Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As Britain went into lockdown, millions of people across the country lost their jobs and the ability to access nutritious food. With the government and other organisations struggling to meet the need, community food groups have stepped forward providing emergency resources and services where others could not.  Â
But personally I prefer an arrangement that allows for a high degree of resilience and a kind of Plan B insurance against unlikely but highly disruptive events. Our present institutional systems work remarkably well…until they don’t.
Since 2012, the Inga Foundation’s revolutionary agroforestry system of Inga alley cropping in Honduras has dramatically transformed the lives of 300 subsistence farming families, planted over 3 million trees, and become a model for true environmental sustainability and ecological resilience.
At least 124,000 U.S. public and private schools have closed in response to the novel coronavirus outbreak. In some states, schools will remain closed through the end of the academic year. Amidst the transition to remote learning, school officials are taking unprecedented steps to ensure students have enough to eat.
Our practices must return to regenerative methods that work with natural processes, instead of against them. We’ve knocked things so far out of balance that the road back to health will be challenging, but the sooner we get to it, the better.
The heart of the conflict between real solutions and false ones is no different here than with other sectors. The false solutions in each sector are aimed at maintaining current power relations. The real ones are aimed at rescuing ecosystems and leading to a better world for all humans and other life forms.
How could local authorities raise their game and start to shift the balance towards more local food resilience? There are a few pointers towards a more radical approach. One is the way that many have declared climate emergencies and begun to work with citizen groups to find new ways forward.
#BristolFoodKind is a campaign to create a community of acts of kindness through food during the lockdown. This community is sharing practical ideas about how you can buy food, reduce waste and grow from home, in a way that is considerate to yourself and your community at a time of crisis.
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.
So, will the apparition at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel actually represent an oncoming train that heralds the re-establishment of the globalised industrial model? Or might it be the beginnings of a renaissance of food systems which truly serve the public interest?
If the pandemic extends into the next harvest, farmers like Piro may be forced to focus on maximizing yield at the expense of innovation, quality, and conservation. The long-term consequences are not just for our palates or our pockets, but for the environment.
Once we have emerged out of this crisis, governments around the world need to unlock the barriers to change to create an international trade policy that supports farmers who use environmentally sound practices and provides all people with a healthy and nutrient-rich diet.
