Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

Fair food for all Australians

A food-filled evening with the teachers

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Story by Russ Grayson, March 2015

KAREN raided her parent’s garden in Orange, a small city out on the flat lands of NSW’s middle western reaches. Then she hopped the fence to collect from the neighbour’s lemon and lime trees. This she combined with home-grown produce from her own Sydney garden.

Margaret obtained her vegetables from the vegetable co-op. She made a beetroot leaf salad by adding vegetables grown in the garden of her preschool. To top it off in a delicious way, she brought along some of her homemade tomato sauce and, to wash it down, the distinct taste of her homemade kambucha, a fermented concoction to which she added fruit from her garden.

Deb was different. Faced with a serious over-production of tiny tim tomatoes at the end of last growing season, she put them in her blender and froze the pulp. This, she said, was the way she gets to eat her own tomatoes out of season, and this she offered spread on sourdough bread fresh from the oven that morning, accompanied by cooked broad bean stems and leaves from her garden.
Julie did something different. She used her leftover food to make a tasty vegetable curry to which she added fresh veges.

I mention only a few of the culinarily-innovative foods we were treated to at the ECEEN (Early Childhood Environmental Education Network) end-of-year gathering last year that brought preschool educators from as far away as the Central Coast.

Talking about food

Eating time for Deb
Eating time for Deb

Julie had invited Fiona and I to make a presentation around food, but rather than offering the usual monolog followed by questions that is the standard offering at such events, we went for an interview and conversation format that we had used elsewhere.

Fiona, the interviewer, asked me about food sovereignty, the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, community gardens and more, and encouraged participants to share their knowledge and experience as well as their questions that were answered not only by Fiona and I but by others, too.

This created a conversation rather than a presentation. Definitely no Powerpoint.

Preschools have changed

The Clovelly preschool was a superb venue for such a convivial gathering. It was far from my clearly-obsolete mental image of a preschool. How else could I account for its raised garden beds full of vegetables, chook yard with spaceous chook house, solar panels on the roof, rainwater tanks to irrigate the garden, compost bins, shady trees, bark-mulched playground equipped with natural stuff for the children to use in creative play, and what I can only describe as ‘sustainability practices’?

Some of that produce that the children and educators grow is taken by the cook to turn into fresh-food lunches for the children. In having these features, I learned, the Clovelly preschool centre is far from alone. Seems there’s a new ethos, new to me, anyway, among those preschoool educators who were engaged in animated conversation around the long table loaded with their homemade foods. I thought, during our guided tour of the centre, of the preschool at the Randwick Community Centre with its rainwater tanks and little vegetable garden.

Teachers go low-waste

The theme of this that evening, what the educators called their ‘sustainable table’, was that they would make and bring along as low-waste a meal as they could manage. Behind it lay the reality—deficiencies and waste are better words—of our food system so well documented by the state government’s Love Food Hate Waste website.

On the pages of that website you find the reality—that 30 to 50 percent of all food produced on the planet is not eaten (And they say we face an imminent food shortage? Seems more a shortage of imagination to me); that people each produce around 360 kilograms of food waste annually in Australia—that totals to around $5 billion worth; that food makes up around one-third of all our municipal rubbish. And here in Sydney, a city that positions itself as a national leader (but that continues to fall well behind Melbourne in urban liveability assessments), 300,000 tonnes of the food we buy is thrown away—for those who like numbers, that’s $2.5 billion worth.

Questions only a guide

We prepared a set of questions before the event, not to slavishly follow, but as a guide to getting the conversation started. The beauty of the interview/conversation format is that you can cease using your prepared questions and go into the free flow of the conversation that develops, only returning to the questions if the conversation drifts off onto a side track.

As it turned out, and as these types of sessions often turn out, all of the questions we had prepared were covered, though not in the order they had been written, and not by deliberately asking the questions but by using what the participants said as the opening for what we had already thought of talking about.

A question of sovereignty

What surprised me was the response to one of our opening questions as to what ‘sovereignty’ means—as in ‘food sovereignty’. It seems most had a fairly clear idea of this, saying that it means ownership. From there it was easy to seque into defining, through questions, what sovereignty might mean for our food system.

In some ways our conversation was one of talking with people most of whom were familiar with the idea of ‘good’ food, as in nutritionally good, and ‘local’ food. A number were home growers and their childcare centres already have little kitchen gardens. Cynics might dismiss the value of talking with people who are already following the same path to good, local and fair food, however that would be a mistake based on a misunerstanding of how education works and of how ideas spread through society.

Rather than ‘preaching to the converted’, as the tired old cliche goes, conversations such as we led become educational devices to explore and extend what people know, often by their freely sharing their experience and insights. Those people, then, go back to their workplaces and their communities to influence others, probably more by doing than talking.

We can think of this as the ‘ripple effect’, or, better still, as a network of localised ripple effects spreading from the participant’s preschool centres. Time spent in the mutual education of those that already are engaged in something—I think the term is ‘social learning’, I picked that up from a professional evaluator from UNSW, Phil Booth—turns them into colleagues rather than students. And that’s time well spent.

Lib-Dems offer little hope for a fair food future

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Story by Russ Grayson, March 2015

THIS IS A STORY of surprise, hope and disappointment. It is about the surprise that a libertarian has been elected to the Australian senate, hope that he would be the variety of libertarian that supports freedom, social liberalism and a secure future for our citizens rather than big corporations, and disappointment at finding that he and his party are not.

As a fair food advocate, I hoped that his party would support Australia's small-to-medium scale farmers, our food processing industry and we food buyers. I'm sure he would say that he does, however I suspect that his party's policies would work against it.

David Leyonhjelm (photo source: Wikipedia)
David Leyonhjelm (photo source: Wikipedia)

Here's the background to this sudden appearance of a political philosophy that has been marginal to Australian politics: On 1 July 2014 became the first senate representative for the supposedly-libertarian party, the Liberal Democrats, founded in 2001. The party has two representatives in local government — Jeff Pettett at Ku-ring-gai Council in northern Sydney and Clinton Mead at Campbelltown Council on Sydney's south-western urban fringe. It is likely that David's election can be in-part attributed to the party being listed first on the senate voting form and its being mistaken for the Liberal Party.

For the Liberal Democrats the precedent is John Singleton and Bob Howard's Workers Party of the 1970s, Australia's first libertarian political party that combined classical right-libertarianism with populism (the party later changed its name to The Progress Party). I remember them saying that those who want a governor-general should pay for the role, and that sounded a good idea to me. But the party had little voter appeal and didn't persist, becoming extinct by 1981.

Search for a better politics

Libertarianism is a political and economic philosophy that through its modern history has had little currency on the Australian political scene.  Its appeal to many is that it is seen to offer an alternative to the tired old divisions of Left and Right in the contemporary politics of Western nations.

"Might believers in modernity — whether 'liberal' or 'conservative' — find ways to break free of the doctrinal rigidity that has been imposed on us by fanatics of both the so-called Left and the so-called Right?"

Scientist, science fiction author and libertarian, David Brin, summed up this need for a new politics:

[quote author="Article: Alliance for the Modern World by David Brin" image="http://afsa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/David_Brin_at_ACM_CFP_2005dsc278c.jpg" w="150" h="205" image_align="right" b]"It's time to free ourselves from the old left-right axis of the 19th and 20th centuries.

"Might believers in modernity — whether 'liberal' or 'conservative' — find ways to break free of the doctrinal rigidity that has been imposed on us by fanatics of both the so-called Left and the so-called Right?" (Source: Alliance for a Modern World. davidbrin.com).[/quote]

 

Political philosophy: a very brief and general excursion

Liberal_Democratic_PartyTo make sense of the Liberal Democrats, let's take a brief excursion into libertarianism. I generalise for sake of brevity and to avoid losing readers in the arcane world or economic philosophy.

Libertarianism is like socialism only in that it is a political philosophy that comes in a range of flavours. Contemporary libertarianism is conveniently divided into what we might call 'right-libertarianism' and 'left-libertarianism' (what I would prefer to call its 'communitarian' branch).

Like most political philosophy it has leaky margins as there are large areas of agreement between the two — the right and left libertarians — epecially when it comes to civic and personal freedoms.  The difference is this: the economic freedom favoured by the right-libertarians favours the big corporations while that of left-libertarians favours more the small entities in the marketplace as well as the decentralisation of economic and political power. The right-libertarians, too, favour decentralising political power or defusing it altogether. Both agree that government is too big, too oppressive, too intrusive, too limiting of opportunity, too bureaucratic, too sluggish, too captured by its corporate paymasters and ideological fellow travellers, and should be diminished in scale and reach. Both agree that the main role of government should be to protect the freedom of the people.

Both of these flavours share a social philosophy that values personal freedoms and freedom from government interference in life. This notion of freedom from government intrusion in individual lives is what attracts many in the US to libertarianism there, where there is a deep suspicion and distrust of government. It is a sentiment that is growing as government and its agencies become more intrusive, more controlling and more dominant in the lives of citizens. It is a sentiment difficult to disagree with (unless your personal political philosophy lurches towards fascism or communism, supposedly polar opposite but really, to some extent at least, just look-alike ideologies, or towards other forms of authoritarianism).

Reading up on this stuff I was again surprised, though not this time at a libertarian being elected, but to discover that there is a libertarian thread — 'green libertarianism' — that Wikipedia says applies libertarian principles "in such a manner that environmental protection becomes necessary to maintain a free society."

Surprise, hope and disappointment

My surprise and hope at learning of the Liberal Democrats was that here would be a party that would represent those without political power in this country, one that would represent individual citizens and small business, one that would create  corrective feedback to the growing dominance of the BIG ENTITIES in our lives — to market control by big corporations and social control by big government, and the assaults on freedom that these entities bring.

The danger of allowing those big entities… entities controlled by small groups of corporate, institutional, public service or government decision makers… too much power reminded me of something David Brin's wrote:

[quote author="David Brin" image="http://afsa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/David_Brin_at_ACM_CFP_2005dsc278c.jpg" w="150" h="205" image_align="right" b]" ...across 4,000 years we’ve seen that whenever a small group of men become powerful enough to control an economy and command-allocate its resources, they will do so according to biased perceptions, in-group delusions and fatally limited knowledge.

"Whether they do the normal oligarchic thing — cheating for self-interest — or else sincerely try to 'allocate for the good of all,' they will generally do it badly. As a blatant recent example... the collapse of the Soviet Union."[/quote]

 

In hope of discovering a political entity with our various freedoms and with a philosophy of opportunity for all who want it at its core, I eagerly clicked through to the Liberal Democrats website and was encouraged to first see their statement of social principles supporting "civil society and volunteerism, civil liberties and individual freedom, individual liberty and personal responsibility under the rule of law". Then there was "free markets and freedom of choice" in their economic principles.

For global market economic fundamentalists, any idea of protecting smaller economic entities and protecting Australians with legislation is anathema...

It's here that my hope turned to disappointment. Further reading of the party's principles put a different slant to their 'free markets' principle. It turns out that it is less about free markets for small-to-medium enterprises, farmers and sole traders, and more the shibboleth of free market fundamentalism that free, open, global markets benfefit all.

The problem with this is that the free global market tends to favour the big entities that inhabit it. In the case of our food system, their market power overwhelms the smaller farmers and food processors in this country and, through predatory pricing, advertising and PR budgets and other means, they marginalise the small-to-medium enterprise and drive them out of business. We know this because we see it happening with Australia's supermarket duopoly.

For global market economic fundamentalists, any idea of protecting smaller economic entities and protecting Australians with legislation is anathema. They are willing to see those smaller, less-economically-powerful entities disappear, to see Australia's lands sold to the highest bidder, to lobby against laws that protect the public. As much as I agree with their social principles, that was my disappointment with the Liberal Democrats. So was their social welfare policy that seems more like an expression of creative writing and wishful thinking based in an ignorance of the realities of the contemporary labour market and possibly leading to social darwinism. Privatising the social net ignores the reality of relying on a market that fluctuates and in so doing puts people's wellbeing at risk.

A better libertarian thread

To those who support the smaller rather than the larger, who support the individual freedoms and civil rights that have made liberal democracies better places to live than the various banana republics, oligarchies, authoritarian command-and-control societies and theocracies that litter our planet, and to those to whom freedom is a basic life principle, elements of the Liberal Democrats program will appeal while others will turn them off simply because — like their policy for an unregulated free market — they contradict their social principles in that it would limit opportunity for those less-economically well off.

...the name you'll never hear (them) mention… is Adam Smith, whose version of libertarianism adults still look to from time to time...

This leads me to wonder whether there is a thread of libertarianism that would be truly refreshing and new in Australian politics, one based on pragmatism instead of the tired ideologies that laid waste much of the Twentieth Century, one that is science-literate and that places the wellbeing and future of Australians first, including our primary producers catering to the domestic market and the industry and people who depend on them. Perhaps the nearest is that espoused by David Brin, who writes of those libertarians that favour big powerful economic entities:

[quote author="David Brin" image="http://afsa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/David_Brin_at_ACM_CFP_2005dsc278c.jpg" w="150" h="205" image_align="right" b]" ...the name you'll never hear (them) mention… is Adam Smith, whose version of libertarianism adults still look to from time to time.

"A version that admires and promotes individualism and the stunning power of human competition, but also recognizes that competitive-creative markets and democracy and science only achieve their wondrous positive sum games when carefully regulated… the way soccer or football must be, lest the strongest just form one team and stomp every potential rival flat and then gouge out their eyes… which is exactly what winner-owner-oligarch-lords did in every human culture for 6000 years. Till Adam Smith came along and described how to get the good outcomes without the bad.

"The stealing of Adam Smith's movement by fanatics and cynically manipulative oligarchs is not just a tragedy for the right, and for market capitalism. It is tragic for civilization."[/quote]

 

Brin continues his economic critique when writing in Alliance for a Modern World: "We believe small business is the engine of innovation and a vibrant economy, and motivated workers provide its thrust. Specific Proposal: Reforms that energize small business should get priority over those that benefit narrow elites, who can afford to lobby for themselves."

So, what do we need by way of an economic system? How about an economy free of the dominance of a small number of big corporations and the faceless men and women who are their decision makers… a 'natural' market based on people selling and buying as sole traders, as small or medium sized businesses, whatever it is that they trade in, whether goods or services… a 'freed market', let's call it.  What we can call it is something, disappointingly, that the Liberal Democrats do not offer us.

Let's use the analogy of the farmers' market — growers and food processors directly offering their goods for sale free of the local presence of market-distorting and dominating supermarkets.

Such a freed market is best accompamied by a free society where government makes a big effort to keep out of people's private lives as much as possible and declines to legislate on things that have no negative social impact or that would benefit some wealthy or political elite.

For those of us looking for a way forward, a way out of the straitjackets of make-it-up-as-you-go, self-seeking Labor and Liberal policy, and those of us seeking to move forward from the tired and now-expired, simpleton divisions of Left/Right so increasingly irrelavent in the contemporary world, for those tired of the cynical politics of the electoral cycle, the Liberal Democrats offer us no solution. Sad.

AFSA and the VFMA call for food safety regulators to be accountable

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AFSA and the Victorian Farmers Markets Association have today released a joint public statement, calling on the Victorian Government to work with AFSA, VFMA and small producers to engage in open and constructive discussions about how to support the rapidly emerging local and fair food economy in Victoria.

Public statement – Cancellation of Regulator-Producer Forum

18TH FEBRUARY 2015

Regulatory costs and compliance have a major impact on the viability of all producers and food businesses. The need to ensure the flexibility to innovate is recognised by the Inquiry into the impact of food regulation on farms and other businesses (2013). In the same document the Victorian Government emphasises the value it places on the contributions of producers in policy-making.

Accordingly, the cancellation of the public multi-stakeholder discussion forum on regulation at Monash University on February 24 is a serious blow to public engagement and transparency.

This event, hosted by Monash University Law Faculty and co-sponsored by AFSA and the Victorian Farmers Markets Association (VFMA), was to be a landmark forum addressing the regulatory challenges in enabling the production and provision of safe, transparent, innovative, fair and local food in Victoria. Producers, regulators, industry representatives and certification agencies were invited to participate in two panels addressing the challenges and opportunities of ensuring safety and transparency in small scale food production and retailing.

The aim of this ground-breaking day was to generate a productive dialogue around the potential and opportunities for improving food regulation to build consumer confidence in and access to fair local food. This dialogue is essential to the co-creation of an effective, coherent and evidence-based regulatory environment that enables a strong and thriving local and fair food economy.

Shortly before the forum was due to take place, AFSA and the VFMA were informed that it was being cancelled, and replaced with a closed invite-only workshop focused just on food labeling issues. AFSA and the VFMA are deeply disappointed that a unique opportunity for a constructive and productive dialogue between regulators and producers has been lost. Many producers were excited by the opportunity for this dialogue and were prepared to travel long distances, at their own time and expense, to take part in it.

We believe it is the public duty of these regulators to engage in open and constructive dialogue with producers. As publicly-funded agencies with significant enforcement powers conferred by legislation, we are concerned that this last-minute cancellation of a public event demonstrates disregard for public accountability and openness to scrutiny.

Further, we believe this stance to be inconsistent with the publicly-stated values and missions of each regulator. Dairy Food Safety Victoria states its values as follows (emphasis added):

Respect

We value diverse opinions, strengths and ideas, and consider the feelings of others.

Integrity 
We are honest, open and transparent in our dealings with all stakeholders and will match our behaviours to our words

'Can do’ 
We are always willing to help stakeholders and each other and strive to continually improve the way we work whilst remaining adaptable and open to change

Fairness
We are fair, objective and courteous in all dealings with industry, stakeholders and our employees

 

The mission of Prime Safe is (emphasis added):

To regulate and advance food safety in the Victorian meat, poultry and seafood industries through a credible, effective and efficient quality assurance system that facilitates opportunities for industry growth and innovation

Despite the opportunity lost with the cancellation of the forum, AFSA and the VFMA will continue our efforts to engage regulators in a constructive dialogue of how they might work within the existing regulatory framework to best support and enable the producers and communities who are building local, transparent and fair food systems.

At the same time, accumulated experience from many producers does, in our view, make a powerful case of the need for a simplified and coherent regulatory framework that enables the emerging local and fair food system to flourish. Anecdotal evidence from many producers reveals that such costs and compliance, and at times heavy-handed enforcement, has a crushing and at times terminal effect on viability.

A case in point is the summary closure of the Giles Family Abattoir in Trafalgar, Gippsland, at the end of 2012, after images of a pig escaping on the slaughterhouse floor were passed by Animals Australia to PrimeSafe. The business employed 30 locals and contributed $7 mn to the local economy, yet its licence was cancelled in a manner that owner Colin Giles felt was most unfair:

Colin Giles says that PrimeSafe's [Deputy Chief Brendan] Ryan told him at the Melbourne meeting that it was an "open-and-shut case" of cruelty and that he was cancelling their abattoir licence permanently. They were also warned that any animal cruelty charges, if proven, could carry a jail sentence.

"Then PrimeSafe told us that if we surrendered our licence to them that afternoon, there would be no further investigation," Giles recalled this week.

"And then they asked us what we thought. But I don't think we said much at all. We were devastated, dumbfounded -- we certainly felt like we were being forced to hand our licence in."[1]

Therefore:

We call on the Victorian government to ensure that food safety regulators are held accountable to the Victorian public as a whole, and in particular the industries they are established to regulate and support.

We also call on the Victorian government to work with stakeholders across the food system to understand the need for regulatory reform and explore options for the most suitable and effective way this can be achieved. Such reforms must be guided by the need to balance the principles of: 

  • Ensuring public safety
  • Supporting a thriving and diverse local and fair food economy
    Promoting open consultation
  • Enhancing transparency and accountability
  • Building food literacy and guaranteeing the public’s right to know

 

* * * *

For comment / interviews, contact Tammi Jonas, AFSA President, M: 0422 429 362 / Wayne Shields, VFMA President, M: 0400 643 341

 

About the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

AFSA is a national alliance of farmers, food entrepreneurs, public health professionals, community gardeners, farmers market coordinators, journalists, researchers and local food advocates who share the vision of a fair food future for all Australians. AFSA draws inspiration from and is founded on the principles of food sovereignty.

Founded in 2010, AFSA has provided national vision and leadership through collaboratively creating Australia's first Peoples Food Plan, and in coordinating Australia's first Fair Food Week. In 2015 AFSA is launching Australia's first Fair Food feature documentary, which tells the stories of Australian farmers, social entrepreneurs, and urban agriculturalists who are transforming Australia's food future.

 

About the Victorian Farmers Markets Association

The Victorian Farmers’ Markets Association (VFMA) is a not for profit organisation, founded in 2002, that supports and promotes authentic farmers’ markets throughout Victoria by:

a) Representing members on a range of industry issues.

b) Providing a central information point for shoppers and industry alike. We support 40 accredited farmers markets around Victoria.

The VFMA represents myriad types of Victorian farmers and food producers who trade at our accredited markets. VFMA accreditation aims to ensure our farmers’ market customers are buying what they expect, with genuine informed choice, as well as providing a fair environment for local small-medium scale food growers and producers to prosper. The VFMA accredited farmers’ markets provide a reliable benchmark distinct from non-accredited markets  - primarily no middle men/re-selling – only the genuine growers and their production staff, reconnecting people with their food sources and producers with their consumers.

The VFMA and our stakeholders share the vision of a fair food future for all, from farmers and along the food production chain to consumers. The VFMA has collaboratively consulted with AFSA regarding Australia's first Peoples Food Plan, and in promoting Australia's Fair Food Week.

[1] Reproduced from the 22 March 2012 Australian story by Rural Reporter Sue Neales – for the full story see http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/piggy-in-the-middle/story-e6frg6z6-1226306631801.

 

 

To read the full statement, follow this link

AFSA VFMA Joint Public Statement Cancellation of Regulator-Producer Forum 18.2.15

 

Fair Food Documentary – Details for Screenings

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GAC_FairFoodThis 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

 

AFSA President’s Report, 2013-14

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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...

AFSA President Michael Croft
AFSA President Michael Croft

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.

The Peoples Food Plan
The Peoples Food Plan

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.

fffu-600

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.

AFSA National Coordinator, Dr Nick Rose
AFSA National Coordinator, Dr Nick Rose

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
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

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