We’re now updating the Fair Food Week 2014 website for it to go live in early July.
For Fair Food Week 2013, we came together in a national coordinating team to make the week happen. That worked. Now, we want to do it again.
Here’s our idea…
- a team of volunteers in each city, state and territory would act as primary points of contact for local groups and organisations that want to host Fair Food Week events
- members of this national coordinating team could consider their availability as state media contacts for Fair Food Week; AFSA will provide briefing notes, talking points and other relevant information and support
- we are also looking for AFSA members and supporters at the local level who would be willing to act as contacts for local media; again, we will provide support and assistance.
For the national coordinating team, the commitment is to be available for an approximately two hour Skype call once a month from July-October and to be in regular email and online contact during that period.
If you are interested or would like to know more, contact AFSA National Coordinator Nick Rose on:
- 0414 497 819 or
- admin@afsa.org.au
Our Fair Food Week 2014 themes…
For Fair Food Week 2014 we have four themes for organising our events around.
Fair Food Week event organisers are asked to plan their event around at least one of the themes. For example, ‘Beyond the trolley’ could be combined with ‘Grow our urban agriculture’ so as to offer a solution to a problem facing smaller farmers producing for the domesic market.
The themes were chosen because they seem most relevant to the fair food situation in Australia at the present time.
Theme 1: Beyond the trolley
Support your local farmers and food businesses — fair food shopping and eating
Concentrating economic power is seldom a good idea. It’s even less of a good idea when that power controls what we and our families eat.
But that’s the situation we have today in Australia where two supermarket chains control more than 70 percent of the national grocery market. It’s not only the reality that what they offer their customers is a limited choice — a diet chosen by the supermarket buyers — it’s also that they use unfair marketing tactics to reduce small business opportunity and treat the farmers and Australian food processors that supply them in ways that are being increasingly questioned.
A fair food system in Australia would do otherwise…
Theme 2: Support your local community fair food projects and groups
Organise a fundraiser for a group that missed out on the Community Food
Grants or other food project or group you’d like to support
Where government fails, communities can succeed.
That’s the potential Fair Food Week 2014 offers event organisers across the country. Fair Food Week celebrates community self-help food initiatives such as:
- food co-operatives
- community supported agriculture
- food rescue
- farmers’ markets and the rest.
Fair Food Week 2014 is the opportunity to raise funds for community food initiatives denied promised funding when the federal government cancelled the Community Food Grants scheme.
Theme 3: Grow our urban agriculture
Encourage your Council to establish a food policy or support campaigns for Local Food Acts in your state
Cities feeding themselves? Seems a strange idea but it’s been the reality for a good many of the fresh foods urban people eat. Now, it might be a fading prospect unless citizens influence their governments to take timely and positive action.
Theme 4: Support gasfield-free communities
City and town dwellers connect with farmers and rural communities asserting their food sovereignty in the face of government and industry demands to hand over land for fracking
Farm land or gas land?
That’s the choice facing farmers when coal seam gas miners demand they hand over their land for gas extraction. It’s also a choice when miners demand access to public land like state forest and other government land.
Now, farmers and urban people are saying ENOUGH! and are forming alliances to retain farmland for farming and public land for less damaging uses.
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