Global Early Warning System

With a current project on the go on Food Security, it's been interesting getting up to date with trends, data and action - or lack of it - on food security. Most forecasters reckon that long-term, the biggest issue for western consumers and governments will be one of price and ethics - food will be available and potentially much more expensive, which is why ethics become key, forcing the question of how much we're prepared to help those with less resources get the calories they need.

Short-term, the UK risk is of interuptions to supply due to oil price spikes / disasters, which in the form of the petrol strike a few years ago, brought Wales to within six meals of civil disturbance, according to Assembly Members in post at the time.

During my research, I re-read the Sustainable Development Commission's positioning paper on Food Security and came across this useful UN Food and Agriculture Organisation website that reports trends and prices on global food http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/en/

The link between national and international food security and the actions that we and our elected representatives can take are complex to say the least, and

Sustainable Supply Chains

There's some interesting work going in Wales trying to sort out what sustainable supply chains in the food sector; we're keen to find out what not only what they are doing, and what they could be doing, but what's possible.

Resource use and energy efficiency are important, as is sustainable land use. One of the biggest challenges that Iain Cox, who is driving one of the projects in this area, has found, is the task of getting primary producers to a) work together, b) think long term, c) be innovative.

For the next steps of where we go, Iain Cox will be working with a group of farmers and producers to make this happen. Drop us a line if you want to get involved.

Three generation farming

St. Davids, Pembrokeshire, Wales, UK. April 2010.

A new community supported agriculture scheme was launched in Wales on the weekend thanks to the tireless hard work of organic farmer and GM-free campaigner Gerald Miles, Gill Lewis, Ailsa, Adam, Wyn & Val Buick and Darren & Rupert from regeneration agency PLANED.

The first day's work involved planting potatoes, onion, artichokes and comfrey. Members signed with an £18 donation that will be followed with a £30 a month food payment from July or so when the harvest starts.

Gerald Miles reckons that for each 50 or so households that sign up, a full time job can be created on one of the areas' organic farms. There are 800 houses in St Davids...

Food in the City

There's an interesting event coming up in Cardiff - well worth getting to for anyone interested in food security, community engagement on food and getting insights on how we plan our way to a safer future.

It's on Monday 24th at Chapter Arts, and here are the details:

Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff.

The basic necessities of life are air, water, shelter and food and urban planners have addressed them all, with the conspicuous exception of food. Increasingly, however, food production, distribution and consumption are being seen as central to a wide array of policy areas, including the economy, social justice, public health and the environment. Food production is widely regarded as a rural activity, yet this ignores the significance of urban agriculture, an activity that is growing in developed and developing countries alike. Food consumption is central to the Healthy Cities programme of the World Health Organization – of which Cardiff has just become a signed-up member - which addresses such challenges as child poverty and obesity. The global food price surge of 2007-08, when wheat prices doubled and rice prices nearly tripled, has made food security a preoccupation for national policy-makers everywhere. Meanwhile, the production of and access to healthy food is increasingly understood to be an essential part of urban regeneration and planning for sustainable cities. Urban food planning has become one of the quintessential global challenges of the 21st Century.

This conference addresses all these themes by charting the development of a sustainable food policy within Wales, a policy that needs to find space for locally-produced food from Wales as well as fairly traded food from afar. This conference is a timely event because it coincides with the publication of a radically new Food Strategy from the Welsh Assembly Government.

Keynote Speakers: Professor Kevin Morgan, Cardiff University; Andre Viljoen, University of Brighton; Steve Garrett, Director, Riverside Community Market; Elin Jones AM, Minister for Rural Affairs; Steve Knowles, Cardiff County Council; Mike McNally, FareShare; Barny Haughton, Chef and Owner, Bordeaux Quay, Bristol; Professor Cliff Guy, Cardiff University

Food reasoning

Cambridge Resilience Forum, part of Cambridge Programme for Sustainable Leadership, are running an event in S Africa later this month. Their summary of reasons to attend is a good reminder of why the Growing Wales project to map out a nation-scale response to food security is so important:

"For the first time since the early 1970s, the prevalence of hunger in the world is climbing. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, 15% of the world’s population is hungry, up from 13% at the middle of this decade. FAO economists are predicting that the number of chronically hungry people will climb this year to 1.02 billion, up 11.5% from 2008.

The future of food is an area ripe with dilemmas and opportunities. Declining biodiversity, global climate change, infectious disease, and global food sourcing (with attendant food safety concerns) are all intervening in food webs in different ways at different levels. Current worldwide migration trends will create new burdens as rural to urban movement continues, and population growth soars over the next several decades. The use of arable land for food production will compete with demand for fuel crops, while our oceans face degradation and declines in consumable marine life."