Cutting Some of that Red Tape

I was reading recently (here, in NPR's food blog) that there's research that favors using local foods as the more efficient option when administering aid. Which is contrary to current policy. Currently, it is required that we Americans "Buy American" for the rest of the world. It was a policy developed to promote the interests of domestic agriculture. A little extra cash in Farmer Joe's pocket wasn't so bad, when the government would buy his grain and distribute it to foreign aid organizations. But this has evolved into a system that largely benefits large crop-specific (often for GM crops) and shipping lobbies, instead of  Farmer Joe, the family farmer, or agriculture as a whole.

Since 2008, 75% of all food aid, paid for by the U.S. government has been required to be purchased from the U.S. and shipped on  U.S. preferred vessels. Before that, 100% was purchased and shipped from the states. This costs a lot of time and money. When it takes a long time to get food to hungry people, food organizations are forced to face more extreme bouts of hunger than they would have to if the food were more readily available. It's estimated that we could cut off 14 weeks of waiting for a response to a crisis. Imagine having to wait 3 1/2 months for fresh food after an earth quake.
Changes could be made to Farm Bill that would speed up the process and feed 17 million more food than we do now - with the money we are already spending. Only 47% of the food aid budget goes to actual food - the rest is red tape, shipping, overhead, markups for growing and shipping regulations.

Letting the people have a little more say in where their food comes from could do a lot of good. The people would feel comfortable with the food their provided - local foods being the familiar sort. Aid organizations would be better prepared to respond quickly in the event of a crisis. Local farms would be supported, and these people could start working their way toward their own sustainable foods systems, economies. That sounds like a lot of good. But then how much of aid work should be in line with foreign policy and trade?

Here's an online form to Tell Congress to cut the red tape. Or follow this link to find contact information for your congress members, if you'd like to write a more personal letter.

Cottage Food Movement

About a year ago, a small town in Maine declared that its residents would enjoy full food sovereignty within the town borders. As long as food was being produced by a local resident, the town declared, it could be sold or traded to any other resident even if such a sale would normally be prohibited by state or federal laws or regulations. You can read more about the food sovereignty ordinance here and here. Sedgwick's ordinance is based on this document.

Four other towns in the same Maine county followed Sedgwick's lead, putting the county at the forefront of the food sovereignty movement in the United States. But many states have taken steps to ease the rules about where food has to be prepared in order to be sold. Thirty states now have some sort of "cottage food" regulations on the books, allowing small-scale producers to sell food products produced in their homes or other, non-regulated spaces. Some limit it to baked goods. Others specify how large the business can grow financially before it can no longer be considered a cottage industry.

(This blog is not advocating for or against passage of the law. We're providing information and this image was available.)

Now California is getting into the action. Assemblyman Mike Gatto, of Los Angeles, introduced the California Homemade Food Act (AB 1616), which would allow certain home-produced foods to be sold in California. Not all homemade foods would be legal to sell if the law passes: foods considered to be high risks for food-borne illnesses are not included.

If the California Homemade Food Act passes, we could be seeing a wide range of new producers and products at the Crescent City Farmers Market and elsewhere. There could be local jams and jellies for sale from sea to shining sea.

Local Food As Insurance

In today's New York Times, food writer Mark Bittman discusses the benefits of locally- and regionally-grown food. He writes about similar issues often, but today's column hones in on the policies that create more incentives for growing commodities (wheat, corn, soy) that we export, feed to livestock, or feed to automobiles than incentives for growing fruits and vegetables, for which we are a net importer. He quite rightly points out that our current agricultural system, requiring massive transport costs to bring "fresh" fruits and vegetables to our supermarkets without regard for seasonality, depends on a continuation of cheap fossil fuels. 

He writes, "We’ve seen that nothing is guaranteed: not energy, not water, not the financial system, not even the climate. Our food supply isn’t guaranteed either (remember 2008?), but it’s more likely to provide us with security if we focus more on regional agriculture and less on trade." 

As it happens, there is a living, breathing example of what happens to a food system dependent on imports and fossil fuels when those things disappear. When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did Cuba's food economy, which had relied heavily on sugar exports to nations behind the Iron Curtain, and imports of staple grains, tractors, and petroleum-based fertilizers and fuels. With no fuel coming in and no lucrative markets for its sugar, Cuba's food production was forced to become small, labor-intensive, and local. Human labor replaced tractors and small urban gardens and farms replaced sugar plantations almost overnight. You can read about it here, here, and here. 

Obviously, there are many criticisms that can be made of Cuba and it's Soviet-era economy is not one that is widely shared by nations today. But the lessons learned by Cuban citizens when they needed to take food matters into their own hands are valuable for us all. There are good reasons to build (or rebuild) local and regional food economies, and Cuba has shown the world that it is possible. Just some food for thought. 

Food Sovereignty and a Yurok Tribal Beach Gathering

Recently, we've been asking a lot of people about food sovereignty and what it looks like to them. Food sovereignty has been defined as "the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems." You can read more about food sovereignty here, here, and here. The last link is to the Mvskoke Food Sovereignty Iniative, one of several Tribal food sovereignty movements in North America.

For larger scale food sovereignty actions, Maine is at the forefront. A few towns have recently declared that USDA regulations do not apply to locally produced foods exchanged between community members. These local ordinances will no doubt be challenged in court, but they serve to change the conversation about local agriculture and food policies. In the past couple weeks, the Maine legislature passed a joint resolution along the same lines, stating:

"RESOLVED: That We, the Members of the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Legislature now assembled in the First Regular Session, on behalf of the people we represent, and in recognition of our State's proud agricultural heritage, take this opportunity to oppose any federal statute, law or regulation that attempts to threaten our basic human right to save seed and grow, process, consume and exchange food and farm products within the State of Maine."

To the USDA, those may well be fightin' words, just as recent local events may be fightin' words. Over this past weekend, members of the Yurok Tribe attended multiple beach gatherings to collect seaweed and mussel shells for traditional and ceremonial uses. Indigeneous rights to some of these cultural resources have been threatened by various government entities. Part of the purpose of the gatherings was to evoke indigeneous cultural rights and the right to food sovereignty. You can see pictures of the events on the Yurok Tribe's Facebook page.

Unfortunately, the beach gatherings conflicted somewhat with the Yurok Spring Fling in Klamath, where we were busy asking people about their vision of food sovereignty. The folks who were demonstrating it weren't able to add this vision to the poster. We're in the process of creating visual word clouds of the answers from the Weitchpec and Klamath Spring Flings and will post them when they're finished.

In the meantime, what does food sovereignty look like to YOU? If we get enough answers in the comments, we'll make and post a word cloud for this, too.