9th February 2013

Lady Eve Balfour was an inspirational founding figure in the organic movement, and she believed that a nation’s health depended on fresh, whole food.  In her book, The Living Soil (1944), she went as far as to say that agriculture must be looked upon as one of the Nations’ national health services.  She argued that once agriculture came to be regarded as a primary health service then the only important question concerning the production of food would be: “Is it necessary for the health of people?” [1].

If her argument is correct, it means that mainstream economics would have to take second place to the moral economies based on care, co-operation, new learning and trust offered by the sustainable food networks within the new agroecological paradigm.  Under the dominant and fragmented industrialized systems of food production a whole food health service seems a long way off. But where fresh, whole food is integrated into local and community systems this vision seems both possible and practicable. These systems legitimize new ways for people to participate in healthy and sustainable diets and create conditions to challenge the status quo which denies the existence of alternatives in an increasingly fragile world.

There is no doubt that Eve Balfour’s philosophical approach has influenced the emerging knowledge structures of the alternative food networks that re-connect farmers to the environment and face-to-face with consumers through the Slow Food Movement, Transition Towns, the 100 Mile Diet and farmers markets. The extant synergies between local food pioneers and environmental and consumer health groups have irrevocably linked organic agriculture with theories of ecological diversity, and in turn, to the failure of the old paradigm to address urgent issues of multiple social, environmental and economic crises to problems to do with ideology, culture and values [2]. Therefore, the new generation of food producers that respect the limits of global life-support systems by limiting their use of fossil fuels and synthetic chemicals are a solid proposition of a traditional and democratic culture that connect local action to real and environmentally responsible economies and is evolving and strives to keep the nature of wholeness alive [3].

La Via Campesina (the peasants way) is an international movement that has adapted to climate change and local conditions by applying ecological concepts and principles of agroecology to conserve land and water resources and to produce more food on less land using no external inputs [4]. Agroecology is helping to break down the dominant market model that thrives on competition to produce cheap food for export, trapping people in hunger and poverty. Campesinos grow enough food to eat and trade surpluses in local markets. By diversifying food growing and distribution systems this radical grassroots movement supports local economies, employment, education and healthcare, seed conservation and scientific research, all linking back to food secure communities. United under one vision, La Via Campesina represents about 200 million small to medium scale farmers in 70 countries and is emerging as a powerful voice for social justice in the international debates on climate change and agriculture [5].

To envison the future of food, it is necessary to understand our past. Agroecology acts a bridge to the older cultures, to the ancient aqueducts and stone terraces in the highlands of Peru, which cultivate food in places that many modern farmers would find impossible [6]. These resilient agricultural practices have survived for over 5,000 years due to careful recycling of land, water, biological wastes, and attunement with nature.  However, these practices are tested to the limit by landslides and other impacts of climate change, necessitating continually evolving and innovative local adaptation. But we know far less about these resource-conserving technologies than we do about the use of external inputs in modernized systems that have existed for the last sixty years or so.

Fortunately, an exciting participatory food project has emerged to demonstrate how a nation is growing organic food without the intensive use of finite resources.  Out of necessity, and after the trade embargo with the US, the people of Cuba had to take up organic farming with little or no access to petrol or oil, pesticides and fertilizers [7]. With enthusiastic government response and support, Havana now has thousands of organic urban community gardens or “organoponicas” that provide fresh local food all year round and employ 300,000 people, providing 90% of the capital’s fruits and vegetables. Of Cuba’s 160 cities, housing 76% of the total population, 130 cities are growing organic food and millions more people are growing their own. This shows what action is possible as we reach the tipping point in respect to human use of fossil fuels. Cuba’s organic revolution indicates that sustainable agriculture is most productive when it increases the use of both infinite natural and human capital.

Another living model of sustainability is Incredible Edible Todmorden [8]. Just one of thirty-one Incredible Edible towns in the UK so far, it has ambitions to be self-sufficient by 2020.  Todmorden is a post-industrial cotton town on the Lancashire/Yorkshire borders with 15,000 inhabitants and high unemployment.  A small group of people worried about climate change and poverty have decided to stop blaming the politicians, scientists or anyone else, and grab the future for themselves.  Concerned that their town was struggling to survive in a supermarket culture and aware of making value choices that were either destructive or sustainable every time they sat down to a meal, they chose food as their agent of change; planting vegetable beds where people could see them, on the railway platforms, by the canal, on the main road, and invited people to help themselves.  They restored derelict land to beautiful green spaces and encouraged children to learn about and to grow food in all six local schools.  Kindness and the inclusive criteria of, “If you eat, you’re in!” [9] has kick-started the successful transformation of an ordinary town that is expanding its participatory planning to building a permaculture (permanent agriculture sustaining human activities for generations to come) training school and a fish farm on land donated to them.

Not surprisingly, the community-led endeavors in these very different loci have garnered interest from international researchers, local participants and the media.  And, as groups all over the world start to mobilize community action, local learning quickly becomes global learning, and with the aid of the internet the “sensitive globalization” [10] of healthy, human-scale, ecologically sustainable food systems is becoming a reality.

How are these ideas being expressed within formal education? The big picture and holistic concepts evolving from the participatory movement can be explained as Education for Sustainability (EfS), which requires the agency of human beings to support both nature and humanity [11].  EfS acts as a catalyst across the disciplines in recognition of the mutuality of the global and local in relation to rights, social justice and the environment. Proponents of whole systems thinking, and of EfS, posit that the role of the “transformative intellectuals” or learning leaders, help learning communities to construct alternative futures and look to the appropriate area of critical theory (within educational research) to justify their authority in this role.[12].

The new structures and processes emerging from agroecological technologies have contributed to the transformation of agriculture, which has extended to the political environment in which it operates. Many would agree that the food producers that have taken advantage of the changed conditions within the new paradigm and begun to serve the differentiated food networks such as farmers markets have prospered [13]. However, many farmers operating in other paradigms have not been so fortunate.

The changes in production-consumption have been stimulated by recurring food scares and farming crises. The crises in conventional and industrialized methods of farming have led to a breakdown of consumer trust, difficulties for farmers and a series of animal disease outbreaks [14]. Consumer fears have also been linked to the emergence of biotechnology, which critics argue is the eliminator of alternatives. The individuals and groups that have chosen routes to a holistic transformation have succeeded in changing both communities and landscapes by a redesign of the whole systems of food supply. Moreover, whole systems approaches to food production can be efficient and equitable as well as sustainable [15].

In the next ten years efforts must be made to reduce food waste and agricultural zones must be brought closer to cities to create short supply chains. Networks of intergrated food and waste management systems (IFWM) would replace the dominant model of ‘infite’ unsustainable growth with closed loop energy resource cycles that mimic the life cycle of organisms to create the autonomous, ecologically balanced zero waste, zero entropy ideal [16]. This localized system reduces CO2 emissions and further improves human, animal and environmental health by reducing pollution from agricultural chemicals, which denude water and soil quality, costing around £2.34 billion annually to remediate in the UK alone. Connecting a matrix of allotments and surburban farms with edible forest gardens on larger scale agroecological farms on the edgelands of  cities is also essential for bees and other pollinators.

Four hundred experts agree that the dominant “business-as-usual” food system is not a sustainable model for feeding the world in Agriculture at a Crossroads, a leading international report co-authored by Hans Herren, a former World Food Prize Laureate and President of the Millennium Institute  [17]. He supports the need for increased investment in agroecological sciences and farming, as a complex, multifunctional approach to food security, demanding knowledge and delivering multiple benefits. The report is critical of the one stop shop approach of agricultural development euphemistically called the ‘Green Revolution’ in Africa, which is not likely to reduce hunger or poverty in the region, but may benefit transnational corporations as has occurred in the past.

A system of sustainable food aid is required for areas in need. This aid takes the form of  permaculture education centres where locals learn alongside project workers to re-design sustainable human habitats.  The design takes three years to set up, but is permanently self-sufficient and economically secure thereafter [18]. A similar approach is underway in Ethiopia where  the Tigray Project has almost doubled yields on arid land using organic compost in comparision with synthetic fertilizers [19]. Ethiopia, once stressed with resource depletion and over population, is now one of the eight major centres of crop diversity, giving hope to the world.

International NGOs in India, Egpyt, Africa, Central and South America are supporting thousands of small to medium scale growers transition to organic cotton and coffee crops,  mixed food cropping and natural pest management systems. This has empowered rural communities to re-envision soils degraded by chemical monocultures and to reclaim the right to food, and replant saved seed, thereby resisting the debt trap associated with patented transgenic seeds and dependency on expensive pesticides [20].

Miguel Salcines Lopez is an agronomist in Havana who is very happy that he no longer works behind a desk and is well paid for growing a diversity of organic food on an urban farm with his 163 co-workers sums up agroecology by saying, “It’s a much more complicated form of agriculture. It needs people who not only have an education, but have passion. Agriculture of the 21st century will not be the same as the 20th century. We have to work more intelligently, not harder” [21].

It is the holistic, participative, egalitarian and ecological systems perspectives that can change society for the better by recognizing the obstacles to achieving long term sustainability. The agroecological worldview stresses both positive local action and local knowledge to promote a real agenda for change and a shift towards enriching the environment so that living and future generations can flourish. This approach stimulates powerful knowledge-based practices that encourage formal and informal experimental learning and choices at the level of consciousness that produce multiple benefits for the whole community and for the biosphere.

The knowledge flows within the new paradigm represent a range of individual and collective meanings and interpretations emerging from the dynamic process involved in participatory social change. The organic movement embodies an alternative methodology that integrates the evolving multiple theories, values and possibilities of whole systems thinking expressed in EfS to bring about socio-economic, political, philosophical, environmental and educational awareness and action for long term sustainability by 2020 and beyond.

The worldwide agroecological revolution puts the future of food and health firmly in the hands of the small to medium scale farmers and growers at the centre of grassroots knowledge systems who recognize and adapt to change using an interconnected social and ecological systems approach to human-nature relations.

References:

1. Balfour, E.B. (1944) The Living Soil: Evidence of the importance to human health of soil vitality, with special reference to post-war planning. Faber and Faber Limited.
2. Huckle, J. (2000) Modernity and Post Modernity: understanding society and its relations to the biophysical world. In Unit One Reader Introduction to Environmental and Development Education. South Bank University Enterprises.
3. Kirwan J (2004) ‘Alternative strategies in the UK agro-food system: Interrogating the alterity of farmers markets.’ Socialiologia Ruralis 44 305-415  ISNN 0038-0199
4. Altieri, MA & Nicholis, CI. Agroecology and the Search for a Truly Sustainable Agriculture (UNEP Mexico, 2005).
5. Via Campesina http://viacampesina.org/sp/
6. Miguel Altieri, Professor of Agroecology at the University of California, Berkeley presentation to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Agroecology 18th January 2012. www.agroecologygroup.org.uk
7. Wright, J. (2005) Falta Petroleo!  Perspectives on the emergence of a more ecological farming and food systems in post-crisis Cuba. Wageningen UR ISBN 90-8504-197-X
8. Incredible Edible Todmorden Unlimited http://www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk/
9. Mary Clear, Todmorden:  How to Feed a Town. A presentation to All Party Parliamentary Group on Agroecology www.agroecologygroup.org.uk
10. Petrini C. (2003) Building the Ark, in Slow Food - Collected writings on taste, tradition and the honest pleasures of food, Chapter 1, pp.1-6 Grub Street  ISBN 1-90410-23-7
11. Wade, R. (2008) Education for Sustainability: Challenges and Opportunities.  Issue 6, Education for Sustainable Development Spring 2008. Policy and Practice a Development Education Review.
12. Huckle J. (1996) ‘Realizing Sustainability in Changing Times’ in Education for Sustainability, Huckle J and Sterling S (Eds) Earthscan ISBN 1-85383-256-1.
13. Coleman, W. Grant, W. Josling, T. (2004) ‘The Globalization of Ideas, ’ in Agriculture in the New Global Economy, pp. 93-100 Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 1843766787   
14. Jackson, P. Ward, N. Russell, P. (2008) Moral Economies and Geographies of Responsibility in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographer New Series 34 12-24 ISSN 0020-2754 9
15. Pretty J. (2002) Agri-culture: Reconnecting people, land and nature. Earthscan ISBN 1-85383-925-6
16. Ho MW (2008) Dream Farm II, Organic, Sustainable, and Fossil Fuel Free. Ho, MW, Burcher S, Ching, LL,  Food Futures Now 2008 ISIS/TWN  ISBN 0-9544923-4-X
17. Agriculture at a Crossroads (2008) International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) www.agassessment.org/
18. Permacultue Education Africa  http://berg-en-dal.co.za/
19. Edwards S et al (2007)  The Impact of Compost On Crop Yields in Tigray Ethiopia http://betuco.be/compost/Impact%20of%20Compost%20Use%20on%20Crop%20Yields%20in%20Tigray,%20Ethiopia.pdf
20. Gordon D (2012)  Back to the Grassroots: An Alternative Model of Rural Development Takes Root in India  The Yale Globalist May 3,  www.tyglobalist.org
21. Bahnson F (2010) The Cuban Agricultural Revolution: A look behind the curtain. http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/