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6. Food Distribution

The Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 10 Sep 2007
India: Biodiversity under threat, says report
Chetan Chauhan

The Environment Ministry released a comprehensive document this week detailing major areas of concern for India's bio-diversity and the proposed action plan to check further degradation and conserving bio-diversity. India's huge gene resources for food and agriculture have got limited to about 12 varieties of food. "A large number of over 300,000 samples of these cultivars, kept under long term storage in the National Gene Bank, have gone out of cultivation," the action plan said.

This is happening when local breeds are genetically better adapted to their environment, more resistant to local parasites and are most adjustable to climate change while being productive. "Greater use of local breeds will be most effective in achieving food and nutrition security objectives at the local level," the report has suggested.

The Ecologist Magazine, 01 Oct 2003

How to feed people under a regime of climate change

Edward Goldsmith

The localisation of food is necessary even without climate change for it is only by producing food locally that the poor, particularly in the Third World, can have access to it. Indeed, one of the main causes of malnutrition and hunger in poor countries is the shortage of land for producing food for local consumption. Anything between 50 and 80 percent of the agricultural land of Third World countries is geared to the export trade. Local people are reduced to growing their own food on rocky outcrops or steep slopes that soon erode and become infertile.

To produce food locally means, in effect, increasing self-sufficiency at a village, regional and state level. It also means storing food at all these levels in order to face possible food emergencies, which, scandalously enough is illegal today as the WTO considers that the money required is better spent on paying back debts to Western banks.

THE TIMES OF INDIA, BOMBAY, 07 AUG 2007
Food that travels well
James E McWilliams

Given these problems, wouldn't it make more sense to stop obsessing over food miles and work to strengthen comparative geographical advantages? Might it be more logical to conceptualise a hub-and spoke system of food production and distribution, with the hubs in a food system's naturally fertile hot spots and the spokes, which travel through the arid zones, connecting them while using hybrid engines and alternative sources of energy?

RESURGENCE WEBSITE, 06 MAY 2007
THE GOOD, THE CLEAN AND THE FAIR
Carlo Petrini

Terra Madre is the brainchild of Slow Food, the international association born in 1989 as an eco-gastronomic movement for "the defence of the right to pleasure", which has evolved over the last few years to draw up the rules of what many have since described as "eco-gastronomy". The gastronome who loves the taste and aroma of good food cannot ignore how this food is produced or be aware of the problems that afflict the world's small food producers at this moment of epoch-making economic and ecological transformation. Food, therefore, must not only be "good" but also "clean" " meaning that it has to be the product of sustainable processing and distribution " and socially "fair" (I refer here to the living conditions of the millions of people who inhabit the world's rural areas and produce the food that ends up on our tables). These three fundamental principles " the good, the clean and the fair " define a new standard of quality that Slow Food and the people of Terra Madre want to make known and available to all.

The Terra Madre food communities " geographical groups linked by a specific productive activity, or members of the same production chain, or groups of people who manage to be self-sufficient " represent the hope of those of us who are working to create a fairer global food system capable of producing better food. With their daily labour, such people ensure the protection of biodiversity, local traditions, gastronomic identities and knowledge, which risk disappearing in the face of the homogenisation of food as a result of the centralisation of production and the globalisation of distribution.

Natural Life Magazine, July 2007
Counting Our Food Miles
Wendy Priesnitz

One way to help consumers through this dilemma of calculating the effect of their food purchases is to have mandatory country of origin labels, known as COOL. In the U.S., COOL was incorporated into the 2002 Farm Bill as a way of protecting American consumers from mad cow disease and other threats from imported food. It was never implemented, at least partly due to lobbying by corporate agribusiness, the large supermarket chains and trading partners like Canada, Mexico and Australia. However, some groups are now lobbying for the implementation of COOL as a way to measure the environmental impact of food.
As the Local Flavour Plus standards suggest, there are more benefits to eating locally than climate friendliness Farmers who are selling to a local market are more likely to diversify production, making it easier to farm sustainably. Preserving local farm economies is another motivation. The Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association estimates that by encouraging Maine residents to spend $10 per week on local food, $100,000,000 will be invested back into farmers- pockets and the Maine economy each growing season.

INFOCHANGE INDIA MAGAZINE, 01 FEB 2007
The alternative: Community autonomy over food and seeds
P V Satheesh

Since 1995, DDS sanghams (village-level women's collectives) have been running what they call an "alternative public distribution system" in over 50 villages. This is a self-provisioning food system based on the principles of local production, local storage and local distribution. By bringing cultivable fallow land under production, the women have been producing a basket of crops through a biodiversity-based, ecological food-production system. They now have enough grain for food-deficit members of their community (landless people, non-farming artisans, etc).

In 2002, the Year of the Drought, some of these villages produced more grain than they needed. At a meeting of members from all the villages, the question went around: "There is extra grain in some villages. Does anyone want it?" All the other villages announced that they had adequate grain in their community baskets and did not need any more.

Thus, some of the poorest and most marginalised women of Andhra Pradesh challenged the high-tech government of their state, which had proved incapable of feeding its people, through their capacity to produce adequate food by using traditional ecological agricultural practices.