Community Grown Food

I'm facilitating this forthcoming FREE EVENT on Tues 29 March in Cardiff

Allotments & Community Grown Food Event 

As part of its Sustainable Development Framework, the WLGA have begun working in partnership with the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens [FCFCG] on community grown food issues.

The WLGA and FCFCG are organising an event for local authority officers involved in planning and managing allotments and community growing sites.  This event is an opportunity to:

• inform Local Authorities about developments currently taking place within the community growing sector in Wales (and further afield);
• highlight what support is available through the Allotment Regeneration Initiative [ARI] and the National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners [NSALG]. It is an opportunity for ARI to extend their successful remit into Wales and engage and consult with council staff responsible for managing allotments in Wales and for the WLGA to also be proactive in addressing the growing demand for the provision of allotments etc – which ultimately relates to food security and sustainable development, as well as health and well-being, biodiversity and regeneration.

What is the aim? This is an exploratory event to: enable the development of ways to promote good practice in allotments management and provision in Wales; promote resources that can facilitate good practice; develop models of good practice from the event; facilitate the development of supportive networks; signpost to organisations that can give help and support; offer constructive and productive delivery. It is also an opportunity to consult and establish circumstances, needs, barriers, etc

What are the desired outcomes?

• Development of an active, supportive, network in Wales in which council staff responsible for the provision and management of allotments can identify their needs, aspirations and barriers in order for support organisations to develop methods of meeting same;
• The establishment of a definitive list of council staff responsible for the management and provision of allotments in Wales;
• This will all help and support the strategic direction of council allotments’ services and land use planning at a localised level in Wales.

Further information from Gill Clarke at the WLGA

On change

The 2010 JOE (Joint Ops Executive) Report is an interesting read, framing the difficulty of planning for security at a global level. This one quote is telling:

The Fragility of History – and the Future...
The patterns and course of the past appear relatively straightforward and obvious to those living in the present, but only because some paths were not taken or the events that might have happened, did not. Nothing makes this clearer than the fates of three individuals in the first thirty plus years of the twentieth century. Adolf Hitler enlisted in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment (the “List” Regiment) in early August 1914; two months later he and 35,000 ill-trained recruits were thrown against the veteran soldiers of
the British Expeditionary Force. In one day of fighting the List Regiment lost one third of its men. When the Battle of Langemark was over, the Germans had suffered approximately 80% casualties. Hitler was unscratched. Seventeen years later, when Winston Churchill was visiting New York, he stepped off the curb without looking in the right direction and was seriously injured. Two years later in February 1933, Franklin Roosevelt was the target of an assassination attempt, but the bullet aimed for him hit and killed the mayor of Chicago. Can any one doubt that, had any one of these three individuals been killed, the history of the twentieth century would have followed a fundamentally different course?

The Fragility of Energy

To meet even the conservative growth rates posited in the economics section, global energy production would need to rise by 1.3% per year. By the 2030s, demand is estimated to be nearly 50% greater than today. To meet that demand, even assuming more effective conservation measures, the world would need to add roughly the equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s current energy production every seven years.

Weathering Economic Climate Change

For those of you lucky enough to live in, or near west Wales, with a free diary on the first Friday evening in December, there's an opportunity to come and join an evening of vigorous, creative discussion about how businesses can best work together to weather the forthcoming storms of economic climate change.

Further info on the event is available here.

Food prices and security

The recent Hay on Earth sustainability workshops focused tightly on food security with the release of the Growing Wales project, aiming to create a nation-scale, open source food security project.

The importance of the learning about and sharing food are starkly reminded in this article in the Guardian, which shows that the UN Food and Agriculture organisation and OECD predict that food prices will increase by 40% in the next decade. Apart from the forecasts that the global demand for food will increase by 100% by 2050 as more people eat meat and dairy products, this price hike spells big trouble for the billion or so people in the world who are so poor they don’t know where their next calorie is coming from, let alone their next meal. That’s not good for them, or us.

At the 2010 Do Lectures, Peter Segger will be talking about the importance of rebuilding our lost soils by smarter growing practice, to lock up carbon as well as produce food. The soil at Peter’s farm at Blaencamel near Aberaeron on the coast of Wales is so full of life, you can almost hear it singing.

Our job is to share that song, and the food, with others.



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."