Fair food Archives - Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

Fair Food Documentary – Details for Screenings

February 3, 2015 by Nick Rose

This is the text of an email sent to all those who have expressed interest in hosting a screening of the Fair Food documentary

Dear Friends

Fair Food – the documentary!

Thank you so much for your support of AFSA and the Fair Food movement in Australia. We are very excited to be collaborating with communities all around the country in sharing some truly inspiring stories of the wonderful people transforming our food system. In this email we are providing details about how you can obtain a copy of Fair Food from us, arrangements for screening, and the support in terms of materials and promotion and, if possible, speakers, that we can provide.

Obtaining the DVD

Once the licence fee (see below) is paid and the licence agreement signed, a copy of the Fair Food DVD will be sent to your nominated address. The releasedate for the DVD will be confirmed in a subsequent email but is likely to be between mid-February and early March. The film is 1 hour 4 minutes duration.

Resources and event ideas

How you choose to organise the event is entirely up to you, and we recognise and celebrate that many of you will no doubt have more experience than us in running similar events. We want to help make your event as successful and enjoyable as possible, and so we are putting together some resources and strategies from our own experience hosting film events, as options for you to consider.

Materials / Resources

Here are some of the resources available – let us know on the order section at the base of the licence agreement which, if any, you would like: • A5 small flyers about Fair Food & AFSA • A4 flyers with more information about Fair Food and Food Sovereignty in Australia and why we need a Fair Food movement • Scripts or guided conversation outlines are available to use to introduce the film and to use at the end of the screening to stimulate discussion

Speaker / panel discussions

Wherever and whenever possible AFSA will attempt to have a local AFSA member available to your screening to discuss fair food and food sovereignty issues in Australia, the work of AFSA, and to take part in any speaking slots or panel discussions you may wish to conduct.

Fair Food Week, October 2015

We encourage all groups and organisations conducting screenings to make attendees aware of Fair Food Week in October 2015 (www.fairfoodweek.org.au) and if possible guide discussion around what event or events could be planned in your local area to celebrate Fair Food Week this year.

Event ideas

And here are some event ideas which have worked well elsewhere:

instead of (or to supplement) catering, invite attendees to bring a plate of locally grown food, local fruit or drinks
set up a photo booth with the #fairfood hashtag, and card and textas available for people to write a short message about what fair food means to them and have their photo taken. Photos can be shared on our AFSA / Fair Food Week Facebook pages and with our Instagram account (http://instagram.com/fairfoodnow/) to celebrate your screening. For inspiration, check out this photo album put together by members of the Lakeside Drive Community Garden for Fair Food Week 2013: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.543397022400692.1073741832.125167374223661&type=3
if you decide to have some discussion afterwards, and you and the participants feel comfortable doing so, it would be great to capture a few views and opinions about local fair food issues on a short video. We can add these to our YouTube channel and also upload them to the Fair Food doco website, www.justfoodfilms.com, to share what’s happening in your community with the rest of the country and the world.

Cost

Fair Food is available to community groups for a one-time licence fee of $300. Please see the attached FAIR FOOD – Licensing Agreement May 2015 for details of the licence conditions. If your organisation or group would have difficulty recouping the licence fee through ticket sales and sponsorships, or might otherwise have difficulty paying the full amount of this fee, please contact us to discuss alternative arrangements. Equally, as a non-profit association that is entirely reliant on member subscriptions and volunteer labour to sustain our advocacy programs and campaigns, if you are in a position to make an additional donation beyond the licence fee, we would be sincerely grateful. If you are uncertain about any of these terms, please contact AFSA via email or the numbers below to discuss and outline your questions.

Screenings near you

There are numbers of groups interested in hosting screenings planned for Adelaide, Brisbane and north coast NSW (Byron Bay). If you are in those regions and are not already in contact with others locally, please let us know so you can coordinate screenings, if it is decided to host more than one.

Membership of AFSA

Membership of AFSA is not a requirement for purchasing the DVD, but we would like to share a few reasons to consider becoming a member, whether as an individual ($10 / $25), farmer ($50), community group ($35), organisation or business ($100). Change doesn’t happen unless you work for it – and we have, over nearly five years:

created Australia’s first crowd-sourced food policy document – the People’s Food Plan, with the direct participation of 600 people in 40 public forums;
exposed the flawed and flimsy foundations of the previous Federal Government’s business-as-usual National Food Plan;
established a new national event to celebrate the farms, individuals and organisations transforming our food system – Fair Food Week – with over 210 events and more than 35,000 people participating in 2013 and 2014;
with the Field Institute, crowd-funded over $30,000 to make Australia’s first food politics documentary – Fair Food;
supported the establishment of local Fair Food Chapters in Brisbane, Adelaide, Sunbury, and Byron Bay, with more in formation;
created a dedicated advocacy and networking chapter for producers pioneering new ways of land stewardship and short supply chain relationships with their customers and communities – Fair Food Farmers United;
campaigned for a Local Food Act and multi-million dollar Local Food Fund to support and resource the efforts of all Australians who want a fair food future;
actively participated in the global food sovereignty movement by attending conferences of La Via Campesina and the International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty, as well as participated in global food security governance negotiations at the World Committee on Food Security;
secured a contract with University of Queensland Press to write Australia’s first anthology of the Fair Food movement, which will be published later this year;
written dozens of articles for online publications and magazines, participated in many seminars, conferences and events as speakers, and been interviewed dozens of times on local and national radio to raise awareness of the key issues.

This is power of a social movement – the power of people working together united by a common vision and passion for change. And we’re just getting started! With your support and participation as individual and group members, we can really make the Fair Food movement in Australia become an unstoppable force for change. We also value greatly your support of AFSA by distributing the membership leaflet at the screenings and promoting membership to attendees. For details of how to join AFSA, please visit: afsa.org.au/join-us.

We are excited about the level of interest being shown around the nation in the Fair Food documentary. We are proud to have been part of bringing Australia’s first Fair Food documentary to you, and hope it will play a role in bringing us into greater connectedness and stimulate smart, innovative, creative action towards making our food system fairer for all.

If you would like any further information, please don’t hesitate to get in touch either by email or by phone at the numbers below.

Warmly,

Tammi Jonas
AFSA President
tammois@gmail.com
0422 429 362

Nick Rose
AFSA National Coordinator
admin@afsa.org.au
0414 497 819

On behalf of the AFSA National Committee

“The food system isn’t just broken. It’s killing us.”

December 3, 2014 by Nick Rose

This is the text of the speech delivered by AFSA National Coordinator Dr Nick Rose to the sell-out audience of 200 people, at the premiere of the Fair Food documentary at the National Gallery of Victoria on Tuesday 2nd December, 2014.

Why did we make this film?

Because the Food System is broken.

Why is it broken?

Because we have fully applied the technologies and the mindset of industrialisation to food and farming. And because we have combined industrialisation with the logic and the imperative of endlessly increasing production, regardless of the consequences.

What does that mean?

It means we have over-exploited our land, degraded our soils, and damaged our river systems. It means we have one of the highest rates of deforestation, biodiversity loss and species extinction on the planet. It means, globally, that the food system contributes as much as 50% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

It means that we have a supermarket duopoly which controls 70-80 percent of the grocery market, forcing farmers and food processors into price-taker relationships. 100 years ago farmers received 90 cents of every dollar’s worth of food they produced; today it’s around 10 cents.

Farming has become de-valued in our highly urbanized culture; and not just economically. So it’s shocking, but not surprising, that 7 farmers leave the land every day, and that rates of suicide and depression amongst farmers are twice the national average.

Our industrialised food system produces too much food of the wrong type. So we’re subjected to an endless barrage of advertising, urging us to buy food products laced with excess sugars and salt. Dietary-related diseases are already amongst the biggest public health issues we face.

[message_box type="" icon="" close=""]Our food system is not merely broken.

It’s killing us, and ruining any chance that future generations have for a decent and liveable future. Yet the industrialised food system persists, and is expanding. Why? Because there are very powerful economic and financial interests that make a lot of money from the status quo. Because we are so disconnected from our food system. Because food is apparently abundant and cheap, and because we don’t join these dots.[/message_box]

We made this film, and we formed the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, because we can no longer tolerate this state of affairs. Because it’s no longer enough just to talk or think in terms of reforms. We need a transformation; we need a revolution.

And that revolution begins in our own minds, in our hearts, in our consciousness. We need to see ourselves as part of the story of the Great Work, the work that matters. As philosopher Thomas Berry puts it:

[quote author="Philosopher, Thomas Berry" image="http://afsa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Thomas_Berry.jpg" w="150" h="150" image_align="right"]The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.[/quote]

This is the challenge to every one of you here in this room. This is the choice facing every one of us alive today. Do we continue to allow our culture and our society to become ever-more destructive, and ever-more violent? Do we choose to remain in a paradigm which says that the Earth, and indeed ourselves, only exist for endless exploitation so that a tiny fraction of humanity can enjoy obscene levels of wealth?

Or do we choose to be part of the great challenge of our times – the greatest challenge of all times? To create a shared vision of a wonderful, bountiful world, where there is no hunger and no poverty; where soils are thriving, rivers are healthy and forests are abundant; where animals roam freely; and where all of us are healthy and flourishing.

[message_box type="" icon="" close=""]Do we choose to see ourselves as victims of processes and powers beyond our control, and simply walk away and do nothing, resigned to our fate? Or do we choose to see ourselves as subjects and shapers of our own history, as creators and narrators of our own story, as powerful beings with the capacity to effect great changes?

Because I’m here to tell you, that’s who we are. We are powerful.[/message_box]

We made this film because these are messages that need to be heard. This is the story that needs to be told; that we need to tell ourselves, and each other. We made this film because we know that there are women and men all over this state, and all around this country, who have embraced this new paradigm, who are blazing a trail towards the decent, fair and liveable future that all of us want.

We’re here tonight to recognize and celebrate them.

They are our Fair Food Pioneers.

And this is the story of Fair Food.

French Farming: Small is beautiful

July 19, 2014 by

Story by Tammi Jonas, 6 July 2014 (story first appeared on Tammi Jonas: Food Ethics)

Would you rather sleep under a patchwork quilt made by your grandma and her friends or a synthetic bedspread from K-mart? It’s not a tough decision, right? So why do we accept what’s happened to our landscape more readily than our beds? (Maybe we don’t and you’re all sleeping under synthetic doonas, in which case my apologies.)

Driving through the French countryside over the past two weeks, I was constantly struck by the smallness of the farms. Having driven plenty of rural routes in Australia and America, I’ve seen what monolithic monocultures look like, and it’s a very different vista from the French farmlands we passed.

Where in America or some parts of Australia there might be hundreds or thousands of acres of the same crop blanketing the land (less a blanket than sheets of pesticide-laden plastic wrap robbing the very soil of its breath), in France each paddock is defined well before the next horizon. Patchworks of corn, sweetbeets and cheery sunflowers roll diversely amongst copses of forests old and new.

The patchworks are seamed together with kilometres of byways that run through countless small villages, the charming life-story embroidery of generations that warm the countryside.

Even the dairy herds are small – we regularly saw paddocks with 20-40 cattle in them attached to what we would consider a micro-dairy in Australia. Given the very different regulations around raw milk, it’s perhaps unsurprising how many of these small dairies are able to maintain control of their supply chains and sales.

The dairy paddocks are typically dotted with compost piles around the boundaries, as the most environmentally and economically sustainable means of fertilizing the paddocks is to collect the cattle’s manure and compost it on the farm. Happily I’ve seen some resurgence in these practices in Australia, with examples like Camperdown Compost helping dairy farms close the loop and reduce synthetic inputs.

The countryside is also dotted with pigeon towers (or dovecotes…), where pigeons were once grown for both their meat and their excellent fertilizer. While I don’t think many are still in operation, they tell a tale of a time before exploitation of the world’s finite phosphate supplies led to our current system of externalizing environmental costs.

A great example of working in agro-ecological ways is the Chapolards’ farm near Nèrac – they call it short circuit, or full circle farming. We spent time with the wonderful Dominique & Christiane Chapolard, where along with Dom’s brothers and their families they run a ‘seed to sausage’ pig farm. They grow nearly all their own feed for the pigs on their 100 acres, where they have 30 sows. Effluence is stored in an on-farm lagoon before being applied to the fields growing maize, fava beans and grains in rotation. They do all their own butchering and charcuterie making on the farm and sell directly through their local farmers’ markets – and the enterprise supports five families.

We were fortunate enough to host the Chapolards at Jonai Farms & Meatsmiths along with Kate Hill of Kitchen-at-Camont just a few months ago. I’ll write in more detail about their farm in a further post…

The next generation of Chapolards is also involved in the business, and one of Dom’s nephews Roman Chapolard has added another enterprise on the farm – a full-circle dairy. He runs 40 head of dairy cattle and packages his milk on farm as well as doing some simple further processing such as yoghurt and crème fraiche to sell at the local markets.

The capacity to value add and sell directly obviously enables farmers to remain much smaller than if they’re forced into long supply chains where everyone gets a smaller cut of the dollar. I understand this not just from a fair food advocate’s perspective, but also from a successful small producer’s view.

And while France may have millennia on which to have grown these communities and sewn them together, a key point is that they still maintain them and enjoy the benefits of thriving rural communities as a result.

Dom and Christiane shared their concerns with us that the next generation is losing interest in manual labour, and leaving the land for white-collar professions, following a trend seen the world over. We all agreed that if people like them keep up their political work within and beyond their cooperative, and spreading the word at the markets, there is hope that the fair food revolution will gain strength in France just as it is growing in Australia, which started off skiing along in the wake of America’s food revolution (though I think we’re set to drive our own boat now).

When you lose family farms from the land, you lose families from communities. Australia’s farming statistics on the decline of the family farm mirror the decline of our rural communities. We should be very worried about this loss and its ramifications for not just the quality of life of rural Australians, but also the quality of food produced in large, intensive agriculture.

We need to value the many environmental and social benefits of families growing food for families, rather than corporations growing food for supermarkets where families happen to shop.

It’s time for a Local Food Act!

July President’s Message

July 19, 2014 by

Greetings all,

It’s Fair Food Week

First of all please check out the Fair Food Week website and join one of the ones in your area or create your own! Creating your own event or happening is easy and registration is free for individuals and not-for-profits/community groups. Oh, and ‘like’ the Fair Food Facebook page whilst you’re at it.

So what is fair food?

Fairness and the idea of a fair go is something that Australians ‘get’ instantly. In this case we mean fair from paddock to plate, field to fork, soil to stomach, wilderness to waste or waist. In other words fair food is food that takes into account all of the aspects that food encompasses: the environment that enables food production, the water it depends on, the soil organisms, the growers, workers, the cooks and eaters, the culture in which it is embedded, the clean air it requires, the life it enables, and the recognition that they are all inseparably linked. If any part of the food system is unfair, the remainder of the system will suffer – including us.

Celebrity line-up

Fortunately this is a message that thinking Australians ‘get’. So much so that we have a celebrity line up of Fair Food Champions who want to support Fair Food Week (see our first video below) – so stay tuned as there are a few surprises in store. That said if you know any high profile Australians who would support Fair Food Week, please get in touch.

During the recent Students of Sustainability conference at the ANU, Simon Cunich, director and producer of the food sovereignty film Growing Change (insert link) caught up with rugby union star and Fair Food Week champion David Pocock, and AFSA national coordinator Nick Rose.

Our role in international negotiations about food

Now I will appear to digress from Fair Food Week for a bit. One of the things I am working on via the Civil Society Mechanism is UN/FAO input into the Food Losses and Waste in the context of Sustainable Food Systems. What is interesting is that at the highest level there is a belief that the current system can be made ‘more sustainable’. I think you know where I am going with this, but either a system is sustainable or it isn’t – period. A ‘more sustainable food system’ is just an unsustainable system that will take longer to fail, because it isn’t sustainable. This error in logic would be funny if it wasn’t happening at intergovernmental level and perpetuating the fallacy that a partial redemption of the existing industrial food system is all that is required.

The other issue that this report raises is that the costs of the global food system and the vast amounts of waste it produces (30 to 40% of all food produced goes to waste) are all ‘context specific’. What this means is that the solutions to waste must be local and context specific. To me this is another example of globalised food system profits, with the costs to be paid for by the local communities. In other words the demands of a globalised and corporate food system produces the waste, which the local, regional or industry specific is expected to fix. It should be obvious to all that food losses and waste are a symptom of the system, and treating a symptom is not going to cure the disease. We risk putting a Band-Aid over waste when what needs to happen is that the system should be redesigned (cured) to stop rewarding over production – ‘productionism’.

I digressed a little, but a system that produces vast amounts of waste, whilst hundreds of millions go hungry, is manifestly unfair. So we are back to supporting Fair Food Week and entrenching it in the annual calendar of national events.

This year Fair Food Week 10 – 19 October is centred around World Food Day which is 16 October 2014.

So please get behind Fair Food Week and encourage your friends, families and communities do to likewise. Be creative and have fun with it too, because this is meant to be a celebration of what a better food system can look like.

Best regards and in solidarity,
Michael

AFSA Members comment on the Jamie Oliver-Woolies partnership

July 5, 2014 by

What do ASFA members think about the Jamie Oliver/Woolworths partnership? — Photo Source: Dailytelegraph.com.au

Woolworths has partnered with Jamie Oliver in a campaign to promote fresh fruit and vegetables. The campaign, targeted at kids, gives free stickers to parents for every $20 spent in store. The content of the stickers and the other items that you can purchase as part of this campaign (like a sticker album and miniature greenhouse for growing seeds) promote healthy and sustainable food. They target kids directly and make healthy food interactive and fun.

This is complemented by Woolworths plugging Oliver’s recipes which are simple and healthy. In turn, they display their home brand goods as suggestions for ingredients in the recipes. Woolworths is funding this campaign by a voluntary levy on top the mandatary marketing fee for suppliers of 40 cents per box. Ausveg estimates that this represents on average 30–40 per cent of a grower's profit margin. What are the impacts of this on Fair Food? Two Food Sovereignty Alliance Contributors give their opinions here.

Here’s two takes on the story...

Story by Russ Grayson, a founding member of AFSA and blogger at pacific-edge.info

THERE'S TWO LESSONS coming from the Jamie Oliver-Woolworths business:

the first is to beware of grocery corporations bearing gifts of nutrition
the second is beware the cult of the celebrity, particularly that of the celebrity chef.

What started out as a marketing opportunity for Woolworths and Jamie Oliver has quickly turned into a dent in the celebrity chef and author's reputation.

Here lurks disillusion

Disillusion within #fairfood networks as well among the wider public interested in our food system lurks behind the hostile reaction to Oliver's ambassadorship of Woolworths.

Oliver rose on a reputation of doing good things around encouraging the use of fresh, nutritional food. He did good work in improving school food. He offered recipes and promoted the use of fresh vegetables. Doing this gained him a lot of public support. Now, in teaming up with Woolworths to ostensibly promote healthy eating, Oliver has walked into the whole controversy that punctuates the relationship of Australia's supermarket duopoly — which controls over 75 percent or so of the grocery market and largely controls what is offered to Australians as food. It therefore controls indirectly the farmers and food processors that supply it.

It is the 'voluntary' contribution scheme of a 40 cents per crate of vegetables tax imposed on Australia's already financially struggling growers that they, the interested public and the vegetable industry finds so irksome.

"That's on top of the 2.5 – 5 percent fee growers are already required to pay Woolworths for them to market and promote their produce", said William Churchill, public affairs manager for the industry organisation, Ausveg, in a media release that gained widespread coverage and that was critical of the Oliver-Woolworths partnership.

Unhappiness at the Jamie Oliver tax

Commenting on the Woolworths' Jamie Oliver tax on growers, former Nationals senator, Bill O'Chee, in an article critical of Oliver in the Brisbane Times, continued the public criticism of the partnership:

"That doesn’t sound much, until you think that farmers’ profits average only $1 per crate for a whole season’s work. Considered this way, it stinks more than a truckload of rotten spuds… In the last 12 months, the average vegetable grower has gone from making a small profit to making a loss. In the same 12 months, Mr Oliver’s wealth rose by an estimated £90 million. Now we know how."

There is still time for Oliver to partially repair some of the damage he has done to his reputation by convincing Woolworths senior management to drop the surcharge and refund that collected to growers. Doing this would also benefit Woolworths who could position themselves as responding to public opinion.

Oliver's statement about having 'sympathy' for growers places him in a sticky position. He has to both honour his contract with the corporation while trying to save his face in public. If Oliver gets the promotional levy cancelled and that already paid refunded, that might just go some way to repairing the disillusion his once-supportive public feel. His doing this would also will be a victory for fair food advocates and growers.

Story by Jennifer Richards, a Fair Food eater who blogs at beyondthetrolley.com, which is about sustainable food, ethical eating and supermarket-free shopping

In #fairfood circles, Jamie Oliver has been getting a lot of bad press lately. I’ve been reading social media comments about how people want to burn his books and calling him some pretty unsavoury things. I think the criticism of him is a bit unfair. Love him or hate him, Jamie Oliver is a great communicator about food. Even if you hate celebrity chefs in general, he has authored enough material about eating, growing and sourcing local, ethical food to put himself firmly in the #fairfood camp.

It’s not Jamie Oliver that is the problem. He’s not anti-supermarket, he’s trying to change the system by using the system itself. He has spoken explicitly about using supermarkets as a mechanism for change in unhealthy diets (as his 2010 TED talk demonstrates). This campaign does what we’ve needed supermarkets to do for years - put the same amount of energy and money into marketing fresh healthy food as they do into processed junk. They might be using mechanisms that I don’t think are great - like pester power for instance - but they are applying it in the right place.

Here it the most important thing about this campaign… it is the beginning of change. Someone who has been eating only processed and packaged food is unlikely to suddenly start attending farmers' markets, but someone who has engaged with fresh food and cooking over a period of a few years just might.

But then you start to follow the money. Woolies is still doing what it is renowned for - squeezing its suppliers. ‘Voluntary' can be a pretty sneaky word when there is a uneven power relationship at play. Can a levy really be considered voluntary if you are scared that declining to pay it will result in the loss of a contract that might ruin your business? Woolies is a massive, billion-dollar business with a not insignificant marketing budget. It seems only fair that it foot the bill for this campaign. And where is the breakdown of where the levy is being spent and the impact measuring of it’s effectiveness? Surely all stakeholders need that information.

Woolies is up to its same old tricks, but I don’t think it’s worth throwing the baby out with the bath water. This campaign might actually do some good. The fact that a supermarket with a large degree of control over how we eat in this country is pushing people towards fresh food is promising. But squeezing the money for it out of suppliers diminishes it to the point where it seems a lot like greenwashing.

Are you a fair food grower and eater? We want to know what you think about the campaign? Please share - respectfully - in the comments.