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Entries in food justice (3)

Tuesday
Jan082013

Slow Foods New Leadership

 

After the departure of Josh Viertel from the leadership of Slow Food USA six months ago, a new leadership has taken up house in the national organizations Brooklyn offices. Richard McCarthy, who previously headed the Crescent City Farmers Market and related organizations in New Orleans has now taken up the leadership role in heading up SFUSA. 

To his credit, Mr. McCarthy seems to have some pretty good accolades: as the co-founder of the CCFM, his leadership has expanded its footprint and influence, especially in the post-Katrina landscape of New Orleans and the surrounding agricultural district. Through its organiztion, Market Umbrella, the CCFM has acted as a mentor for up and coming farmers markets authorities, built coalitions with regional (such as the Oxford Food Symposium) and national organizations (such as the Project for Public Spaces), they have been able to both raise awareness, and helped raise both consumer and political awareness of the food system in New Orleans, if not the South as a general category. He certainly speaks well; in both his above interview with Julia Moskin above as well as this Oxford American interview in May 2010, the man can talk the talk, and seems to understand some of the more complex underpinnings of how marketsplaces act. Money quote: 

The question of market impact is where we have invested much of our energy, especially over the past decade. Integral to our belief that public markets can serve as strategic levers for social change is that to use them you need not change your idea about the world upon entering the market. There is no admission. There is no ideological litmus test, other than, when on-site, everyone treats one another with dignity and mutual respect. In fact, this is largely what our job—as market managers—is: to create an environment where this social contract is maintained. Both vendor and shopper should feel welcome, regardless of their beliefs. This social contract is perhaps as valuable—if not more so—to a community as the exchange of food. 

This is a good mark; especially as I wrote in my paper on farmers markets in June of last year, there is a need for markets to conduct themselves in such ways as to make sure the population of those accessing and utilizing markets grows. And at this point I can only wish the man well and hope that this proves to be a good development for the organization; as he himself has pointed out, his first order of business is making sure that members and supporting organizations know that there is a secure leadership, which is a good step, though I know I'll be looking for more concrete initiatives in the near future. 

I will also indicate, however, that at this point, the political story here that has unfolded has proven a very interesting one; it is telling that Mr. McCarthy is from New Orleans, also home to Poppy Tooker, the Slow Food leader who led the seemingly one-woman campaign against Viertel last year. While there were a number of issues at play at Mr. Viertel's departure (institutional culture at the Brooklyn office, the relationship and operations between Brooklyn and convivia, the goals and aspirations of the convivia during the administration prior to Mr. Viertel and upon his arrival, the status of the Ark of Taste project, among others), the placement of Mr. McCarthy at the head of the organization, given where the seeming core of Mr. Viertel's "opposition" came from, should be noted.

And I use "opposition" in quotes because I think, at the end of the day, the issue really being played out prior to the departure -- is Slow Food about food justice or about food culture -- was a false dichotomy. Projects like the $5 Dollar a Day challenge were not to undermine paying farmers a fair wage, in the same way relegating the Ark of Taste to a convivia-based project was not an attempt to ignore biodiversity. Contrary to the claims about Carlo Petrini bemoaning the "politicization" of Slow Food in the US, unlike its European counterparts, the American food system -- from agricultural production to crop biodiversity, food justice to culinary history -- has had disruption at a lot of levels, and needed to be rectified and revived at a number of levels. None of these are atomistic -- they are all very interconneted. And unlike in Europe, where Slow Food came out of a response from within the Italian Communist Party, in a country with a long culinary history as well as a given civic response to food culture (as well as political institutions that supported and defended those norms), this is one of those instances where the American iteration was bound to stand apart, and in a way that does matter if SFUSA wants to remain relevant.

My thesis work is currently leaning towards the income double bind in the American food system: namely, that most farmers need to be able to charge more to shore up the financial and economic sustainability of their operations, while most communities across the board -- from the supposed middle class able to afford "good food" to lower income communities that have a desire to access such food -- need jobs that actually provide them the financial means to access such food. That is the question of "good food" in a just, equitable food system: income. And it is this particular conundrum that SFUSA must take leadership on in its near future. The convivia cannot only be dinner clubs that cater $80-100 events once a month; they also shouldn't exclusively do programming that deals in food justice and curious challenges. But it has to be more than it has been, something Mr. Viertel attempted to do, perhaps clumsily, within the organization. SFUSA, like the organization Mr. McCarthy comes from, must act as an umbrella for all the stakeholders and members of the good food community, and not be a reified version of itself. If his past is any indicator, Mr. McCarthy will hopefully be the mind for such a mission.  

Thursday
Jun142012

Farm Bill Almanac :: The Austerity of SNAP

EBT and SNAP benefits have been increasingly accepted at farmers markets.

As news today broke about the compromise in the Senate to move forward with Farm Bill negotiations prior to its ending in July of this year (the previous 5-year Farm Bill was signed and passed in 2008). As the $969 billion dollar piece of legislation gets moved through the Senate, not much has changed since the murmors of the fall legislation battle -- there are cuts being made to direct payments and other forms of direct subsidy while more the egregious programs are being moved into crop insurance programs; steep cuts are being made to programs like conservation and many rural development programs (we have written previously on both here and here). Nowhere are these cuts being more hard-felt than in the Title I Nutrition programs -- namely the never-contentious-until-now food stamp program, now referred to as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). 

In this most recent Farm Bill, it's been important to note that much of the austerity/budget-streamlining talk has been about programs that have been, mostly, uncontentious in years past; SNAP is largely been supported by both sides of the aisle (with the most wasteful expenditures in the program being those that uselessly attempt to root out "fraud" in the program), and only recently has come under fire, primarily from Tea Party activists within the Republican tent. Cuts targeting SNAP have been proportionate to its size; at $10 billion alone per year in SNAP, it is one of the largest programs in the Nutrition title, and in FY2012 was distributing to 44.7 million elligible recipients (households) 144 dollars a month in supplemental food aid.  All recipients must be working / employed in order to be elligible to recieve SNAP/WIC benefits. 

The proposed cuts are not really cuts so much as restructuring of the qualifiers for obtaining aid, namely, what constitutes the poverty line. Presently, to qualify, one must have a collected worth and earnings at 130% below the understood poverty line, and the level at which one obtains full benefits goes on a sliding scale from that amount. Presently Republicans, moved by Jeff Sessions of Alaska, are attempting to redefine those limits, which would cut an average of $90 per month from most current recipients. (For reference, the average recipient would receive approximately $50/month per household.) The other attempted effort, led by Rand Paul in the House, that would have restructured SNAP as a block-grant program, failed, but would have eliminated much of the federal infrastructure built around SNAP and WIC programs (leaving, of course, the detail of who would run it at the state level up to the cash-strapped states). This is being done, by the by, while the expanded use of the program neatly aligns with the increased rate of joblessness and underemployment happening nationwide, and in certain geographies, the use of food stamps keeps some businesses afloat (exempting, of course, Wal-Mart, who in certain geographies is the beneficiary of over 50-75% of all SNAP sales). 

There are clear changes to be made to the Farm Bill, but most of the stated goals in changing the Title I nutrition program will not help with the goals of the program, namely, assuring a basic level of food security in times of hardship, especially for those most in need. But these proposed changes are not them -- they don't even account for the type of punting happening in the direct-payments-to-crop insurance cross-over, because what this amounts to, in every sense of the word, is gutting the program. The program is run on high efficiency, with the CRS giving the SNAP and WIC programs high marks for reliability of execution and turn around. And fraud cases within the SNAP/WIC system amount to less than 3% of all transactions, amounting to little over thousands of dollars a cycle (whereas the efforts to counteract fraud in the system amount to several million dollars annually). The numbers represented above are per household, not individual, so a family of 3 or 5 is asked to use $50/month to make ends meet nutriatively, if the proposed changes were to be made. Add to this the psychological stress of being unable to make food ends meet, and you can begin to imagine the type of psychological impact this has on participants in the program -- a program that was intended to alleviate that kind of stress to begin with. 

This attempt at reform is, at its core, an easy way to score political points while not answering the key questions about budget balancing and large entitlement reform, and doing so on the backs of the hungry and those least able to promote their interests in Congress. It will hit them in ways that will make it harder for them to go maintain their work. And it will undermine the businesses who can use SNAP/WIC to help maintain and expand their customer bases, from mom and pops, to farmers markets & gardens (yes, gardens), even Wal-Mart. Ultimately, the economic drivers from the SNAP program are a more important variable to consider, and short-sighted political aims to  dismantle or otherwise cripple this piece of the Farm Bill do so at the risk of further crippling local economies across the country. 

Wednesday
May232012

Feeding the Community: The Original & Potential Value of the Urban Farm

 

various images from, and courtesy of, DBCFSN.

"Detroiters recognize that the value of the vacant land in the city goes beyond the construction of a structure. Residents have turned "abandoned" lots into productive agricultural resources. Mini farmers markets are springing up citywide providing Detroiters with fresh, organic food grown right in the neighborhood. Urban agriculture should be recognized as an essential contributor to the local food system. It ensures a ready supply of nutritious, high quality vegetables and fruits. The entry costs associated with intensive food production on small urban farms in a cooperative environment is much lower and accessible than the current trend of mega farms. Urban growers stand to benefit from increased opportunities to market local products. The potential market for local value-added products makes urban agriculture even more attractive as a local economic development tool.." -- The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network

As mentioned the other day, urban farming has come to some mention in the press lately. As discussion on Farm Bill-related matters keeps to the downlow, much of the conversation in advocacy circles (both at the Edible Institute in Santa Barbara and to a more limited degree at Cooking for Solutions 2012, for example) have moved into direct ways institutions, consumers, and localized policy solutions may be able to rectify shortcomings in food security and access issues. Urban Agriculture represents one such venue: as the foreclosure crisis hit across the country, large swathes of property in various urban, suburban, and peri-urban counties have been abandoned or lost population density. Cities bleed cash having to still cover utilities to these areas, geographies that no longer pay into city coffers in any significant way. And not all of these areas are peripheral; some areas are right in the urban core, thanks to a planning notion called "contagion effect", where a single property devaluation and improper handling by mediating institutions (such as banks) can lead to a cascading devaluation effect at nearby properties, even if there was no mishandling on the part of the tenant/owners. 

Nowhere has this been clearer than in Detroit, a city who has been defined by decreasing population, high poverty rates, low investment, and a high degree of food insecurity across all demographics. It is a city of 1000 liquor stores and not a single grocery. Within its large African American population, a large portion of the population was, in the 80's as today, largely locked out from federal and state assistance programs and food stamps due to ineligibility issues derived from housing, employment, and criminal record qualifications.  And it is from these conditions -- lacking institutional and financial access to food sources, little to no recourse through political means to rectify these conditions, and a high degree of unemployment -- led to the start of what can be considered the present understanding of urban agriculture (1).

Detroits urban farms were largely abandoned lots or yards within abandoned lots, taken over by neighbors and with either implicit or passing allowances from the city. They were largely intended for individual households, occasionally for resale to other families. They were representative of a cultural resilience and self-sufficiency; rooted in some thinking from the Black Power movement, the idea was to be able to feed yourself and curtail the dependency one had on the state for basic needs. As documented in the film "Urbanized", this was as much a movement of basic need as it was a way to build sense of community in a city with little of both. Over time, these farms came together to create the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, an organization that supports these farms, as well as fostering an urban farm incubator, a green jobs program, and lobbying the city of Detroit for permanent policy promotion and protections for urban agriculture in the city.

This still remains the core of the this more recent evolution of urban farming nation-wide; many of the projects in the books I mentioned in the previous post -- Breaking Through Concrete and Urban Farms (2) -- cover projects, both non- and for-profit, community organized and individually run, that see community building as a core value in their orientation, their brand, whatever you wish to call it. It measures out -- urban farming projects have been shown to increase communication and interactivity between neighbors, have a strong multiplier effect on economic transactions, and pay dividends to local tax bases. And in centering around these notions, the ability to create context-specific solutions is improved considerably. There are still many things in the way of expanding urban agriculture efforts -- zoning laws and blight definitions, as well as urban convenants all have restrictive tendencies on what individuals can and cannot do, and most business zoning exempts agricultural work from occurring on them. Cities are beginning to overcome those restrictions, and with the rise in entrepreneurial urban agriculture, they would be best in starting to work on them as extensively as allows. 

(1) Urban agriculture and urban gardening have been a part of the American cityscape since the inception of the nation. Truck farms and large-scale operations within city limits were common in places like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City; allotments and community gardens abounded, especially during the Garden Cities movement, let alone the proportion of participation in the Victory Gardens program in World War 2. There is a difference between the two

(2) Review of these two books to come up later this week. I have a lot of good to say about them, but there are also a few points to consider -- especially where the location and demographics of their subjects is involved.