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Gunnar Rundgren

Gunnar Rundgren has worked with most parts of the organic farmer sector – from farming to policy - since 1977, starting on the pioneer organic farm, Torfolk. Founder and Senior Consultant of Grolink AB, he worked for several United Nations agencies and development cooperation organizations including the World Bank. He was a World Board member of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements 1998 and the president 2000-2005. He has written several books, the latest being Global Eating Disorder. Curretly, he runs a small farm with vegetables, fruits and nuts as well as a handful of cows.

first electric car

What a Milk Carton Can Tell Us

By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth

My milk package, the electric cars, agriculture land use and the wood saving stoves are all examples showing why overall reduction in resources use or emissions (absolute decoupling) through substitution and efficiency is a pipe dream in a growth economy.

  • August 11, 2020
Vertical farming Mongolia 2015

Do We Need Farmfree Food?

By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth

Instead of de-coupling human civilization from nature, we need to live in and by nature. We are fooling ourselves and betray the rest of the living by pretending we are a species that doesn't need the rest of the living – after all we are nature.

  • May 4, 2020
pop up market

Build a Future Outside of the Market

By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth

It is astonishing that so little of the food debate is enlightened by a proper understanding what the main driver of the food system is: Markets or even more precisely, capitalist markets (today, one can hardly find a market that is not capitalist).

  • April 21, 2020
Swedish landscape

Ask a Reductionist Question and You will Get a Reductionist Answer

By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth

In the article “Towards better representation of organic agriculture in life cycle assessments” in Nature sustainability, van der Werf, Knudsen and Cederberg, from France, Denmark and Sweden respectively demonstrate the inadequacy of LCA for comparisons between conventional production systems and agro-ecological and organic systems.

  • April 13, 2020
Sims Hill Shared Harvest CSA

To Feed or to Profit? To Eat or to Consume?

By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth

We can no longer let the distribution method - the market - dictate how we farm and how we eat. We need to develop new tools and institutions in order to cater for the many functions of food and farming.  A process of decommodification should be at the core of the alternative food movement.

  • January 24, 2020
San Francisco earthquake

There is No Such Thing as a Business as Usual Scenario

By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth

One of the firm rules of systems is that you can’t change just one thing. Why do we keep on discussing options compared to a business as usual scenario? There will be no business as usual scenario when climate change hits and there will be no business as usual scenario if human society takes appropriate action. 

  • November 20, 2019
Consumers buying local organic produce at the authors farm photo: Ann-Helen Meyer von Bremen

Towards a Landscape Diet and Communal Landscape Management

By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth

In my vision we see farming as landscape management and food is based on the landscape diet, i.e. that you eat food from the landscape you live in. Communities are jointly deciding on major principles of how the landscape is managed and take responsibility for that farmers can do their job in a good way – and eat the stuff from that land.

  • August 5, 2019
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