The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance wants your input into its People’s Food Plan project!!

For the past few months, we have been drafting a discussion paper for this project – setting out values and principles that we think should guide the food system – which will be ready for circulation very soon.

During September and October, we are inviting people around the country to hold ‘kitchen-table’ style meetings to get together with other interested folks and talk about the changes we need to see in our agri-food system, using the discussion paper and as kick-starter for the conversation.  We’ll then collate the feedback we receive and compile it ready for the launch of our people’s food plan project in November.

The aims of this process are broadly two. First to put together a ‘values, principles and best practice’ document / discussion paper, with input from supporters and allies, to be launched in November, as a response to the government’s national food plan. (See some of our criticisms of the government’s food plan here: http://theconversation.edu.au/the-draft-national-food-plan-putting-corporate-hunger-first-8342)

Secondly, and probably more importantly, we would like to use this as an opportunity to start building towards establishing a more coherent and cohesive food justice / fair food movement around the country.  We see this as the start of a long-term process to change the agri-food system and would like to use this discussion process as an organising tool. This would mean gathering contacts of interested people, finding out what topics people are interested in working on and people’s availability and skills / specialist knowledge.

On the basis of the process we are now starting, we are aiming to establish a structure with working groups and so on to do some concrete and longer-term work towards achieving our objectives.

Public meetings / kitchen-table talks

We would be delighted if you were able to hold such a meeting in your area.

We are putting together a few materials with some suggested questions you might like to consider during the meeting and the types of feedback and info we are keen to collect. If you think you can hold a meeting like this and / or you know anyone else who might, please contact us and we will provide you with the materials in the next few weeks.

For a list of the key contacts, please go to People’s Food Plan Steering Committee.