California Food System Network (CFSN)

Mary: You are the 10,000th person to become a member of WiserEarth!! We were wondering who it would be earlier today. I am so glad it was you!

Thank you!

Paul

Love it!

Love to get feedback about the Yahoo site. They do have a 12 year head start in groupware, and there is much we can learn. Where is the site?

The original idea is that there would be three (at least) separate sites, only because the needs and functions of civil society, business, and government are different. However, the idea was that there would be personal, local, and regional hubs in which all three entities would merge and be seen in an integrated way, because the challenges we face need all three working in consort. It has not been done yet for a couple reasons:
1. WiserEarth needs to be better developed, and what we learn in so doing will benefit the others, and
2. We don't have the resource yet.

There was always the intention to map the whole, not the parts.

Benjamin: John Schaeffer at Real Goods has some very good stuff. I just ordered his new catalog wherein he gives some good metrics on home measures. But not on these specifically because they are more relative.

Greetings Jon! May I suggest big box retailers as a topic. They are into food in a big way and going deeper. But also, like Wal-Mart, are feeling that they should change. They exist. What to do with them? How to work with huge buyers, or buyers who buy huge amounts.

How about Patsy Northcutt who does all the Bioneers video?

This is from Peter Warshall but I am posting it.

As the writer of the Global Food Supply and Sustainability paragraph, I think this is a good dialog between Frances and myself. I thoroughly enjoyed our previous dialog on radio, a few years back. I wrote this Area of Focus paragraph with a fifty year time frame. The dialog is, in part, confused because neither Frances nor I put time-lines into our comments. She emphasizes the distribution system. I allude to the distribution system in the phrase "changes in the food commodity trade system" but, of course, did not go into details. I was hoping that the keywords "mal-distribution, foreign aid programs, and trade system" would lead users to those organizations trying to reform the world food system. I might have added "fair trade" and a few more keywords to cross-connect global governance and trade.

Population and Food

I have worked in Africa for over thirty years and come at it from two view points: the here-and-now among starving peoples and the long-term (which is to say 50 years). From the short-term and long-term points of view, in Africa, population (demographics) and food are so entangled that, regardless of what one thinks of the world trade system and food distribution, the immediate needs of deprived and refugee Africans has to do with Food Banks and food aid. We are talking tens of thousands of lives each year. This situation came about, in part, from the unintended consequences of modern medicine. In the 1960s, a Kenyan family, for instance, had six to eight children and expected five to die before adulthood. The remaining two or three inherited the farm and provided for old age care (there is no old age insurance available). Modern medicine concentrated on many perinatal and post-natal diseases. In the 1980s, mothers still had seven children but maybe five or six survived. The land could not be subdivided into that many pieces and many young people fled to the city for a life and jobs. Many young men became soldiers. The Dickensian horror of Nairobi slums is indicative of a failure of whole systems analysis, and the creation of urban poverty and violence by well-intentioned, but narrowly focused, doctors. Trying to squeeze out food from overly subdivided farms also led to erosion, fertility loss, etc. (The situation is again changed from AIDS.) This dynamic history definitely entangles population demography, global medical care, food production, and aid on the local, global and state levels . So "global food supply" and demographics are intimately inter-twined.

The sentence on slowing pop growth is oversimplified. Slowing population growth depends on many factors (war, disease, refugee influx, access to birth control pills, empowerment of women, multifaceted health services, education about the consequences of birth control and family size, old age insurance). More food, does not always lead to smaller families (e.g., in fundamentalist families be them Jewish , Christian, or Muslim) and lack of food does not always lead to large families (e.g., Kerala). Lack of multi-factorial thinking in a fast-moving landscape continues to plague all policy decisions in subSharan Africa.

Democracy and Food

More important, democracy as formulated by Westerners will not solve any food problems in Africa. What happens is the largest tribe wins the vote and steals the land or infrastructure. Then coalitions of small tribes vote the big tribe out and reverse the process. Nations experience revolving door oligarchies and endless violence with corrupted farm policy (funded by large multi-laterals) and insecure land rights. The next Nobel Peace Prize will go to a person who designs a new form of governance that balances the needs of small tribes (Kenya has forty or so) with the major tribe. No voting, parliamentary system can yet do that. So let's be humble. Africa has worked best with beneficent dictators, and there is little prospect (or imagination) going into new forms of governance. Yes, how do we create ANY governance system that deals fairly with food production (land and water) and distribution and pricing ? Western democracy is not the model (and has not dealt exceptionally well with its own food policies). I am passionate here: many starve while the idealistic designers propose grandiose solutions. Beware of Manifest Democracy, the grandson of Manifest Destiny.

A Note on Livestock

While I am very familiar with the global livestock industry and think many changes should occur, Frances' comments can be interpreted as insulting to African pastoralists who use cattle for money (in barely monetized economies), have multi-purpose cattle (skins, cheese, rarely meat, dowries, ceremonies, etc.) and are desperate to understand the marketing system. (I just helped entertain a group of Masai on my son's ranch in New Mexico. It's a conservation ranch and the Masaii, losing their ability to be pastoralists because of population growth in Kenya, want to know how to raise cattle in fenced pastures.) The global, cultural , intelligentsia needs to speak precisely about industrialized cattle raising vs. livestock raising in general. Livestock raising has many economic and cultural forms in Eurasia (eg, Mongolia) and Africa that require careful respect, new livestock market forms as well as breed preservation .

Distribution is Central, but is a multi-layered and complex focus of sustainability

Frances is absolutely correct that in an ideal world, the wealth (eg, food) could be better distributed than the FAO or World Food Bank and "free" market systems have done. I love her emphasis on the need for a social fix. I think it a wonderful ideal for global sustainability but know of few mechanisms for change. Without the praxis for change, I was worried in writing the Area of Focus that I would set up the typical Western mind-set (common in advertising) of Great Expectations, followed by Great Disappointments.

To give an example, I am presently working in New Mexico (which has the highest food insecurity of any state in the USA) and find three strands of sustainability that are not integrated. First, the Food Gap folks who distribute food daily to the hungry and do not particularly care who grows it or where it comes from. This group is tightly entwined with the Farm Bill, which favors ag-biz over local commodity producers. It will take probably three more farm bills (fifteen years) to combine food-gap advocates with more locally produced food (and only for those that can be produced in New Mexico). How to change price supports and federal purchasing programs is central to redistribution of food (think sugar, think cotton).

Then, there are the Local Food farmer/folks who, at the moment, confront issues of crop volume, storage, liability, adequate transport, and expansion from specialty markets (farmers markets as opposed to poor public school cafeterias or super-markets). Third, there are the Green-Ag NGOs who focus behind the farm gate at the food production system (agro-chemicals, water, tilth). In New Mexico, they run into massive frustrations. For instance, there are no rules about who owns water that farmers could conserve and, under what conditions they retain rights to the water, and can profit from being good guys. Some water rights disputes have not been properly adjudicated after 200 years of disagreement! These three strands (food gap, enviro-ag, and local food-to-table) confront production and distribution difficulties in the USA -- many more exist in nations without price supports, drought emergency funds, food banks, special irrigation water rights, etc.

The point is: There may be many groups, each doing a good job in a narrow arena of food and sustainability, but these groups have not connected and configured themselves into a movement powerful enough yet to create significant Global Food supply and distribution changes. Mid-term strategies (20 years?) are very complex and specific and require hard-nose power brokers. For instance, only Michigan has even looked at what is imported and exported from its state and how to reduce food-miles over the next 20 years.

Global Food Supply and technology

Finally, you've obviously hit a heart throb on my commitment to SubSaharan Africa, there is need to speak more subtlety about technology. The African diaspora has helped undermine the need for global food trade. In Mali, sons go to Paris, work in factories, buy a diesel or solar water pump, and send it home to mom who then can increase irrigation and food security on the acre of land. The technology is crucial. Similarly, in the Peanut Belt of Senegal, they need for agro-chemicals to counteract the impact of aluminum in certain soils has been crucial to the survival of hundreds of farmers. While Frances probably has the World Bank monstrosities like Narmada or the Lake Chad irrigation disaster in mind, we should be careful of debasing "technology" and "production". Agroecology will be technology intensive in subSaharan African soils and we should promote the right technologies (even those that rely on fossil fuels) that help farmers increase productivity. This is the best solution to Global Food security.

With all that said, I would modify some of my area of focus on Global Food Production and Sustainability, now that I see the bigger picture of what Wiserearth had in mind. I greatly appreciate Frances' comments and I would emphasize more the need for a new world trade system in global commodities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve equity. I would love to see a vision of how, in the next ten years, a more equitable distribution of food commodities might evolve, especially in Africa. Do we really need to reform the WTO? What is the dream of the right institution to distribute the unequal abundances of food? Can a fair profit be made? How to prevent reliable food aid from undermining the prices from local production? Is fair trade labeling a major driving force? Do we really need to reform the UN? Will subsidies for biofuels replace subsidies for food -- all in the name of stopping global warming? Can any of the dispersed and narrowly focused grassroots groups deal with planetary distribution inequities?

Forgive the length of this response. Africa has been a great teacher and I owe it to my teachers.
Peter Warshall

Camila

Thanks for creating such an open and compelling profile. We will have many more networking functions in a month or two. We are still new, young, and unfinished, but I think these will help in creating a broader network for you to find the work and challenges you want and deserve.

My best

Paul

Josef
With respect to folksonomies and tagging, Wiser is the first online relational database where the structure can be modified by its users. We realize that tagging is very popular on sites such as MySpace and Flickr, and you can hardly go anywhere without seeing tag clouds. Having appreciated that, the areas of focus are designed to be amended just as Rabea is suggesting. I made a note today about Participatory Budgeting as a potential subcategory. With all of the Areas of Focus are keywords, which are tags in a sense. They can be edited and added to in real time. The overall structure is a taxonomy, which is different than a tag cloud. And we feel that as WiserBusiness and WiserGovernment go up, a stable taxonomy will be critical for linking, communication, and collaboration, the purpose of the site. That does not preclude tagging as well, and that will come as an adjunct such as you see in the keywords. Also, take a look at what
Danny Hillis is doing at http://www.freebase.com. He is taking the database
concept to a whole new realm, an open shared database of the world's knowledge, and will be using the taxonomy here.

Mark: Editors can add tags and keywords to the areas of focus. I want to respond to all of your suggestions in a separate comment, and I agree with every one, but wanted to reply to this one area as it complements Josef’s comments. Thanks to you both!