The film is a tour de force, drawing on confronting and exciting initiatives especially in India and Brazil as well as France and parts of Africa. It was followed by the traditional pause gourmande for an hour at seven, and then a meeting with a visiting ecologist beginning at eight pm.
During the interactive street time the local Association for the maintenance of a peasant agriculture joined the local horticultural and rural management college and many local civil society bodies to go beyond warnings of ecological catastrophe to practical local learning and action: “[the warnings] have their utility but now we must show that there are solutions; we need to listen to the reflections of peasants, philosophers and economists who invent and experiment with alternatives”.
Subjects included alternative and sustainable ways of growing and producing, composting, harvesting and using produce; nurturing biodiversity in the way that fruit-trees are grown, for example. There was literature from the college on Agenda 21 et Developpement Durable, on bee-keeping, wildlife photography, Bio Tomatoes, Vegetables, and Aromatic plants, on a local exchange system: biodiversity at the heart of a participative pedagogy. People were encouraged to join Potager a Proteger, especially if they considered a sixteen acre area of the town part of its patrimoine – an area for which the community at large owed guardianship.
The La Palette cinema is an imaginative small town educator-animateur, now under threat to its annual civic subvention from ‘austerity’, and the subject of petition on market day. A few days earlier it showed a lost early seventies film, Le Cousin Jules, a remarkable and technically brilliant simple study of an octogenarian peasant couple set in nearby rural Bourgogne, portraying a way of life that, like this remarkable little cinema, is perhaps close to extinction, unless that invisible groundswell fast gains momentum. It is however this surviving community spirit, this instinct to retain and regain traditional wisdom as well as embrace smart new technology, that makes France a bit special, and gives hope.