Fair Food Week Archives - Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

Fair Food Week – in your backyard this October!

July 29, 2015 by Alana Mann

Food producers, eaters and community-based food organisations across Australia will celebrate Fair Food Week this year from October 16 to 25, led by the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA).

In 2015, the International Year of Soils, nationwide activities will have a strong focus on healthy and regenerative agriculture in both rural and urban areas, with community gardens playing a key role.

AFSA President Tammi Jonas announced this week that the Australian City Farms and Community Garden Network would be contributing its support to Fair Food Week 2015.

“Community gardeners are at the forefront of the connected food system – the Fair Food system – that millions of Australians want and are embracing” said Tammi.

“Fair Food is fundamentally about people connecting with where their food comes from. And one of the best ways of doing that is by growing or raising some of your own food.”

Many community gardens and city farms have taken part in Fair Food Week for the past two years with garden lunches, workshops, seed swaps and movie nights.

This year Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network (ACFCGN) President Jane Mowbray is urging even more members to participate.

“Community gardeners and city farmers form a large part of the Fair Food Movement across Australia. They enthusiastically choose to grow and eat fresh, local fruit, vegetables and herbs and are keen to share their skills, and knowledge, making many community gardens and city farms vital centres of community education.”

For Jane and other members of the ACFCGN Fair Food Week is a welcome opportunity to applaud those who are offering local, socially and environmentally just alternatives to unhealthy food produced through industrial methods.

“Ethical farmers and the markets and businesses that supply and use their sustainable products provide us all with more choice about the production of the food we eat.”

Established in 2013, Fair Food Week provides an opportunity for local communities in every state and territory to showcase how farmers, gardeners, chefs and community-based food enterprises are working hard to ensure access to fresh, local and affordable produce to all Australians.

Communities are encouraged to organise events according to local priorities. In previous years events have ranged from slow cooking and underground restaurants to free training in skills such as making sourdough bread and butchering.

AFSA President Tammi Jonas sees Fair Food Week 2015 as a “unique opportunity for the food movement to come together, recognise and celebrate each other and our many achievements”.

“And this year we look forward to working closely with the ACFCGN to make Fair Food Week 2015 a particularly outstanding success” she adds.

Media contact: AFSA President, Tammi Jonas, 0422 429 362, tammois@gmail.com

To promote your event contact: AFSA Communications Officer, Alana Mann, alana.mann@sydney.edu.au

Photo credit: © Russ Grayson www.pacific-edge.info
ACFCGN President Jane Mowbray and friend during national meeting of Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network in Adelaide, 2015.

AFSA President’s Report, 2013-14

November 15, 2014 by Nick Rose

This is the report to be delivered by outgoing AFSA President, Michael Croft, at the AGM to be held on 18 November 2014, at Byron Bay Community Centre…

Dear AFSA members,

It is with great pleasure and humility that I present this years abridged account of our activities and achievements as a social movement. We have achieved much in the last year, which has been a consolidation and advancement of projects and aims that we collectively started some 4 short years ago. The list of activities presented by our extraordinary and indefatigable coordinator Nick Rose is impressive for an all-volunteer organisation running on less than a shoe string budget.

AFSA, as an alliance promoting food sovereignty in Australia, has I believe shifted the debate on food and food systems in this country. Food sovereignty was a virtually unknown concept or idea 4 years ago, save for a few academics and front line food activists. Now food sovereignty has entered the vernacular and is being used by reporters, politicians, agriculture and food leaders and advocates all over the country. This is some achievement and one that is proof of the power of alliances and allies.

We, AFSA and our alliance partners, are much more powerful than we realise. We hold the ethical high ground of working for the common good, AND we have practical plans and road maps of how to get there. This is especially obvious with our People’s Food Plan and our support for and understanding of agroecology. Incidentally, there are moves afoot for Australia to have its first tertiary agroecology course, which is great news.

A word of caution, though. As food sovereignty enters the mainstream language in Australia, it is important that we collectively guard against food sovereignty and agroecology being co-opted by those who wish to use it for personal gain and profit. We need to hold those who would do so to account and correct them – and I am thinking of politicians and mainstream agriculture and food organisations. Both these groups would love to harness the power of a social movement and alliance such as ours, as it would give them the credibility that most so obviously lack.

As I write, the Fair Food documentary has been completed and is due for release in Sydney and Melbourne in the first week of December. As you will appreciated AFSA are very excited about this and we all look forward to see it – yes that’s right, your AFSA committee haven’t seen the finished doco yet either, even though we have been very involved in the entire process, and we can’t wait! There will be a full national release scheduled early in the new year, complete with community screening options. In short we want to get this out and seen as far and wide as possible.

Fair Food Farmers United is a new farmer only organisation launched this year by AFSA. As a farmer this is a project close to my heart, as the lack of genuine national farmer representation is a glaring omission. It is early days of this exciting development and we encourage you to ask all the farmers you know to be a part of this, and help develop the organisations goals and objectives – obviously this will be within a food sovereignty and agroecology framework and principles.

Thanks, too, to the Alliance’s Communciations Group who maintain our connections to other networks. They also keep information flowing to Alliance members through our nine eNewsletters over the year.

To keep people coming back to our website and to attract new visitors, it’s important to post new material online regularly. So it’s heartening that over the past 12 months, something like 50 blogs as well as a media releases have been posted to our website. It’s also heartening to look at the stats and find that we’ve had an average of 115 visits a day to our site, making a total of 34,000 website visits this year.

fair food week 2014 — Fair Food Week 2014

Using the Alliance’s website and through deft use of social media, the Communciations Group produced the graphics and text and tweaked the website’s coding to get out the news of Fair Food Week 2014. With 97 events run over the week of 10-19 October, this year’s was the second Fair Food Week and the event shows promise so long as we can keep it interesting and attractive to people out there who are actually creating the type of fair food system we want.

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This year AFSA also became internationally active and recognised as a movement leader for food sovereignty in Australia. We are now a part of the International Planning Committee for food sovereignty and have attended several meetings to advance the global cause. We, or more specifically Fair Food Farmers, have also been invited as observers to La Via Campesina, and this is an important first step in a long process of potentially joining the world’s largest peasant farmer organisation. Our voice was also heard at the UN’s Committee on world Food Security in Rome as Australasian delegate.

And last but not least, Nick Rose carried the AFSA flag to Canada, the USA and Latin America as part of his Churchill Fellowship studying food sovereignty.

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Dr Charlie Massy, sheep farmer and author, contributor to Fair Food: A movement with a mission

All great news as Australia is no longer known as ‘the lost continent’ in global food sovereignty circles. AFSA members are also currently writing a book on the emergence of food sovereignty in Australia to be released next year, so stay tuned for that too.

There was so much happening during the year on the food sovereignty front that it is hard to mention all activities, but you can track this via our facebook page and website. Incidentally our facebook page reached over 5,000 likes in October, which is impressive for a single-minded food sovereignty page without cute dogs and cats!

Seriously though, there is a sense within your committee, and among other frontline advocates and activists, that food sovereignty in Australia and AFSA in particular is on the verge of a genuinely powerful mass movement – a shift in the way people relate to food, agriculture and the environment. As we stand on the threshold of an exciting year ahead with great potential, it is important to thank all the volunteers who have contributed over the last year. But the truth is I don’t want to single anyone out for special recognition as this is genuinely a collective effort, but I must mention your committee and the fantastic commitment shown by all.

AFSA is only as good as the members of the committee who walk the talk of members. In that regard your committee is extraordinary, working countless hours for the common good, unpaid and usually without recognition. So please, keep up your membership and encourage others to join, because it is on your solidarity that AFSA depends to continue the good work.

And speaking of committee, we have an equally great bunch of highly talented people who want to be part of AFSA’s future. They are standing for election at this years agm, so please read their bios, be impressed and vote! I am stepping down as president to make way for this talent, and hope to remain part of the great team I see forming. There will be no losers in this election either, as those who aren’t part of the official 7 member committee will be encouraged to be part of the process via subcommittees or co-opted post the new committee’s deliberations – we want the talents and commitment of all applicants.

So thank you all for last few years, we have achieved some extraordinary results together, and as they say, “the best is yet to come”.

In solidarity, Michael Croft

Fair Food Week 2014 is here!

October 4, 2014 by Alana Mann

Fair Food Week

From October 10-19 this year, thousands of Australians all over the country will be celebrating the second Fair Food Week.

Coordinated by the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), these days are dedicated to celebrating the work of women and men in country and towns who are striving to create a fairer food system for their families and communities.

Fair Food Week is also about raising awareness amongst the broader public on the many critical issues our food and farming system is facing, and what we can do to tackle those issues.

This year, the organising team at AFSA has created four central themes to provide a focus for the dozens of events already scheduled. The four themes are:

FFW Themes

This year, the organising team at AFSA has created four central themes to provide a focus for the dozens of events already scheduled. The four themes are:

Beyond the Trolley

Fair Food shopping and eating. Events to raise awareness about the extreme concentration in the Australian supermarket sector, and promote locally-owned food businesses as alternative shopping options.

Support your local community Fair Food Projects and groups

The now defunct National Food Plan created for the first time a $1.5 mn fund to support community food projects, like community gardens, farmers markets and community kitchens. 364 groups applied to this fund, but it was axed in February this year by the new Federal government. AFSA is encouraging communities to raise funds for local food projects.

Grow our urban agriculture

Having witnessed a small part of the dynamic global movement for urban agriculture over the past couple of months during my Churchill Fellowship, I am especially keen to see this movement flourish in Australia. I have spent time with local governments in Chicago, Milwaukee, Toronto, Rosario and Neuquen, and can see what a key role supportive policy frameworks – and resourcing – plays in the expansion of urban agriculture. So this is a great focus for Fair Food Week.

Support Gas-Field Free Communities

I was delighted to see that that Lock the Gate Alliance, which unites farmers and rural communities with urban environmentalists, is now a major sponsor of Fair Food Week 2014. As many in the Coffs Coast and Northern Rivers regions of NSW know all too well, the rush for unconventional mining – fracking – poses serious environmental and social risks that are yet to be properly evaluated.

Which is more important – a new mining boom that may last a few years and enrich a handful of mining executives even further, or safeguarding our best farmland for food security for future generations?As in 2013, the inaugural year of Fair Food Week, there is a wide diversity of events already scheduled. These include visits to farms and community gardens, long table dinners on farms, farm and garden workshops, Fair Food forums, community cooking events, local business open days, celebrations of ethnic and regional food cultures, permabliztes, soup kitchens and more.

One event I am especially pleased to see is the Food Security Conference in Sydney, to be held on October 13-14. Organised by the newly-formed Right to Food Alliance, whose members include the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance, Foodbank NSW, Red Cross, SecondBite, Blacktown City Council, NSW Department of Health (South Western Sydney District), Liverpool City Council and others, the centrepiece of this conference is the presentation by Joel Berg, Executive Director of the New York Coalition Against Hunger. Joel will be in Australia for a series of events during October. His focus is to raise awarness of the structural reasons why hunger persists in affluent countries like Australia and the United States, and why it is unacceptable to continue tolerating this reality.

To organise a Fair Food Week event ………..

Anyone can organise a Fair Food Week event! For more information and to see details of all events currently listed, visit www.fairfoodweek.org.au

What is shopping Beyond the Trolley? A consumer’s role in changing the food system.

October 4, 2014 by

Take bananas as an example. Mums like me who are the largest spenders in grocery stores, like to put bananas in kids lunch boxes. But they don’t fit right if they are too big, so we pick out the smaller ones. Over time, as everyone starts to do this, the retailer can tell that the big bananas aren’t selling. So they tell their suppliers they only want the lunch-box sized bananas. The suppliers oblige, and start asking producers to provide only lunch-box bananas. It’s good times so the farmers can pick the bananas at just the right moment and get a premium price for them.

The whole situation is bananas!

But then something happens – a massive rain event, say – and the bananas grow too big. The retailer won’t buy them because they can’t sell them and the farmer who had no control over the weather doesn’t get any money. Despite outlaying the same amount and working as hard as she normally would for the lunch-box bananas she gets nothing. She might get to sell the big bananas off cheap. If she’s lucky she’ll break even on the cost of production. If not, she chops them up and ploughs them back into the field to fertilise the next crop. Yes, you read that right. Perfectly good, yummy, healthy food being ploughed into the ground…The whole situation is bananas!

Most people don’t realise this happens. They just don’t realise that their choice can have an impact on the system around them. But this happens in different ways for just about everything we buy. Shopping beyond the trolley means shopping with the knowledge that each purchase can have an impact beyond just that simple relationship of you and your supermarket. It is about recognising your power to influence the system.

The Beyond the Trolley experiment

My experiment shopping Beyond the Trolley began in 2010. I just got sick of going into supermarkets. I was tired of having my life disappear in those brightly lit aisles as I chucked stuff in without a second thought. I was aware of stories about farmers and producers being treated unfairly and I wanted to step outside that system. I wanted to see if it cost me more and if it really was a viable thing to do. So I gave up shopping at Australia’s big two supermarkets and started writing about what I found. I can’t say it was the most rigorous scientific study on earth but over the course of a year I became convinced that consumers can use their power to drive change.

For me, shopping beyond the trolley took the form of giving up the big two supermarkets. After all, I was after system change so I tried to step outside the system. It wasn’t as hard as you might think. However, in order to change the system around me, I had to change my personal system. In order to save money – and yes, I did save money – I had to cook more; I had to be pretty organised; I had to explore my community; and I had to favour healthy food. But then, is that such bad thing?

Fair Food Week is an opportunity to try shopping beyond the trolley. It’s a chance to reflect on how to use your power as a consumer to shape the system around you by favouring farmers’ markets, local food projects, and sustainable food system initiatives. Together we can all make a difference to the world beyond our trollies!

To learn more about how to influence the food system with your shopping habits, come along to Randwick City Council’s Fair Food Week event: Skilling up for our Food Future

October President’s Message

October 4, 2014 by

Greetings All,

It’s Fair Food Week

Fair Food Week is almost upon us, and what a fantastic week it promises to be! There are dozens of events celebrating the pleasure and values that food embodies for us all – check out the website www.fairfoodweek.org for an event near you. If there isn’t an event near you, create your own. Get inspiration from other events, create your own, and please share it on our website and Facebook page. It could be as simple as a shared meal with friends or local produce or plant a fruit tree.

Over the last few months I have spoken to hundreds of people about Fair Food and the week we celebrate it. The most common question was; what makes food fair? The answers varied enormously and reflected the wonderful diversity that is the fair food movement, but they can all be distilled into three basic groups that revolve around environmental, social and economic justice.

The concept of a ‘fair go’ resonates so deeply with Australians, that for many it is a visceral response and we equate the ‘fair go’ with natural justice. So it is a very healthy thing for the fair food movement to tackle the systemic issues of the food system from multiple directions simultaneously. The great variety of events demonstrates our resilience through diversity.

I would also suggest that it would be fair to say (pun intended) that a ‘fair go’ is the strongest of unifying themes in Australia. Give that Fair Food Week is deliberately centred around World Food Day, it is a great response to the local, national and global challenges to food sovereignty. Fair Food Week is truly thinking globally whilst acting locally.

Best regards and in solidarity,
Michael Croft