Permasynergy

Philosophy of Sepp Holzer's Permaculture

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:28:00 +0000

Ever since our childhood, which was permeated by farm life on our parents mountain farms, we have been deeply rooted in nature.

Many of the ideas, which we have now been successfully realised, date from that time. Nature was our playground and we learnt to understand it. Like most of the children of mountain farmers of that generation we had to help working on the farm. Since we hardly had any toys, we played with soil, water, plants, roots and stones. There was no limit to our phantasy.

At an early age we started to grow plants in our mother's flowerbox and very soon playing with nature turned into a passion for every living and growing thing. When I began my training as an orchard farmer, I was being led onto the wrong track: farming with fertilisers and pesticides.

Very soon I began to realise that conventional farming would only create higher costs, more work, and plants that are dependent on constant care. So after a few failures, I returned to the farming methods which I had been used to as a child. For more than 30 years my wife and I have been running the Krameterhof in the Lungau region, which is in the province of Salzburg, and belongs to the mountain farming zones III and IV.

We have extended our farm from the original 24 hectares to 45 hectares. Major areas of the farm that were barren have been made productive again. As a result the standard value of the farm was raised from 1.744 € to 17.950 €. Our way of thinking and farming within the natural cycles and interactions proved to be worthwhile.

It was only in 1995 that we leart, that our unconventional approach to agriculture could be described as Permaculture. The term was coined by Australian environmental scientist Bill Mollison. Permaculture involves farming in cycles, on the model of self-sufficient natural ecosystems. Sepp Holzer

"I have lived on the Krameterhof for more than 30 years, and I have learnt that you can overcome the most difficult situations if only you care about nature and are thankful for what it offers to you. Mother Earth belongs to the Creator and her bounty is what we can experience." Veronika Holzer

The Krameterhof

Situated in Ramingstein, Lungau (Salzburg) on the slopes of Mount Schwarzenberg the Krameterhof extends as far as 45 hectares at varying altitudes ranging from 1100 to 1500 metres above sea level.

See also Documentary films with Sepp Holzer:

Sepp Holzer - The Agro Rebel: Permaculture in Salzburg Alps (Der Agrar-Rebel)

Sepp Holzer's Permaculture: Farming with Nature - A Case Study of Successful Temperate Permaculture

Improving Nutrition Through Permaculture in Malawi

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:58:00 +0000

Post courtesy of Stacia Nordin

This article was written in 2000 and won an international nutrition award from Wimpfheimer Guggenheim. The award money was used to purchase the land and homes that are now the ‘Model Village’.

(ABOVE: Jennifer Lebum standing in front of her own design in her front yard, the beans and other vegetables receive much of her wash water)

In Malawi, health is directly dependent upon the environment as over 90% of people living in Malawi fulfill their nutritional needs through subsistence agriculture. If the environment around doesn’t supply the necessary food, then there is nothing to eat. Despite this, we are finding that current agricultural systems are destroying the very soil that plants depend on to grow, making it more difficult every year to extract a yield. Permaculture is a useful approach for improving the environment around us while at the same time providing us with food and healthy water, in addition to medicines, fuel, and building materials. In Malawi we developed an approach based upon the principles of Permaculture to restore both nutritional and environmental health.

The Permaculture Nutrition activities include:

Promotion of local foods through seed collections, establishing permanent gardens, and demonstrations on using and identifying the local foods

Courses to allow people to understand and learn methods of Permaculture Nutrition

Developing a training manual with supplemental teaching aids so others can have a base of teaching tools to work with

Compiling a field guide of local foods in Malawi. This field guide will to be used by extension workers to teach Malawians and expatriates about the abundance of foods Malawi has and how to utilize them.

What is Permaculture?

The word “Permaculture” is the combination of the two words “permanent and “culture“. Two Australian men named Bill Mollison and David Holmgren coined the term in the 1970’s. It is a philosophy that allows us to use the resources that we have around us to their fullest potential. By observing and learning from our environment, such as how nature replenishes its soil, how nature protects and conserves its water resources, how nature has adapted to the specific climate of an area—we can learn how to imitate these natural processes when we are designing our farms or gardens. The more closely that we can work with nature, the more likely we are to establish a balance which will provide us with the things that we need without hurting the environment. One of the founding fathers of Permaculture, Bill Mollison, has defined applying Permaculture to agriculture as “the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems, which have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems.

Permaculture has a useful saying that can help to point us all in a more positive direction:

SEE SOLUTIONS, Not Problems

Although we have created a number of environmental and health problems in this world, it is not too late to restore health in our bodies and in our environment. To do this we will need to change our thinking about our place as humans in this world and realize that we are part of nature, not above it. We currently see humans all over the world trying to control the environment around them, when instead if they just live with nature it will provide them with all that they need. To us, this is what Permaculture is all about—living within the cycles of nature.

Why use Permaculture to improve Nutrition?

In Malawi we began to notice a relationship between the emphasis on maize, activities that are leading to environmental degradation, and the resulting nutritional problems we are currently seeing. The agricultural systems that are being promoted now involve planting solely maize in combination with fertilizers and chemicals to attack insects and other plants that may interfere with maize growth. This system is unhealthy for both the human body and for the environment. The body needs to eat a variety of different foods in order to maintain health, just as the environment needs to contain a variety of plants, animals, insects, etc. to maintain its healthy balance. Permaculture emphasizes learning about and imitating these natural systems of variety and balance to provide for all our needs, and by doing so it provides us with the diverse diet that we need for health.

Improving Nutrition through Promoting Local Foods

In the past, Malawi’s environment and diet revolved around a wide variety of local fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, millets, sorghums, roots, and various animal foods. Although many of these foods are still available, they are vanishing quickly because of the push to supply maize year-round either by forcing the land to produce it or by bringing in maize aid when the environment is unable to meet our maize demands. Maize is not the only culprit, people are becoming more interested in obtaining the foods of the west than in giving attention to the abundance of foods right around them. Expatriates who come in to ‘help’ often never take the time to learn about these valuable food resources that are already here. These local foods that are being crowded out by maize and western foods are often higher in nutrients than similar types of western foods, are available with no work or money, and are delicious!

We have categorized over 500 plant foods available in Malawi that are able to meet all the nutritional needs of people living here and we are trying to revive the knowledge of these plants. Slowly we have been collecting these food plants, sharing the seeds, teaching about their importance in nutrition and the environment, using them in our own meals, and encouraging their use for anyone living in Malawi. In two years we have established over 150 different local foods just in one small half-acre plot, in addition to other plants that can be used for fuels, medicines, and building materials. Many places in Malawi are now establishing similar gardens of local foods because of our program—at health centers, at nutrition rehabilitation units, in villages utilizing ‘gray’ water from washing clothes, dishes, or bathing, at the end of wells where water often sits in a large puddle, at mission hospitals, for AIDS patients, at schools—the list goes on. We are now beginning to document these Permaculture Nutrition activities that are taking place so that we can share with others the potential that the environment has if we work with it.

Teaching through Courses and Sharing

One way that the project has been teaching about Permaculture and nutrition is through a week-long course that we developed. In the course we look closely at the cycles in nature and how each part of it works—the soil, water, trees, plants, insects, and animals. We examine what we as humans are doing to interfere with nature, but more so, what we can do to protect the nature cycle so that we can benefit from it. We also look closely at nutrition: how the human body works, what it needs, and how we can provide what we need through nature. A key component of these courses is understanding. A wise person once noted that “People will not preserve and protect a natural environment which they do not understand or respect. When people learn about the relationship of all forms of life to each other and to the earth, they begin to have a responsible attitude toward natural resources and their wise use.” Where can we gain this understanding? There are many sources that we use in our courses: speaking, printed materials, visual aids, and sharing with each other, but the BEST way to gain understanding is from nature itself. So naturally, a large part of the course takes place outside observing how nature works, how it reproduces, how it remains fertile, and how it balances itself to support a wide variety of living things.

Another main point in Permaculture is to “Observe, Learn, and Share”.

Observe what is happening, Learn from it, and then Share the information with others. These courses are much more than just teaching about Permaculture and nutrition, it is just as much about sharing knowledge within the group. We ‘teachers’ have been learning as much from these courses about the local environment, foods, and farming practices as we have been teaching. A key group of teachers that often gets overlooked is our experienced local teachers, often labeled as ‘indigenous knowledge’. It is this knowledge that has evolved over generations that the Permaculture Nutrition approach seeks to learn about, try for ourselves, and share.

Courses are not the only way that we share what we have learned; we also share these ideas through conversations with neighbors, friends, and colleagues. We’ve held sessions around our community in villages, at the agricultural research station, at the health centre, to expatriate groups, and in the schools. We haven’t counted the numbers of people that attended the courses and sessions that we have given over the past 8 years, nor have we been able to follow up with people with whom we have spoken as this work is part of our life, not part of a ‘project’. If we included all the people that have learned through other channels such as short sessions, conversations, and garden tours, I suppose we would have talked with thousands of people about Permaculture Nutrition.

Teaching through Training Manuals

Another method we are working on now is the compilation of two manuals: one a Training Manual, and the other a Field Guide of Local Foods in Malawi. The Training Manual is in the format of our training courses and is meant to give trainers the tools for giving their own Permaculture Nutrition sessions. It is also geared toward people who want to implement Permaculture Nutrition in their lives. Whether or not someone uses the manual for training, the manual encourages everyone to share what they learn at whatever level they feel comfortable, such as with friends, family members, church groups, neighbors, etc.

The Field Guide of Local Foods is still in its infancy, but the idea is to develop the guide into a teaching tool for extension workers to identify and utilize local foods. We plan to include color photographs, line drawings, descriptions, scientific and local names, uses, seasonal availability, and nutritional information. Along with this Field Guide we are trying to integrate Permaculture Nutrition activities into the National Herbarium and Botanical Gardens so that more individuals have access to planting materials.

The Future of Permaculture Nutrition

Although our Permaculture Nutrition approach began with our work in the Ministry of Health with the US Peace Corps, the approach is now also being integrated into other food security projects in Malawi and in the region. The project is spreading itself throughout Malawi by people that have experienced the potential the environment has for giving us health, and we believe this is the only true way for permanent improvements.

We are now putting more energy into providing trainers with teaching tools to make it easier for them to share Permaculture Nutrition with others. These teaching tools will also be applicable to other countries and similar programs are already taking place in South Africa, Zimbabwe, England, the United States, and Australia, just to name a few. The uniqueness of our approach in Malawi is the emphasis on local foods and medicines to provide nutrition and health. This idea can also be transferred, but each country needs to identify and protect its own particular resources.

We hope that as others reconnect with the environment around them that they will collaborate with us in sharing the potential that nature has to provide us with nutrition and health if we respect it.

A Warning: E. F. SCHUMACHER ON THE OIL CRISIS

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:56:00 +0000

E. F. SCHUMACHER ON THE OIL CRISIS

VOLUME XXXIII, NO. 36 SEPTEMBER 3, 1980

Excerpt posted by Sheryl Dutton

Schumacher is most widely known for a collection of essays, entitled Small Is Beautiful, in which he inveighs against the inhuman scale of modern production and its lack of concern for human, spiritual values. He argues instead for the development and use of sophisticated, small-scale technology, which he says "is conducive to decentralization, compatible with the laws of ecology, gentle in its use of scarce resources, and designed to serve the human person instead of making him the servant of machines." His writings and personal efforts have been the guiding force behind the "appropriate technology" movement that has spread rapidly in recent years.

All this has made Schumacher a hero of the anti-growth, environmentalist movement, perhaps explaining why his essays on energy have been ignored in establishment circles. The loss has been ours, for he is no wild man but a highly trained, brilliant, original thinker who, as the chief economist for the National Coal Board of England from 1950 to 1970, began reflecting deeply on energy issues before most of the current crop of experts ever thought there might be a problem.

In 1961, in the dim prehistory of the energy crisis, he foresaw the present state of affairs. He recognized the inherent contradiction between continuing expansion in oil consumption at the then prevailing rates, six to seven per cent per year, and the finite nature of oil resources. He asked a simple question, one that could be answered purely arithmetically: how long could it continue? He calculated the answer and found:

Read the complete article and please leave a comment below.

Low Carbon Mowing

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 14:32:00 +0000

Swinging Scythes at Oxgrow

by Harry Wykman

On Sunday afternoon I visited Oxgrow, a great little urban agriculture project in Oxford, for one of their weekly work parties. Oxgrow attracts a great range of people, including John Letts who was giving an informal scything demonstration just as I was dismounting from my bicycle on arrival. Scything is low carbon mowing — as Wendell Berry says “… it runs on breakfast.” John, apart from being a scythe competition winner is a local farmer. John used to work as an academic archaeological botanist. He is growing heritage grains with 1400 different varieties of wheat which he has collected from many gene banks. He is also one of three founding members of the Oxford Bread Group cooperative. I hope to visit John’s place and learn more about scything, heritage grains and cooperation for the preservation of biodiversity. For now, here’s a little video of John demonstrating scything technique and scythe sharpening. Please forgive my embarrassing laughing in the second part of the video.

Low Carbon Mowing:

John Letts Scything at Oxgrow from Harry Wykman on Vimeo.

Here’s the rest of the quote from Berry on scythes:

“It is the most satisfying hand tool that I have ever used. In tough grass it cuts a little less uniformly than the power scythe. In all other ways, in my opinion, it is a better tool because, it is light, it handles gracefully & comfortably even on steep ground, it is far less dangerous, it is quiet and makes no fumes, it is much more adaptable. In rank growth one narrows the cut & shortens the stroke. It always starts - provided the user will start. Aside from reasonable skill & care in use, there are no maintenance problems. It requires no fuel or oil. It runs on breakfast. It’s cheaper to buy than most weed eaters & is cheaper to use than any other power mower. And best of all it’s good exercise.” — Wendell Berry, A Good Scythe

A few scythe resources:

Vegetable Gardens Are Booming in a Fallow Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 17:11:00 +0000

Sarah G. Fannin adds a red pepper to pickings she gathered with Linda Frisby for sale in West Liberty, Ky. More Photos »

WEST LIBERTY, Ky. — As the economy continues to stagnate in towns and cities across the country, here in eastern Kentucky it is causing things to sprout.

Garden plots are dug into the green hills, laid out in fuller force than people have seen in years. People call them sturdy patches of protection in uncertain times.

“You see a lot more people turning up ground,” said Wanda Hamilton, 61, a lifelong gardener who sells her surplus vegetables at the farmers’ market in West Liberty, a small town in the Appalachian foothills. “It’s the economy. You just can’t afford to shop at the store anymore.”

It is not just eastern Kentucky. Vegetable gardening has been on the rise across the country, according to Bruce Butterfield, research director at the National Gardening Association, driven by rising food prices and a growing contingent of health-conscious consumers. Garden-store retailers have reported increased sales over the past two years, he said, and many community gardens have waiting lists.

“Our sales have skyrocketed,” said George Ball, chief executive of Burpee, one of the largest vegetable-seed retailers. The jump, he said, began around the time Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, when anxiety about money started to rise.

In urban areas, the words “locally grown” conjure images of affluent shoppers in pricey farmers’ markets. But in rural America, consumers are opting for locally grown food — from their own gardens and neighboring farmers — largely because it is cheaper.

Rebecca Frazier, a teacher here, said she had cut her food bill in half by growing her own and preserving and by buying in bulk from local farmers. She recently paid $10 for 40 pounds of sweet potatoes, a fraction of the store price.

“I’m getting twice the food for a whole lot less money,” she said.

Timothy Woods, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Kentucky who has studied the evolution of farmers’ markets in the state, said more rural residents were selling surplus out of their gardens for supplemental income, a pattern that has helped double the number of farmers’ markets in eastern Kentucky since 2004.

Those markets are geared to shoppers who want to buy in bulk at the lowest possible price in order to pickle, can, dry and freeze, Mr. Woods said — unlike urban markets, where customers pay double rural prices and typically eat what they buy right away.

“You won’t see certified organic products or any fancy marketing,” he said of rural markets. “It’s a very different world.”

Ms. Hamilton began selling about 10 years ago when her garden produced more than she could handle. She knows she could charge more but doesn’t, because her customers “are struggling just like me.” Nearly two-thirds of her sales are to elderly residents who are using government food vouchers.

Another motivation for bigger gardens: the financial uncertainty that comes with retirement.

Brenda Engle, 56, an apparel factory employee, and her husband, Leon, 64, a former telecommunications company employee who works at Wal-Mart, are trying to squeeze their budget down to the size of their future retirement check.

They grew a year’s worth of beans. “We want to be self-sufficient,” said Ms. Engle, who has even started making her own laundry detergent.

Her garden is also therapy.

“When I’m in the garden,” she said, “the world is gone.”

Sarah G. Fannin, an agriculture educator who works with the University of Kentucky’s cooperative extension service to take research to people in the county, said calls for gardening assistance had doubled in the past three years, many from young people. Gardening classes have been full, she said, as has a class on canning taught by a colleague.

Read the full article here:
Vegetable Gardens Are Booming in a Fallow Economy
SABRINA TAVERNISE, The New York Times

Ezio Manzini on the Economics of Design for Social Innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 16:22:00 +0000

by Sarah Brooks

Image by Jolien Sumers via DESIS's Design for Togetherness Slideshare.

Ezio Manzini is an Italian design strategist, one of the world’s leading experts on sustainable design, author of numerous design books, professor of Industrial Design at Milan Polytechnic, and founder of the DESIS (Design for Social Innovation towards Sustainability) network of university-based design labs. In part one of this two-part interview, Sarah Brooks spoke with Manzini about his design philosophy ("small, local, open and connected") and building innovation at the grassroots level. In this second part, Manzini discusses the issues surrounding design for social innovation, community-supported agriculture, and the business component of Shareable design.

Q: Are there issues surrounging design for social innovation you feel are important to examine, yet are currently ignored? And how do you suggest we address them?

A: In my view, one of the most challenging issues related to design for social innovation is the quality of its results.

In fact, when we discuss traditional products, in general, we have a language and the needed sensibility to discuss their qualities. Vice versa, when we talk about design for social innovation, things are quite different and we still don’t know how to do it.

Let’s consider, for instance, a solution based on the sharing of places or products. Given the title of your magazine, Shareable magazine, I suppose that you think that to share is good. And I agree. But, what are the qualities you consider to give this positive evaluation? How do you discuss them? As a matter of fact you can share something in many different ways. We should be able to judge how much effective and economically viable each one of these different solutions could be. But also, and in my view, here is the major designers’ specific responsibility, we should have the criteria and the words to discuss different ways of sharing, endowed with different sets of soft qualities. As you can imagine, this is today a particularly challenging issue.

Image via loucaspapa

Q: Who are the people you look to for inspiration?

A: I'm doing what I am doing because during research I was engaged in five years ago, I met groups of people who opened a window of new possibilities. I was supposed to search for emerging users’ demands, and I found creative communities. I discovered that they were much more than users – they were the social heroes who where changing the world. Those people became very important to me.

Only some years after that discovery I (finally!) recognized that they were an expression (a fantastic expression, indeed!) of a larger ongoing phenomenon: social innovation.

Beyond that, of course there are also some thinkers who have been very important to me. I like to quote Amartya Sen. He's a Nobel Prize winning economist who introduced me to the notion of “capabilities”. His main work deals with social equity. His approach focuses on positive freedom, a person’s actual ability to be who they want to be and do what they want to do. It’s the idea of empowering the capabilities of people. In my view this is a very strong idea for design. In some way, when you design, you search for problems to be solved. If you take the capability approach, you search for capabilities to support. This is a paradigmatic change in the way that we think. This is connected to social innovation. You don’t ask what you can do to make people behave differently.

You ask what you can do to recognize people’s capabilities and help people use those to solve the problems they face.

Q: What projects are you working on currently?

A: Before answering this question I must say that I am a design researcher working in a team. In the last period my team has been the DIS-Unit of Research at the Politecnico di Milano. Here, the projects we have been involved in have been mostly related to what we call collaborative housing (forms of living where people share some spaces and services) and new food networks (improved and de-mediated relationships between the city and the countryside). Beyond these kinds of projects, we have been (and still are) very busy also in promoting and coordinating an international network on design for social innovation towards sustainability (DESIS). It is a network of design labs, based in design schools and design-oriented universities, actively involved in promoting and supporting sustainable changes. I have to say that majority of my time now is absorbed by this kind of work (and I like it a lot!).

Q: Can you describe your community-supported agriculture project in some more detail?

A: At present, the most relevant project we have in this field is Nutrire Milano (Feeding Milan). It is an initiative promoted and developed in Milano by Slow Food, Politecnico di Milano, Facoltà di Scienze Gastronomiche and several other local partners. This project aims at regenerating the Milanese peri-urban agriculture (that is the agriculture near the city) and, at the same time, at offering organic and local food opportunities to the citizens. To do that implies to promote radically new relationships between the countryside and the city. That is, to create brand-new networks of farmers and citizens based on direct relationships and mutual support.

The project's first step had been recognizing the existing (social, cultural and economic) resources and best practices. Moving from here, a strategy has been developed considering the emerging trends towards a new possible synergy between cities and their countryside (as the ones towards zero-mile food and proximity tourism). On this basis, a shared and socially recognized vision has been built: the vision of a rural-urban area where agriculture flourishes, feeding the city and, at the same time, offering citizens opportunities for a multiplicity of farming and nature related activities.

To enhance this vision, the program is articulated in local projects (which are several self-standing projects, each on of them supporting, in different ways, a farmer’s activity) and framework actions (including context analysis, scenario co-creation and communication, promotion and coordination of the different individual local projects).

It is remarkable that, in a large project like this (a five-year project involving a very wide regional area), thanks to its adaptability and scalability, a first concrete result (a very successful Farmers’ Market) has been obtained in less than one year since starting-up, that two other initiatives will be realized in the next years and that several others are underway and will be implemented in the near future (keeping in account the very concrete experiences of the first three ones).

Q: If there was an idea you'd like to see catch on, what would it be?

A: To find the way to combine, in a positive, sustainable way, the small and local with the global and connected. In fact, humans live in a locality and have the possibility to control a relatively small amount of variables. Therefore, the quality of their experiences and sense of control on their lives are higher if they are rooted in a place and have the real possibility to control some relevant elements of their daily life. If this is true, and this is what I strongly believe, to have a place to refer to and to have the possibility to participate to the definition of your everyday life context are, in my view, two main pillars in the building of a sustainable quality of life. And therefore the sustainable society as a whole.

But, at the same time, we have to recognize that to promote the small and local perspective can also be very dangerous. In fact, it can bring people to jail themselves in closed communities. To isolate themselves. And moving from here, to create a fake identity of who is inside his/hers “gated community”, against all the others. That is what, unfortunately, today is happening in many places in the world.

Vice versa, what we have to search for is to be local and open, at the same time. To create permeable interfaces between communities and places. To cultivate diversity to permit, at the same time, the free flow of people and ideas.

All this, of curse, is very difficult: to blend the local and the open could appear to be a quasi-oxymoron.

But maybe, it is exactly from dealing with this kind of oxymoron that a sustainable society will find the ground to emerge. A society that is based on a multiplicity of interconnected communities and places will appear as a large ecology of people, animals, plants, places and products.

Photo of Manzini by overlobe on Flickr.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to include in this conversation?

A: Yes, there is another important and very concrete point I would like to add to our conversation: until now we have spoken about social innovation (and therefore a collaborative and sharing attitude) assuming the points of view of active people, creative communities and designers. But it has to be said and underlined that this same issue has a very important business side too. If what we have discussed here is true (even only partly true), new forms of organization are appearing and new products and services will be required to fit them. In other words, looking to social innovation companies can focalize the businesses of the future.

In parallel to that and, in my view, even more important and urgent, something similar has to be said about considering the impact of this kind of social innovation on the public sector. In fact, the services traditionally delivered by the public sector consider their users to be passive recipients. What happens if we imagine a new generation of public services attuned to active and collaborative citizens?

Not only: typically, the design and development of public services has been based on top-down processes. What happens if a new generation of services emerges from a collaborative, largely bottom-up, design process?

We cannot deal with what could be the answers to these questions in this interview. But I can anticipate that they will be the core of a program that will be launched in few months. Maybe, we could continue the discussion on this point in the next future, when this program will be officially presented.

Part one of Sarah's interview with Ezio Manzini can be found here.

Original article available here:
Ezio Manzini on the Economics of Design for Social Innovation

Design for Social Innovation: An Interview With Ezio Manzini

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 21:43:00 +0000

by Sarah Brooks

A recent conversation with Neal Gorenflo led to the idea of a column dedicated to exploring the Shareable tagline – Sharing By Design. As a design strategist and interaction designer, I’m passionate about the role and responsibility of design to create a more shareable, just, and better world; so is Neal, so we’re embarking on a process of discovery through a series of conversations with designers.

Ezio Manzini is an Italian design strategist, one of the world’s leading experts on sustainable design, author of numerous design books, professor of Industrial Design at Milan Polytechnic, and founder of the DESIS (Design for Social Innovation towards Sustainability) network of university-based design labs. His work over the past 30 years in sustainability and social innovation has coalesced around four watchwords: small, local, open and connected. On a recent Friday morning we spoke via skype and I was immediately impressed with his easy manner, warmth and balanced optimism.

Q: What's most interesting to you right now?

A: Right now, what’s most interesting me is what we can do to catalyze the most abundant resources we have on the planet, which are our human capabilities. This is, if you want, my motto and it is also a very deep philosophical issue. If we consider that we have a very small heavily populated planet, to move to sustainability we have to make best use of all the resources we have.

We can look to the people of the planet in two ways. We can see 7 billion people on the planet today or 9 billion people tomorrow as the biggest threat and the biggest problem, because we are a little planet. But given that those 7 billion people are you, me, my friends and the people we know, we see them not as problems but as people with capabilities, intelligent operators. So the planet is very rich with potential intelligent operators. What does it mean to enable all the potentialities of so many intelligent people? The system can help in catalyzing the best, or catalyzing the worst. Or in making people more stupid than normally they are. I think this is a very big challenge. This is the biggest challenge with the most potential. Collectivity can help.

Slide from Manzini's Interaction 10 presentation. Photo by Simon King on Flickr.

There is, in my view, a new model of organizing society and the production and consumption and whatever. When I use the words small, open, local and connected, this is my way of telling the story.

People can tell it in another way, but the result is similar. Of course it’s a metaphor: having small entities that when connected, become bigger entities. It’s evident that it comes very strongly from the network. But once it appears, it’s not only related to what you can do, strictly speaking, in the network and technologies. It’s a way to imagine the way in which the social services are delivered in society and the way in which we can imagine economies that are at the same time rooted in a place and partially self-sufficient but connected to the others and open to the others. This is a very interesting relationship between being local, being related to a certain context and at the same time being open and connected, not provincial or one closed community that risks being against the others. This is an idea that is clear and strong if you talk about the arena where people are dealing with networks, open source and peer to peer. But it can become a very general metaphor, and embed itself in some realities to become a powerful way to organize a sustainable society.

Having dealt with sustainability for the past 30 years, I have had to reframe several times my way of discussing the problem. A lot of sustainability topics were simple to discuss in a naive way 30 years ago because nobody, us included, had concrete ideas on how a sustainable society would have been.

Now, luckily, a lot of experiences have been done and good ideas have spread. As a researcher I look for ways to propose a topic in a relatively new way that can help the process to move faster, or find a better direction. Today, for instance, my way to deal with sustainability has shifted toward social innovation.

For me, dealing with the needed sustainable changes that are mainly cultural and behavior change, the pivotal moment has been when I moved from saying “What can I do to help people change behavior?” toward the discovery that a lot of people (even if they aren’t yet so visible) had already changed, and in a good way, their behaviors. And that therefore, the right question is: ”What can I do to trigger and support these new way of thinking and doing? How can I use my design knowledge and tools to empower these grass-roots social innovations?"

Ezio Manzini-Keynote: Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

Q. Can you describe one or several specific examples of organic innovation at the grass-roots level and what makes them successful in your view?

A: We can look for example at “zero-mile food”, where not only a new way of eating but also a new relationship between production and consumption, and between the city and the countryside, are established. Or collaborative services where elderly people organize themselves to exchange mutual help and, at the same time, promote a new idea of welfare. Further examples are neighborhood gardens set-up and managed by citizens who in this way improve the quality of the city and its social fabric, or groups of families who decide to share some services to reduce the economic and environmental costs, but also to create new forms of neighborhood.

Once we start to observe society and look for this kind of initiative, a variety of other interesting cases appear: new forms of social interchange and mutual help (such as the local exchange trading systems and time banks); systems of mobility that present alternatives to the use of individual cars (from car sharing and car pooling to the rediscovery of the possibilities offered by bicycles); the development of productive activities based on local resources and skills which are linked into wider global networks (as is the case of certain products typical of a specific place, or of the fair and direct trade networks between producers and consumers established around the globe). The list could continue, touching on every area of daily life and emerging all over the world.

Looking at such cases of social innovation we can observe that they challenge traditional ways of doing things and introduce new, different and more sustainable behavior. Of course, each one of them should be analyzed in detail (to assess their effective environmental and social sustainability more accurately). However, at first glance we can recognize their coherence with some of the fundamental guidelines for sustainability.

First of all, many of them have an unprecedented capacity to bring individual interests into line with social and environmental ones. For example, one side effect is that they reinforce the social fabric, and they generate new and more sustainable ideas of wellbeing, a well-being where greater value is given to the quality of the social and physical context, to a caring attitude, to a slower pace in life, to collaborative actions, to new forms of community and to new ideas of locality.

Behind each of these promising cases of social innovation there are groups of people who have been able to imagine, develop and manage them. A first glance shows that they have some fundamental traits in common: they are all groups of people who cooperatively invent, enhance and manage innovative solutions for new ways of living. And they do so recombining what already exists, without waiting for a general change in the system (in the economy, in the institutions, in the large infrastructures). For this reason, these groups of people can be defined as creative communities:

people who cooperatively invent, enhance and manage innovative solutions for new ways of living:

social heroes who find in themselves the capability to break the rules of the game (i.e. the mainstreams ways of thinking and doing) and successfully operate in a creative and collaborative way.

Given that, the key point for me as a designer is to help these communities to exist and consolidate and the ideas they generate to spread and replicate. That is, to scale-up from being relatively marginal towards becoming more diffuse, and hopefully, in the future, the new mainstream.

Photo of Manzini by overlobe on Flickr.

Q: What do you see as the most contentious issue in design for social innovation? And where do you stand on the issue?

A: To move in the field of social innovation designers need to define a set of conceptual and practical tools. But, first of all, they have to recognize that design activity is not defined by the products to be designed, but by a specific body of knowledge that can be applicable to a multiplicity of objects and in diverse nodes of the design processes. In other words, if you don’t recognize that design can also be strategic you cannot imagine that design can play an important role in triggering, supporting and scaling-up social innovation.

At the same time, designers must recognize that they are not alone in doing this kind of work, that several other actors are involved with different crucial roles and that, therefore, their original contribution has to be better understood by the other partners (and, sometimes, by the designers themselves.)

In part two of our conversation with Ezio Manzini, Manzini discusses the design issues surrounding social innovation, his current projects, and community-supported agriculture.

Original article available here:
Design for Social Innovation: An Interview With Ezio Manzini

Resilience Debate - Sunrise Off Grid Festival

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:51:00 +0000

A panel discussion with Rob Hopkins, Patrick Whitefield, Mark Heley and Claire Milne filmed at the 2011 Off Grid Festival courtesy of Permanentculturenow.com on resilience and what it means.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

Check out http://sunrise-offgrid.co.uk/#conferences.php for more information on speakers and conference.

The Evolution of Self-Sufficiency

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 16:57:00 +0000

Have we forgotten the real meaning of self-sufficiency?

We use the expression 'self sufficiency' in a rather loose way. Usually we use it to mean ' growing our own lettuces - producing more of what we consume for ourselves' without thinking much about the significance of what we are doing in 'neighbourhood' terms.

Self-sufficiency in the Stone Age

Recently my wife and I have bought a home in Devon, England. It sits in a thinly populated but well watered and well-farmed valley which has held resident humans since the stone age. We know little of those ancient people but it seems that they lived in groups - mini communities (possbly family based) - and that they were completely and communally self sufficient. They were not dependent on 'trading' with other such groups.

Probably, like the 'Indians' in North America, they did not conceive that air, land or water could be privately owned. Although this is speculation, it is reasonable to suppose that the 'we' in them dominated the 'I', and that, in that tough, uncomfortable world, tasks were shared in a way that best met the communal need. Their 'lettuces' were grown for the community, not for the grower, in a sort of economic communism. Not much room for self-sufficiency as we think of it.

Self-Sufficiency in the 21^st century

Contrast that with the situation thousands of years on when, in much greater comfort, very few of us (in the western hemisphere) live on the land and none of us depend on it in the direct way that our ancestors did. For most of us layers of 'middlemen' - land owners, tenant farmers, processors, wholesalers and retailers - separate us from land which is no longer 'ours' and has lost much of its meaning for us. How many of us know how many teats adorn a goat's udders? Or even how to grow a row of radishes?

There is not much room for self-sufficiency in our less communally aware world. It is easier to rely on the middlemen and, although we can grow lettuces on our windowsills, there is little room for chickens or rabbits and access to useable land is essential. Whilst there is something about it which many of us respond to in a compelling and instinctual way and take great satisfaction from, there is a price to be paid: being self sufficient to any degree involves time consuming hard work, sometimes disappointment and, often, physical discomfort. Rather like living in the stone age I suspect. It speaks to many of us, though.

More about John Jackson

John Jackson is the author of 'A Little Piece of England: A Tale of Self-Sufficiency', which tells the tale of how he and his family, living in a sliver of countryside in London's commuter belt, came, over some ten years, to make itself self-sufficient.At the time, John was on the Board of Directors of the electronics company, Philips, and his wife was raising their three young children so it was the ultimate 'spare time' project.

To find out more about John's experiences head to www.jjbooks.com/blog or follow him on twitter @johnbhjackson

Sepp Holzer and the Water Landscape of Tamera

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 14:47:00 +0000

Written by Harry Wykman

The morning swim in the creatively named “Lake One” at Tamera was one of my favorite parts of the time I spent in Portugal. If “Lake One” has something of the revolutionary resonance of “year one” it would not be wholly inappropriate. This first and (currently) largest of the rain-fed water retention basins at Tamera is, for the Tamerans, the first in the movement to re-hydrate the landscapes of Tamera, Portugal and the dry lands of the world.

These large expanses of water are striking in semi-arid Mediterranean climate Portugal. They are the result of the Tamerans working with Sepp Holzer to develop a permaculture which will sustain the several hundred residents of Tamera and become a model for Portugal and elsewhere. The Tamerans live where Portugal’s cork oaks (Quercus suber) once dominated the landscape as a part of a stable relationship between people, pigs and trees. Where this most stable Mediterranean climate agroecosystems once existed, the land is now undergoing desertification.

The Tamerans are trying to develop such a stable agroecosystem again — they call it a healing biotope. They are starting with water. And where better to begin? Following Sepp Holzer’s methods, the Tamerans have created a series of large water retention spaces along with other smaller water harvesting and water distributing earthworks.

Surrounding Lake One are terraces of vegetables and fruit tree polycultures. Experiments in hugelkultur are also being conducted next to the retention basins.

A more recent basin is surrounded by fruit trees only. Trees are densely planted on small finger berms which allow for passive irrigation on the low side of the basin. On the high side trees are planted along or below a small off-contour distribution swale with micro check dams to slow the water and encourage infiltration. These swales are fed by pumps and irrigation lines from the dam.

The Tamerans appear to be working from a different tradition of water landscaping than that represented by the Keyline tradition. Influenced byHolzer and by writers like Viktor Schauberger, the Tamerans see water as a living thing which must remain vital as it moves through a living landscape — the ‘earth body’. To my eyes there were signs of some destructive patterns and underutilsed resources — things which might have been avoided by greater familiarity with the writings of P. A. Yeomans, more recent works like Brad Lancaster’s books onRainwater Harvesting in Drylands and the work of practitioners such as Darren Doherty of RegenAg. These signs included the erosion patterns which were visible below the overflows of the retention basins, the relative lack of small scale earthworks like basins for individual trees and insignificant greywater systems given the number of people on the land. Nevertheless, the intuitive approach taken by the Tamerans has resulted in a beautiful place which is rapidly undergoing regeneration.

Every effort is needed to hydrate and re-hydrate dry landscapes to make best use of the resources of soil and sunlight and to ensure the continued function of these often delicate but important ecologies. The water landscapes of Tamera represent a significant movement towards such landscape regeneration.

Interview with Permaculture Farmer Sepp Holzer

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 09:18:00 +0000

Author: Heidi Smith
Photographer: Mark Frey

The normal temperature range for growing lemon trees is seventy to fifty-five degrees. Below fiftyfour degrees Fahrenheit they go into dormancy, which is why much of the world’s citrus is grown in sun belts like Florida and California. But although the average temperature at Sepp Holzer’s farm is 39.5 degrees (4.2 degrees Celsius), sometimes plunging to thirteen degrees below zero during the winter, his one hundred acre property known as the Krameterhof is home to 30,000 fruit trees, including many citrus.

Holzer farms in the Lungau region, which is commonly referred to as the Siberia of Austria. Through paying careful attention to the interaction of different species, he has developed a system that creates astonishing yields, allows for an incredible diversity of plant and animal life, and uses none of the toxic additives so prevalent in standard agriculture.

Growing up on his family farm, Sepp Holzer began experimenting with nature early, taking great joy in each sprout as it emerged from the soil and surreptitiously creating fish ponds where legally none were supposed to be. His academic studies eventually persuaded him to abandon his former methods, however, and adopt the contemporary approach of pruning, fertilizing and using pesticides. To his surprise, the same plants which had thrived under his care now began to die. It didn’t take long for him to conclude that modern theories about farming were wrong, on a colossal scale.

Rejecting the advice of teachers and local farmers, he resumed his intuitive experiments, using power of observation and experiential knowledge as key tools. He learned which plants naturally promote or inhibit each other, and discovered how to create microclimates by using large stones to trap heat and establishing terraces to reflect warmth back into the earth. His maverick approach drew frequent criticism from state and local authorities, and lawsuits, fines and charges of “forest desecration” followed, based in one case on his refusal to plant a monoculture of spruce trees in favor of maintaining the diversity of fruit and other trees. More often than not he won these battles and in the process has earned the nickname “The Agro Rebel.”

With the way nature is now, it’s like an open book. You can read everything there about what is coming to us. There are so many signs already, and you know when it will happen.

Today Holzer’s practices are supported by agricultural scientists, including internationally renowned biologist Bernd Lotsch, and he is in demand worldwide, conducting workshops in Costa Rica, Bosnia, Colombia, Thailand, America and Africa. He sees a growing hunger for the information he can provide, particularly in light of the growing food crisis. “In my opinion, cities especially are full of people seeking a way back to nature,” he says. “Every city dweller could produce a lot of his own fruit and vegetables like I once did as a little boy by planting them out in flowerboxes on the balcony, terrace or front yard.”

He talked with SuperConsciousness about the lessons of nature.

SuperConsciousness: How is the way you see nature different from the views of those who support commercial agriculture?

Sepp Holzer: That kind of agriculture is an addiction for people who get money from some program that wants it to be done in a specific way. There’s an agenda. The farmer is given a particular way of dealing with the crops. Then he just does it that way and gets money from the government. That goes away from the natural thinking of observing nature. So a few people up there have the ability to control everything about the prices for the product. The teaching in the universities is very bad because the professors are already influenced. They are told what they have to teach.

SuperConsciousness: How do you see that relationship between mind and nature?

Sepp Holzer: It’s a constant communication with the animals, with the plants and with me. It’s total communication.

SuperConsciousness: How does that communication happen?

Sepp Holzer: Respect for nature is everything. Nothing is excluded. It’s a whole. The most important thing is you have to put yourself in the position of your opposite partner, the plant, animal, whatever. You are the plant, the fish as well as the human. If the earthworm feels well, that’s my main worker and I have healthy soil. If it doesn’t feel well, I have sick soil. I have sick plants, and this will come to the animals. If nothing is feeling well, the worm, the plant, the animal, then that sickness comes to the human. It all starts from the plants, the crops, the agriculture. I end up with a sick product and less crops.

For me it’s very clear that every entity has life, has consciousness. And all the time there is communication.

SuperConsciousness: Is it true that when you have a question about nature, you go to sleep and dream and you get your answer?

Sepp Holzer: If there is a problem in nature or some damage, first I try to get the reason. You have to get rid of all the junk in the brain and focus on that. Every human has a different way through nature. This is a sensibility which grows over time. There are different ways. Sometimes there’s a nearly full moon, or sometimes when I am walking, I talk with the tree. It just frees me. It’s like cleaning my mind. You have to look for a way to get rid of the problems, whether you lie down in the grass or put your mind into the water or a stone, you feel it.

Then you are free of that, and then you go to bed and sleep. What you haven’t realized while you were awake, it comes in the dream. Then you have to contemplate about it. It doesn’t take long; then you find a possible solution.

SuperConsciousness: You’ve referred to primeval grains, and an ancient Siberian corn grain in particular, as carrying energy and information. How does that relate to agriculture in general?

Sepp Holzer: If you make an experiment in plain soil, with a hybrid seed and the Siberian seed, I see that in the case of the hybrid seed, the corn doesn’t grow well. But the Siberian seed has lots of energy. It has a very high value. I can put it in plain soil as well. You don’t have to do anything, you just observe.

After one week, ten days, suddenly it drills into the soil. There is the sprout and it grows into the soil. Just this observation should open many eyes.

SuperConsciousness: So the Siberian seed has more life force?

Sepp Holzer: More energy. That’s natural information. This hybrid seed is already stupid. It’s the same with plants, animals and humans. We are not an exception.

It’s like the chickens who are raised in a battery. If you put them outside, they would just die. It’s the same with humans. Outside, they don’t know anything. They would die. They become victims, and the big changes that are coming, they will experience them.

Read full interview here:
Earth in Mind: Interview with Permaculture Farmer Sepp Holzer

See also:

Sepp Holzer's Permaculture - articles and videos by Paul Wheaton

and documentary films with Sepp Holzer:

Sepp Holzer - The Agro Rebel: Permaculture in Salzburg Alps (Der Agrar-Rebel)

Sepp Holzer's Permaculture: Farming with Nature - A Case Study of Successful Temperate Permaculture

Collaborative Consumption

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 22:13:00 +0000

A 'Big Shift' from the 20th century, a time defined by hyper-consumption, to a 21st century age of Collaborative Consumption, is underway.

Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities.

All the video files below are available for you to use under an Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike Creative Commons License. What does this mean?

– Go ahead, freely download, build upon and distribute these ideas and graphics for whatever non-commercial purposes you choose.
– But please follow the sharing code of giving credit/acknowledgment that they are from and made by Collaborative Consumption (with a lovely link back to this site)

See also:

The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,976 groups with 8,704,861 members around the world. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by local volunteers (them's good people). Membership is free. To sign up, find your community by entering it into the search box above or by clicking on 'Browse Groups' above the search box. Have fun!

Permasynergy: The Beginning

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 23:51:00 +0000

The word Permaculture is a marriage between the words permanent and culture. The most fundamental ethics of permaculture are care for Earth, care for people and fair share of abundance; a true existence in harmony with nature.

Welcome to Permasynergy.com

Perma- - Indicating a fixed state, i.e. permanent.

Synergy - Combined, cooperative action or functioning.

If one could say of synergy that the whole is greater that the sum of its parts, then one could surely say of permasynergy that the whole of the community is greater than the sum of its individuals. This is the essence of Permasynergy.com.

Who are we?

We are a nonprofit web-based community of permaculturists, permaculture educators and permaculture web content producers. Our intention with Permasynergy.com is education and awareness through a synergistic effort by all those involved.

Who are those involved as yet?

Permasynergy.com's administrators are:

Sophia Novack - responsible for and maintains the very informational Permaculture Media Blog.

Robert Puckett - freelance writer obsessed with permaculture and founder of Missouri Permaculture.

Who else is involved?

We would like to see permaculturists from far and wide contribute to this communal effort of education. Look at this site as a wiki site for permaculture. Any and all information pertaining to permaculture all around the world is welcome. The three of us can not to it all on our own, though. If you maintain a blog and would like to link a blog post here, we'll post a snippet of your content and then provide a link to the original source of the content. This way, you are contributing to global education with your content as well as gaining more exposure for yourself and your site amongst the digital world of permaculturists as full credit will always be given to the original author of contributed content. How symbiotic can we get? Let's ask the above question again. Who else is involved? Hopefully, you will be.

How do you get involved?

This one is easy. If you would like to be involved with this site in any way, drop us a line at Permasynergy@gmail.com. Maybe you just have a suggestion for the site or a video you saw on Youtube the other day that you think contains great permaculture information; it doesn't matter. We welcome all contributions that are relative to permaculture information and, above all, the regeneration of our planet's natural systems.

With the help of all of those within our mutually agreeable community, we look forward to cultivating this site to become your main source of permaculture information.

You can also find us here:

Permasynergy @ Facebook
Permasynergy @ Twitter

Food justice – Changing ‘there’ by changing here

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 13:47:00 +0000

by Matthew Steele

I remember as an undergrad reading Ivan Illich’s 1968 speech to American students working in Mexico and having the once-clear vision of my life’s path confused. Illich’s rather simple, passionate, and poignant criticism has stayed in the back of my consciousness ever since. He dismissed the aid efforts the students were embarking on and went further to explain that their efforts would likely have a destructive impact in their host Latin American countries.

He found the students to be ambassadors for the American way of life, positing values that would ultimately serve more to destroy their host countries instead of aid them. He further remarked that working in an American ghetto as an alternative for these students could be equally destructive, but at least there community members would have the ability to vocalize or organize a rejection of student’s efforts. I think such critiques are increasingly relevant to the world of food, especially in the potential advent of “Food Corps”, a food-focused AmeriCorps program.

In the world of food activism, and arguably in every context, a person must identify the systems of power in place in the worlds they traverse to appropriately justify what role they take in changing them. Many of my well-intended contemporaries in the food movement fail to focus their efforts where they have the most power to apply a constructive and systemic critique. It is all too common for food activists to live in a community distinctly different from the one they are serving; their work and personal lives held separate “to maintain their sanity.” Though complete assimilation will likely never be possible, nor perhaps ideal, many of these community activists fail to even marginally immerse themselves in the community they are advocating for or organizing among. While focused on serving “other” communities, many food organizers and advocates in turn ignore the food system of the privileged community in which they choose to inhabit, thus obscuring the linkages between the choices made in the spaces of privilege and the spaces that lack privilege. Undergraduate student activists working on community projects are especially prone to exist in this outsider dynamic, as they frequently have superficial, short, and often uninformed interactions, and they live, if not physically then at least mentally, in disconnected bastions of privilege at their university.

These problems surface most explicitly in the efforts of current food justice advocates abroad who are focused on holding back unsustainable industrialization from reaching the agricultural sectors of Latin American and African countries. The American food system is the model being followed and these advocates’ efforts abroad are opportunities lost to change the unsustainable and unethical system perpetuated in the U.S.

The well-intentioned activists utilize their influence as Americans, but in so doing they inadvertently reinforce the problems they are hoping to solve. They are in part legitimizing the means by which American power was attained, specifically rapid industrialization and economic imperialism.

Many food justice advocates are brought into their work by an emotional reaction to the tragic hunger that exists in the world, be it in the context of the U.S.’s inner cities or global poverty. Indeed, hunger and emergency food efforts have been the recipients of the bulk of funding in the growing food movement over the last 40 years, a time period that simultaneously saw an expansion of hunger and food-related problems. Focusing on the one issue of food access has only enabled the persistence of the true underlying causes of our unjust food system. Food access, though important, cannot be the focus of efforts. It is more important to restructure the food system in a way that empowers a community to have control in their food system thereby ensuring their continued access.

The radical conceptions of food sovereignty movements and movements such as Via Campesina (an international peasant movement for food sovereignty) were born out of this realization. To advocate for food sovereignty is to advocate for a redistribution of power within the food system so that communities have the ability and control to feed themselves with healthy and quality food.

Despite the increasing popularity of the term “food sovereignty”, funds are still doled out to organizations whose efforts only stand to superficially address food access issues. Often the funders are businesses like Walmart, which have been the major culprits in restructuring the food system and increasing income and health disparities. Philanthropic funds given to emergency food service providers satisfy a paternalistic need to help poor and starving people through direct forms of assistance. These funds are directed to those whose faces and places have become synonymous with need. However, the underlying causes of the need are ignored. Though humanitarian concerns should be addressed in tandem, the focus of available resources should be on building food security and addressing systemic issues at work causing mass hunger.

CoFed: A Systemic Approach
The idea of CoFed was built out of the growing relationships between student food cooperative (co-op) start-ups and is especially linked to the success of the Berkeley Student Food Collective in the winter of 2009-2010. The idea was to create an incubating structure to support students interested in creating food co-ops in their campus food system as well as to address some of the endemic problems, such as high turnover, institutional capacity, and memory, many of these cooperative projects have historically faced.

Student food co-ops integrate into the landscape of the university and operate as beacons for education and hubs for sustainability and activism among students. Student food co-ops as thriving money-making businesses can be a source of direct power for students aiming to transform their campus food systems. Co-ops can have control over the sourcing, the price of food for students, and revenue reinvestment. In addition, co-ops create opportunities for people to gain access to quality food through volunteering and wages. These co-ops educate and expose generations of students to food system critiques and give students a solid way to build food sovereignty. They also provide a means to create a peer-facilitated cultural shift in student communities. Through involvement in food co-ops, student organizers internalize food justice and food sustainability in their daily lives and often continue to build food sovereignty in the communities they join following graduation.

The creation and success of student-run food cooperatives, and the often-accompanying campus farms, serve to legitimize community efforts of a similar nature. The systemic efforts on behalf of student food co-op organizers have the potential to transform their campuses into more ideal models for development within a conducive intellectual environment where arguments around food sovereignty can especially gain traction. We hope that a national co-op organizing effort—in tandem with efforts to start campus gardens and farmers’ markets—can build momentum for food sovereignty on campuses throughout the country. In the process, we seek to increase the influence of food sovereignty as a development model in broader community development patterns both at the local, city, national, and international scale.

Experiential Learning
Ivan Illich was a staunch advocate of experiential learning. Indeed, one of his most important intellectual contributions was a book arguing for more self-directed, project-based learning, Deschooling Society. It is because of my support for such kinds of learning that I find it important to determine where such work is appropriate. While recognizing how much students actually gain from experiential learning, it is important to note that such learning is not gained at the expense of the communities being “helped”.

As the students at the conference Illich was speaking at noted, students often have much more to learn from their host communities than the reverse.

Students in conventional universities only have a short period of time to get “credit” for project-based learning in a community. Given the time constraints of their semester/quarter system and institutional support for a year, or at most, four years, the community food projects in which students tend to partake struggle to be genuinely community-based and sustainable, precursors which are needed for any effort toward food sovereignty. Students also often lack the knowledge and the sensitivity to ensure their work is significant, and gaining such knowledge and sensitivity should not come at the expense of the community they are hoping to serve.

Regardless of their background, students and academics often come from a place of privilege and power inherited through their explicit association with an academic institution and the intellectual legitimacy it represents.

The systems in place that maintain a university’s legitimacy provide students the privilege to bring service to a community and be accepted by the same. Indirectly, the systems that enable one’s power are condoned in the use of that power. A student is an ambassador for all of the values substantiated in the process that enabled the imparting of the privilege they wield. In the context of food systems work, the privilege a student wields is in part made possible by the exploitation of farm workers and by the unsustainable usage of fossil fuels in an industrialized and global agricultural system far removed from their daily life. It is important for all students to be cognizant that they are enabled to focus on their school projects because of a pattern of development that thrives on existing disparities in the world.

The conclusions drawn from the Illich’s paternalist critique should not be that one should throw up one’s hands and embrace blind apathy. Rather, it means one should take radical and sometimes more difficult steps to systemically change the worlds they do inhabit. For students focused on food, the most elemental of our systems, the focus should be their own campus food systems.

Sweeping policy changes such as those made to campus food dining halls or restaurants and the food service provider, often widely touted and spearheaded by administration, are rarely systemic, not sustained over time, and largely superficial even if directly and quantitatively significant in the short run. Such policy changes to campus food systems may have the overall impact and image of greening a campus, but such efforts need not involve students, and indeed could occur and be reversed without the broader student body ever noticing. The policies changed are often preliminary and enable the university or a sub-contracted food service provider to put on a green face while ultimately making few changes significant in the long-term.

The example of this I always provide is: the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle touts the sustainability of its food service. The crux of their claim to being “green” lies in the university’s switch from disposable to compostable eating utensils and plates in all of their restaurants and dining halls.

They were especially proud of their ability to pressure Coca-Cola to make a compostable cup for the first time. While it is difficult enough to fathom Coca-Cola as sustainable in any form due to its egregious human rights violations in Colombia, its abysmal environmental track record in India, or its contribution to the obesity epidemic in this country, the compostable plates and utensils they put into use are actually less sustainable than their reusable counterparts that were once employed 25 years or so prior.

This is because less resources are consumed through washing and the production of such serviceware. In making its change to compostable utensils and plates, the UW housing and food service perpetuates a fast food model.

Student food co-ops, in sharp contrast to these university-wide policies, provide a democratic cornerstone on which to build food sovereignty and channel power into students’ hands. In a co-op, students wield the power to make decisions about the quality, sustainability, and cost of their food.

The potential power these food co-ops wield pose a threat to existing power structures and each successful co-op generally must engage in a battle with the existing monopolistic food service provider, be that an in-house operation or a sub-contracted corporate food service provider like Aramark and Sodex. Food co-op efforts on campuses, after being established, go on to spearhead the implementation of important systemic changes in the broader food system and increased democracy.

From my experience, though sweeping political changes can happen, ideally, in tandem with the creation of food co-ops, if it occurs before hand, it can paradoxically become difficult to build support for a food co-op. Superficial green policy changes become status quo and legitimatize a claim to being “sustainable,” which masks the lack of any systemic changes or plans for further changes. Once a system or institution has been legitimatized by such green policy lip service, food sovereignty by paths such as food co-ops is no longer a strong consideration. In contrast, the initiation of a food co-op on campus stirs policy changes by placing students into a prominent and empowered place in the food system that allows students to further push the status quo consistently into the future.

Food Justice Work
Food Justice work cannot narrowly be conceived of as helping poor people obtain access to food. We need to consider the broader systemic effects of each choice made in our lives and how we contribute to the systems of oppression that exacerbate health disparities and food access issues in our own communities. In the context of economic oppression, the food choices of those living in poverty are reflections of the norms substantiated in popular culture. To use the analogy of Paulo Freire, the oppressed internalize a love for their oppressor. The norms established by privileged individuals disproportionately influence norms that go on to influence popular culture on the aggregate. In other words, the choices of the poor are structurally framed through the influence and power wielded by the rich.

Regardless of where in the food system one focuses one’s efforts, there are injustices present throughout the system. The most blatant exploitation in the food system—that of the farm workers—can be addressed if the power and responsibility of sourcing is put into the hands of consumers. Consumers can then make decisions in collective dialogue with others, which creates the space for considerations of ethics and social values. This is precisely the goal of the student food co-ops I work with.

The influence of retail is powerful, and as such it is an important medium through which sovereignty can be built. As Raj Patal puts it in Stuffed and Starved (2007):

“The highest temple of the modern food system is the supermarket. The supermarket chain is an empire of logistics, one that governs and regulates the smaller fiefdoms within the food industry, such as the commission agent’s rule over the grower, or the distributor’s clutch on the agent. Through its decisions, and through its close supervision of each step in a product chain, supermarket-buying desks can fire the poorest farm workers in South Africa, flip the fates of coffee growers in Guatemala or tweak the output of paddy terraces in Thailand.”

Walmart, while clearly a powerful player in the food system, gained its power through unethical, unsustainable, and highly profitable, exploitive business practices. The use of its power in addressing food insecurity is enabling of Walmart’s business model both directly, by shielding the company from criticism, and indirectly by legitimizing that power among those being aided. Up until 2000, and more starkly in 2007, the Waltons were notorious for their lack of charity and the small size of the gifts they did give out. The company is making these superficial changes largely in response to the growing criticism in response to their mammoth presence in the food system, growing beyond 40% of all national food sales.

Retail power can be taken from corporate moguls and, through co-ops, be put into the hands of community members. This can happen in a wealthy neighborhood far easier than it can happen in a low-income neighborhood, and happening in the former will help make it possible in the latter. Efforts in one community can help build solidarity for community based efforts toward food sovereignty in others. Community food co-ops in low-income neighborhoods notoriously fail for a myriad of reasons including but not limited to issues surrounding poverty, such as a lack of human capital, a lack of community buy-in, and a lack of access to capital and credit. A report by UW (Madison) Center for Cooperatives provides some examples of failed cooperatives in low-income communities but identifies that community food co-ops that exist on the periphery between low-income and upper-income communities have been able to be very successful.

I understand the potential of a university to be an “anchor institution” for a local low-income community. An anchor institution, as discussed in the development field, utilizes its institutional power to catalyze surrounding development. Indeed, the local university, the University of Pennsylvania, enables me to work among a low-income community in North Philadelphia.

But even in my position as a food ethnographer, I find myself not entirely immersed in the local community. A complete immersion requires sacrifices only some of the most privileged people could enjoy. To radically change the fate of an oppressed community, one needs to share its fate. For young, educated, but poor community organizers, time spent developing relations and immersing themselves in a world of chronically unemployed individuals is time that could otherwise be spent among those who could connect them with opportunities. Such a situation creates contentious incentives especially for those who are doing community food organizing as an employment strategy while unemployed, as is largely the case in Philadelphia.

I see few genuine, complete immersions by young food justice advocates in the area that I live.

Indeed, the food justice world mainly consists of hyper-educated food activists who primarily associate with each other. At some level, I think people can immerse themselves sufficiently among a community to build truly community-based projects. However, such organizers need to accept that they will always be balancing a tension between what privileges they can sacrifice against the degree of their community immersion. For some, immersion is not even possible as the sacrifices are too difficult or impossible for them to make.

Many of the urban farmers I work with cannot or are unwilling to adapt their appearances to fit the community being served, because so much of their identity, and by extension motivation, is wrapped up in their radical appearances. They expect and hope to be “accepted,” and at some level this happens. Though the culture and values they are perpetuating may be admirable, they walk as aliens among the people they are working with, unable to connect with important figures who hold cultural influence over the neighborhood. As a result, they are unable to build bridges to create genuinely community-based food projects. In my neighborhood, the cultural icons are not the existing community organizers, but rather the hustlers of the neighborhood, the dealers, the players, the graffiti artists, and the rap artists. Those in the age group between 16 and 24 are often the most important cultural figures in the neighborhood and yet the most absent in community food projects.

Building a highly successful community-based grocer is possible, as demonstrated by People’s Grocery in West Oakland. Much of its ability to integrate into the surrounding community was due to the efforts of Nikki Henderson. Though an outsider, Henderson lived in, immersed herself in, and built community among the communities of color in West Oakland. Her partner is an equally engaged and respected community organizer involved withOakland’s hip hop scene. The project also benefited from its proximity to San Francisco, a city of privilege spearheading food sovereignty.

In neighborhoods like Philadelphia, the food co-ops that exist have been invisible. Of the two co-ops, Mariposa has been for members only, though is about to open to the public. Weaver’s Way was closed to the public as well up until a few years ago. While the latter is now open, it is tucked away on the outskirts of the city near the suburbs. For now, those living in low-income communities consider the notion of convenient, affordable, healthy and quality food access only in association with the suburban development model and by way of a corporation like Walmart. Ironically the migration process of “getting out” to the suburbs to enjoy these benefits will only continue to disintegrate the local community, making it ever more unlikely that things will change for the better.

I hope the reader takes from this article a clearer idea of where to focus their passions. One wields the most power in a descending concentric sphere of influence in relation to one’s identities and respective communities. Though I focused on students in this article, the arguments can be extrapolated. One must analyze where best to focus their efforts, taking into account what role they could occupy in the potential communities they aspire to serve. Efforts placed in one potential sphere of the food system are absent in other. Ultimately, efforts to reform the part of the food system in which we are active participants will have more impact in changing broader systems and indirectly address the disparities that spur a lack of access. Though hunger and other problems associated with food access are important issues to address, these issues are rooted in the disparities and poverty spawned from systemic and historical injustices that have as much to do with privileged contexts as they do spaces plagued with hunger.

For students, student food cooperatives can build food sovereignty into the food system of the institutions that provide them their privilege. Having food co-ops on universities throughout the country will indirectly influence development patterns by normalizing and legitimizing food sovereignty and food co-ops. Working in your own communities starting food sovereignty projects is just as important if not more important than working in “other” communities.

Matthew Steele works part-time as the Mid-Atlantic Regional Director for the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive, incubating food cooperative start-ups at universities and consulting with existing cooperatives. He also works part-time as a food ethnographer through the University of Pennsylvania, studying and documenting the local food movement, specifically market creation in areas of low access. Matt facilitated the creation of the University of Washington Student Food Cooperative (UWSFC) before moving to Philadelphia to focus on community development in North Philadelphia in conjunction with the work of his partner, Fernando Montero, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Original article available here:
Food Justice – Changing ‘there’ by changing here

Stir - www.stirtoaction.wordpress.com - a newly established online magazine. The second issue features articles about Radical Gardening, Food Justice and Food Cooperatives amongst other interesting and insightful interviews and articles on intellectual property, transforming the university and how to respond to austerity measures.

Summer 2011

Sod It! Radical Gardening?
by George McKay
‘Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks’. But how can a garden be an attack, a flower a critique, a trowel an agent of social change?

Food Justice — Changing ‘there’ by changing here
by Matthew Steele
I remember as an undergrad reading Ivan Illich’s 1968 speech to American students working in Mexico and having the once-clear vision of my life’s path confused. Illich’s rather simple, passionate, and poignant criticism has stayed in the back of my consciousness ever since.

Don’t Defend the University, Transform It!
by Amy Clancy
The future of the university hangs in the balance and the instinct to defend it against a wholesale attack seems to be an obvious response. But what is it that so many rush to defend?

The Prejudice Against Prometheus
by Alberto Toscano
As the last echoes of a bullish neoliberalism fade, and we are asked to accustom ourselves, indefinitely, to austerity’s hair-shirts, it’s worth reflecting on whether the attitudes learnt over the past few decades retain within them the resources for effective opposition.

Grow a Grocery!
by Debbie Clarke
Back in the early 90s, Unicorn Grocery’s founders felt frustrated at their lack of shopping options, and aimed to create the kind of place where they wanted to shop themselves—where their needs were met and their ethics not sold out. And so Unicorn was born.

Mobilisation vs Pacification in Brazil’s Favelas
by John Gledhill
Brazilians really are crazy about football, and poor Brazilians are as pleased as everyone else that Brazil is hosting the 2014 World Cup (and 2016 Olympics). Yet families who built their own homes on land to which they did not have secure title also worry about being forcibly relocated because of urban redevelopment in preparation for 2014.

Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain
Reviewed by Rashmi Rangnathi
Can a tree and its properties be copyrighted, and those who customarily use it be criminalised? Can the girl scouts be sued for singing copyrighted songs such as “Puff the Magic Dragon” around the campfire? Recently, a corporation trademarked the phrase ‘Radical Media’. With the increasing privatisation of our cultural assets, can we change the system that allows corportations to own our intellectual products?

Celsias Interview: David Holmgren

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 21:23:00 +0000

[Celsias] David, I just wanted to take a moment first to thank you for living such an inspiring, creative, and explorative life. I've been very interested in permaculture for the last few years, and I'm keen to discuss many of the themes that have emerged in your latest book, Future Scenarios: How Communities to Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change.

The book is really great concise reference. Thank you for not providing another 500 page thesis on either climate change or peak oil. Your treatment is really thoughtful and well analysed. Digging into the material, what I found really enlightening was your take on the challenges of climate change and peak oil to be ones that can have particularly positive results.

Most people view these factors in a very "gloom and doom/the world is going to end" sort of way. Perhaps you can elaborate on some of your thoughts from the book?

[David Holmgren] Permaculture arose out of the limits of resources and unsustainability of society 30 years ago. People could have come to permaculture for a variety of reasons over the years. Since the 1970s, Bill Mollison and I have been very touched by Club of Rome, the ongoing oil crisis, environmental impact issues, global food crisis, and how we narrowly averted catastrophes on so many occasions.

A lot of these issues dating back to the 70's were largely swept under the carpet in 1980s and it no longer became acceptable to talk about "limits to growth". Later climate change became the galvanizing issue for the environmental movement, rather than just running out of resources. For me, over that long term, getting a better understanding that these things are taking place has meant I restructured what I believe in. I've changed my focus around the more positive outcomes will result from these inevitable shifts.

It works on two levels. One can change their own life in taking these issues as "Normal" (e.g. a world of scarce resources), become more self sufficient, and start doing things with nature rather than focusing on technological solutions. Through that process, you gradually become more comfortable with those realities becoming the norm. So actually the things we have been talking about, such as food being grown more locally for example, will become both economically and environmentally necessary. These trends make me comfortable.

Looking at the numbers, even if we were living with a 10^th of the resources we have now, we would be better off than many of our recent ancestors, and maybe even relatives several generations ago. There is the opportunity to bring back many patterns of human behavior that have served us well for centuries. While the changes ahead of us could be quite challenging, some many good things can come out of it.

For example, the sense of community: decreased mobility and high energy cost will lead to people talking to their neighbours again... even if it is because they can't get away from it! Challenges will mean that people have to look out for each other. Real community isn't a "utopian" thing, it is a really basic thing... it is a normal human state.

Speaking of community, you mention Cuba's "Special Period" (the period during the 1990's where oil, fertilizer, and other imports were essentially shut out by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the U.S. lead embargo) as an interesting case study.

On that note, the activist and social entrepreneur Roberto Perez certainly has presented some incredibly inspiring stories of how people can overcome obstacles relating to peak oil. Then again, in the culture of Cuba, it might be said that the family and community bonds are stronger than say, in a dormitory suburb of Cleveland, Perth, or Leeds.

Do you think that other countries following a purely Capitalist model will have similar success as Cuba did in its challenges? Do we have the same dormant seeds for success in the face of adversity?

The Cuban society does have a strong sense of the collective, and what's good for everyone. In a crisis it is easy for those things to come to the fore. We don't have those things as well developed in Western Society and that is a key weakness. In some ways though, what we have something that puts us in a better position.

In Cuban society, most aspects of day to day life are controlled by huge bureaucracy. From the Western perspective, we don't have to wait for approval, we have an established culture of do it yourself and an entrepreneurial nature. We don't have to wait to be told what to do. I would hope that our capacity for individual action will be a key strength in these difficult times ahead.

With the global economic crisis in full swing, a lot, at least on the surface, seems to be changing. Do you think any of the soul searching and introspection going on at the moment is going to result in any profound social/economic changes, or do you think people will refer back to the same models that got them into the mess to begin with?

I think that structurally, there will be some kind of economic recovery and increase in demand for things like oil. Curiously, what's been overlooked in this recent situation is the price spike in oil that preceded the economic fallout. Of course after that happened, all the other financial instabilities were realized which made the whole thing go down that much faster. A spike in the price of oil has preceded every economic recession in recent history.

With all the forces trying to stimulate the economy now, there could be several cycles of advance and decline from here on out. With each one of these coming cycles, there will be people who question these degrees of greed and desire, questioning the irresponsibility and negligence of it all. I think people will start to change their lives away from a culture of consumption. They won't just want to be back in that cycle again.

While people stepping away from the lifestyle of consumerism might be bad for the economy, what people aren't commenting on is that this contraction is profound when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It's hardly getting any notice. While there are many proponents of a "green tech fix" to both economic and climate problems, nobody knows in the long term if a green tech approach will reduce emissions and slow climate change in the long run.

This economic contraction has taken people's attention away from climate change and peak oil, but at the same time it is normalizing much of the behavior that will be necessary to deal with those larger, non-negotiable forces at play.

One area I'm particularly keen to get your take on is the demand for oil in light of this economic downturn. Accordingly, oil production has declined along with prices. I came across an interesting theory on something called "Peak Lite ".

The theory essentially says this sudden drop in demand and price, and massive scaling back of production, may essentially "shut off" any rebound in production that is needed in the immediate future-- possibly shutting down certain oil projects for good. As all our current world systems essentially run off the energy provided by oil, this drop in productive capacity could pose a major problem if/when demand ramps up again. What are your thoughts on this?

That dynamic I would take for granted in that the really hardline geological view in how peak oil plays out has always been a bit doubtful as to when "global peak" takes place because of human factors in the economy, and how they come into play. There are some human effects that will fundamentally change the rules of the game.

It is very clear that all energy investment has been knocked on the head by two factors coming together. One is shortage of capital with banks not lending/investing in new oil infrastructure. The other factor is the oil price drop as that pulls the rug out from under the idea of profitability in developing oil resources. A lot of those oil resources need $100 a barrel for development to be profitable. The price of oil going back up does not automatically mean that investors will come back to the table right away.

The global heights of production might never reach the highs they might have reached without peak oil. It may mean that quite a few resources will never be dug out of the ground. If we go into a long contraction, they may never be extracted. People may have differing views on if it is a good thing or bad thing. We might have less energy to make the transitions we need to make, or we might not have done anything positive with that extra energy anyway. Overall, I see a lot of positive things that can come out of it.

Not everyone in the world is blessed with the ability to leave urban life for a smaller, less densely populated countryside location to practice subsistence agriculture. In many urban areas, especially with tens of millions of people as we see in Asian cities, even urban agriculture is challenging at best. What sort of scenarios do you see as likely to play out in those sorts of areas? How can people turn challenging situations and prosper in an urban environment in spite of hardship, or is a complete collapse the only likely option?

It's clear that in high density cities, even if affluent places, people can initially get by with less resource consumption, especially in transport. My view over the last 30 years is that I see high densities as highly problematic. If there is a decline in supply changes, especially food, it is very difficult to maintain them. We will likely see a return to rural areas and a progressive abandonment of some urban environments.

Rural densities aren't always the best options either. Suburban densities are potentially the best option for adaptation. There are communities in place, some land availability, and generally good basic infrastructure. It is possible to do an incremental ad hoc adjustment in making those environments sustainable and habitable.

In visiting Japan and Latin America, and in a lot of other societies outside of the West, there is a capacity for working together for the common good and strong family support networks. People are used to a certain level of chaos and lack of security. People build their own ramshackle houses and there is a lot of capacity towards cooperation. It gives them resilience. Countries like Australia have social brittleness by comparison. There is always that mixture of the climate and the resources available, but also the social and psychological resources at people's disposal. I'm certainly under no illusion that we can make high density urban areas aren't going to be sustainable into the future.

In the Brown Tech scenario mentioned in the book, it could be possible that some urban areas are maintained to a certain level, but not to the ones we enjoy today (e.g. the roads, communications network, energy distribution). Centralized services will be difficult to maintain and enormously problematic. Many cities around the world are also located at or near sea level. Putting resources towards maintaining sea walls etc. will be futile in the future.

The "End of Suburbia " is a fairly simple notion, mainly an equation about unaffordable commuting. People will be able to grow food and get the basics, and they do have access to land and the ability to harvest water, as well as use extra space like garages as localized work space. Once you have a home based lifestyle, these are all advantages. The suburban lifestyle will certainly not be people sipping lattes and working on their Mac laptops however.

Turning the attention to climate change, Jim Hansen and others have started changing their tenor from discussions of mitigation of carbon emissions and other green house gasses, to adaptation-that climate change is indeed happening now, and poised to come on much stronger and faster than we first conceived. Are you seeing things from a similar vantage point?

Yes, certainly in Australia with bush fires and floods happening at the same time, dealing with the impacts of climate change is a pretty high priority. That is a discussion that tended to divide people talking about both peak oil and climate change. Climate change has focused on more of a tragedy of the commons, whereas peak oil discussions have focused on adaptation and resilience.

Now it's interesting that the adaptation theme has come up with climate change. Some of the people involved with climate change over the last 30 years are coming to adaptation very reluctantly as they think such an approach means people are giving up on stopping climate change.

Through permaculture, we have been pushing for diversity; even a tree species that might be marginal to your climate region might survive and help adapt to changes in climate. That flexibility is important. There has been too much faith placed in the ability to make the macro change.

Once there is the belief that future growth as we know it is not possible, there will be huge economic collapse. That is what underpins all of the wealth that has been hit by the current financial crisis, but as soon as there is the widespread belief that future growth is no longer possible, all those stocks and shares plummet in their value. What we tangibly have in the way of resources is not reflective of that paper wealth we focus on.

It is really important that people focus on adaptability and it is certainly something that has been behind a lot of permaculture ideas that depart from mainstream ecology views of leaving the environment "as it is". Nature needs to be allowed to move and shift as she determines and that's how she's survived crisis of the past.

We represent a huge challenge and threat to nature, but in past crisis on earth, there have been other things that have been much more threatening than what we've done. Flexibility and adaptability in nature has to be mirrored in what humans are doing, and of course a lot of those things that need to be done are things that reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. We don't necessarily see any conflict between adaptation and mitigation if you do it in a holistic approach.

The key is to look at the whole system rather than breaking things down into a narrow view. It is a deeper thinking tool to how we examine issues in a deeper way and get past cultural blind spots. We need a completely new way of thinking and that's the strongest contribution of permaculture, as much as the particular techniques that people need to adapt and copy. It's how we think into new situations where we don't have any models or examples to work from, or in other words, our future.

I'm a big fan of taking personal action and responsibility for one's life, which is part of the reason I find permaculture such a fascinating design strategy and philosophy. What advice would you give to our readers waking up to issues like climate change and peak oil on how they can take the reigns of their future and get involved?

It's always difficult to give personalized advice, and the era of giving blanket solutions is part of the passing world. Having said that, I think it is important for people to build their local networks of mutual support, both through economic resources as well as supplies and familial community wherever you are. Rather than just existing in a network so characterized by the internet, a lot of our wellbeing will be determined by who we know and how we get things.

It is important to have some skill that is useful to another to a person. A lot of us have skills that are only useful when plugged into a larger system (governments, corporations, technology). Having practical skills will be highly useful. That is the sort of cultural insurance that can be done anywhere. You don't have to grow your own food, you just need to be useful. One's own physical fitness is important to maintain and be able to do things, to be able to look after yourself. Focus on things that can be done anywhere. Decide where the geographic community is and plug in. Don't wait to practice permaculture when you move out into the country, it is something that can be useful no matter where you are or circumstances you have.

What else is in the pipeline for you professionally in the years ahead?

There's a manuscript now in the works on retrofitting the cities and suburbs into the future. It will look at not just the physical retrofitting of the landscape, buildings and environment, but also at the social shifts that will take place and how we can increase efficiency through behavior change. Larger households will start to take shape, whether people are related or not. There are huge efficiencies to be gained by the economy of scale in households. Most of the "gigantic structures" of what we have in society are too big to be sustainable, and yet the current households are too small to be sustainable. It is very difficult to do a lot in the way of self reliance of a household of 1-2 people. Things get more efficient in 5-10 people household. I'm interested in exploring the evolution of these ideas and the culture that will grow up around it.

Seems like we've got something to look forward to. David, it has been a pleasure. Thanks again for all your amazing work and we look forward to hearing more from you as you develop these new avenues.

David Holmgren is best known as the co-originator with Bill Mollison of the permaculture concept following the publication of "Permaculture One" in 1978. Since then he has written several more books, developed three properties using permaculture principles, conducted workshops and courses in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and Japan. David is passionate about the philosophical and conceptual foundations for sustainability which are highlighted in his latest book, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. David lives with his partner Su Dennett and their son Oliver at "Melliodora", a one-hectare permaculture demonstration site at Hepburn Springs, Central Victoria, Australia. Visit his web site at www.holmgren.com.au

Posted on May 12, 2009 by Chris Tobias of Celsius

The New Green Revolution: How Twenty-First-Century Science Can Feed the World

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:51:00 +0000

by Olivier De Schutter and Gaëtan Vanloqueren

A farmer gathers wheat in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. (UN Photo/Eric Kanalstein)

In Brief

The combined effects of climate change, energy scarcity, and water paucity require that we radically rethink our agricultural systems.

Countries can and must reorient their agricultural systems toward modes of production that are not only highly productive, but also highly sustainable. Following the 2008 global food price crisis, many developing countries have adopted new food security policies and have made significant investments in their agricultural systems. Global hunger is also back on top of the international agenda. However, the question is not only how much is done, but also how it is done—and what kinds of food systems are now being rebuilt.

Agroecology, the application of ecological science to the study, design, and management of sustainable agriculture, offers a model of agricultural development to meet this challenge. Recent research demonstrates that it holds great promise for the roughly 500 million food-insecure households around the world. By scaling up its practice, we can sustainably improve the livelihoods of the most vulnerable, and thus contribute to feeding a hungry planet.

Key Concepts

There are roughly 925 million hungry people on the planet. Many of them are smallholder farmers or farm laborers.
With many governments poised for a large-scale reinvestment in agriculture, the question is not only how much, but how.
Agroecology—the effort to mimic ecological processes in agriculture—could provide a framework for this reinvestment. Already, agroecological practices are being used around the world, increasing productivity and improving efficiency in the use of water, soil, and sunlight.
But before agroecological practices can be scaled up globally, we must assess the market and political obstacles that stand in their way. Here, we present six principles that could help us overcome these obstacles.
Our “farmers-in-chief”—heads of states—can make the new paradigm on agriculture, food, and hunger a reality.

Some crises appear and disappear in global media while remaining acute in the lives of real people.

Global food insecurity is this type of crisis. In January 2011 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) warned that global food prices in December 2010 exceeded the 2008 peak during the so-called food price crisis that sparked “food riots” across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.¹ The UN also warned that the price increase would not stop overnight and that we were entering “danger territory.”² Although prices stabilized in the spring, global food prices in May 2011 remained higher than they were in June 2008. We will see more price spikes in the future, due to a growing discrepancy between supply and demand, the impacts of climate disruption on agricultural production, and the merger of the energy and food markets. The food crisis is here to stay.

Governments have pledged to reinvest massively in agriculture. After three decades of neglect, this is welcome news. However, as countries announce impressive figures on the scope of their reinvestment, we tend to forget that the most pressing issues today regarding agricultural reinvestment involve not only how much, but how.

The choice between agricultural development models has immediate and long-term consequences.

Since 2008 some major reinvestment efforts have been channeled into a slightly modified version of the Green Revolution without fully considering our other great contemporary challenge of climate change. In contrast, scant attention has been paid to the most cutting-edge ecological farming methods—methods that improve food production and farmers’ incomes, while also protecting the soil, water, and climate.

Yet, with an estimated 925 million hungry people on the planet,³ we must think outside the box. Major shifts in food security policies are being discussed in most countries. Yet the best options are simply not being promoted sufficiently.

The first Green Revolution—as developed in Mexico and then in South Asia in the 1960s—succeeded in improving yields in the breadbasket regions where it was implemented.⁴ But it sometimes came at a high social and environmental cost, including the depletion of soils, pollution of groundwater, and increased inequalities among farmers.⁵ And the productivity gains were not always sustainable in the long term.

Our strategy today must recognize the connection between climate change and food security. It must leverage the potential of the new sustainable agriculture paradigm with policies designed to scale up and mainstream the systems that have proven records of success. It must not only preserve land and other agricultural resources for future generations; it must actively restore lands and resources that have been degraded. It must monitor progress using multiple indicators, ones that go beyond the amount of money invested and the amount of crops harvested. It must also create the enabling macroeconomic environment needed to link sustainable agricultural systems to markets.

Because hunger can be attributed to a wide range of causes, a comprehensive strategy to combat food insecurity would have to address issues such as an international trade regime that penalizes developing countries through subsidies that stifle local markets, the infliction of an unsustainable burden of foreign debt, and the impact of speculation on commodities markets. We do not focus on these themes, which are well known. Our interest is in the paradigm of agricultural development under which most policymakers work, and whether it meets the challenge of today and tomorrow. We believe it does not, and we seek to outline an alternative path.

Climate Change and Energy Scarcity: Key Elements of the New Food Security Context

Climate change is already having dramatic consequences for agriculture and international food security. Rain patterns are shifting, leaving farmers unable to harvest mature crops. More prevalent droughts and floods place unprecedented stress on agricultural systems. Water sources are more variable and are rapidly exhausted. Peasants are already struggling with these disruptions in Central America and East Africa. And, by 2080, 600 million additional people could be at risk of hunger as a direct result of climate change.⁶

In Sub-Saharan Africa, arid and semiarid areas are projected to increase by 60 million to 90 million hectares, while, in Southern Africa, it is estimated that yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent between 2000 and 2020.⁷ Losses in agricultural production in a number of developing countries could be partially compensated by gains in other regions. But the overall result would be a decrease of at least 3 percent in productive capacity by the 2080s, and up to 16 percent if the anticipated carbon fertilization effects (incorporation of carbon dioxide in the process of photosynthesis) fail to materialize.⁸ Without closer international cooperation, the FAO and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) warn that the direct impacts of climate disruptions on food production patterns will also lead to more “extreme volatility events on international food commodities markets”—the economists’ way of describing the 2008 global food price crisis.

Additionally, our current systems of agriculture are utterly dependent on fossil fuels. Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency, warned in August 2009 that oil is running out far more quickly than previously predicted, and that global production is likely to peak in about ten years.

A study of the 800 biggest oil fields reveals that the rate of decline in the output of the world’s oil fields is 6.7 percent a year.⁹

The impacts of energy scarcity have been obscured by the economic crisis over the past two years.

However, the price of the crude oil barrel has constantly increased in 2009 and 2010 thanks to economic growth in China and other emerging countries. Its level in May 2011 exceeds the level preceding the 2008 food price crisis.¹⁰ Although the geopolitical situation in the Arab world and speculations about its consequences are currently driving oil prices up, economic recovery in developed nations and growth in the rest of the world will keep prices high.

An agroforestry system (interplanting poplar trees and wheat) in southern France. The system produces more grain and wood by hectare than if the two crops were cultivated separately. (Christian Dupraz )

Modern agriculture is highly sensitive to oil prices. Our food relies on oil or gas at many stages: nitrogen fertilizers are made of natural gas, pesticides are made out of oil, agricultural machinery runs on oil, irrigation and modern food processing are highly energy-dependent, and food is transported over thousands of miles by road or air. While the exact impacts of peak oil on the availability and cost of both oil and natural gas are unknown, it will undoubtedly affect food security. Energy scarcity is thus a key element of any policy for reinvestment in agriculture. But it is one that many current efforts lack.

Our current methods of food production are thus deeply unsustainable. Water scarcity and land degradation—two of the anticipated results of climate change in many regions—will add to the challenge of feeding the world. Already, 37 percent of China’s total territory suffers from land degradation. And, while China has 21 percent of the world’s population, it has only 6.5 percent of the freshwater available globally.¹¹

This can be changed. Some agricultural systems can mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and increase resilience to climate extremes. According to a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report, the agricultural sector could be largely carbon neutral by 2030 and could produce enough food for a population estimated to increase to 9 billion by 2050—if systems proven to reduce emissions from agriculture were widely adopted today.

Roots of the Future: The New Agricultural Paradigm

A few decades ago, agronomists were faced with a sharp increase in pest outbreaks in modern monocultures, while ecologists were starting to model the complex interactions between insects and plants. At the same time, scientists were observing the effectiveness of traditional farming systems.

The two scientific disciplines of agronomy and ecology converged, shaping the field of agroecology.

Agroecology is the application of ecological science to the study, design, and management of sustainable agriculture.^12,13 It seeks to mimic natural ecological processes, and it emphasizes the importance of improving the entire agricultural system, not just the plant.

The pioneers of agroecology proposed that agroecological systems be based on five ecological principles: (1) recycling biomass and balancing nutrient flow and availability; (2) securing favorable soil conditions for plant growth through enhanced organic matter; (3) minimizing losses of solar radiation, water, and nutrients by way of microclimate management, water harvesting, and soil cover; (4) enhancing biological and genetic diversification on cropland; and (5) enhancing beneficial biological interactions and minimizing the use of pesticides.¹⁴ Now, agroecologists are looking to integrate food systems, as well as agricultural systems, into the scope of agroecology.¹⁵

A growing number of scientists work and publish on this field,^16,17 and, recently, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a four-year study involving 400 experts from all regions as well as international organizations such as the World Bank, the FAO, and UNEP, called for a fundamental paradigm shift in agricultural development and strongly advocated the increase of agroecological science and practice.¹⁸ Agroecology is also at the core of the latest reports published by the FAO and UNEP.^19,20 Meanwhile, the farmers united through La Via Campesina, the largest transnational peasant movement, have rapidly integrated agroecological principles in recent years.²¹

Today, agroecology has concrete applications on all continents. Its results speak for themselves. The widest study ever conducted on these approaches, led by Jules Pretty of the University of Essex, identified 286 recent interventions of resource-conserving technologies in 57 developing countries covering a total area of 37 million hectares in 2006.²² The average crop yield increase was 79 percent, and a full quarter of projects reported relative yields greater than 2.0 (i.e., 100 percent increase).

Malawi, which ramped up its fertilizer subsidy program in 2002 following the dramatic drought-induced food crisis the year before, is now also implementing agroforestry systems using nitrogen-fixing trees.²³ (Agroforestry involves planting trees with crops to more efficiently use land, nutrients, and water.) By mid-2009, over 120,000 Malawian farmers had received training and tree materials from the program, and support from Ireland has enabled extension of the program to 40 percent of Malawi’s districts, benefiting 1.3 million of its poorest people. Research shows that the program has increased yields from one ton per hectare to two to three tons per hectare, even if farmers cannot afford commercial nitrogen fertilizers.²³ With an application of a quarter-dose of mineral fertilizer, maize yields may surpass four tons per hectare. The Malawi example shows that while investment in organic fertilizing techniques should be a priority, it should not exclude the use of other fertilizers. An optimal solution could be a “subsidy to sustainability” approach: an exit strategy from fertilizer subsidy schemes that would link fertilizer subsidies directly to agroforestry investments on the farm in order to provide for long-term sustainability in nutrient supply, and to build soil health for sustained yields and improved efficiency in fertilizer use.²³

In Tanzania, 350,000 hectares of land have been rehabilitated in the Western provinces of Shinyanga and Tabora using agroforestry.²⁴ In Zambia, agroforestry practices outperform fertilizers in rural areas where road infrastructure is poor and transport costs for fertilizer are high (which is the case in much of the African continent). The benefit to cost ratio for agroforestry practices ranges between 2.77 to 3.13 in contrast to 2.65 with subsidized fertilizer applications, 1.77 in fields with nonsubsidized fertilizer, and 2.01 in nonfertilized fields.²⁵ Dennis Garrity, the director of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, estimates that a global implementation of agroforestry methods could result in 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide being removed from the atmosphere—about a third of the world’s total carbon reduction target.²⁶ Such agricultural developments are examples of what many experts and scientists are calling the “evergreen revolution.” Among them is M.S. Swaminathan, the architect of the first Green Revolution in India, who now advocates organic farming.

In West Africa, stone barriers built alongside fields help retain water during the rainy season, improving soil moisture, replenishing water tables, and reducing soil erosion. Significant gains result: the water retention capacity of the soil is increased five- to tenfold, the biomass production ten- to twentyfold, and livestock can feed on the grass that grows along the stone barriers after the rains.

Such “water harvesting” techniques are highly efficient in fighting desertification. They match the efficiency of mechanized irrigation, and are vital for food-insecure communities who live in dry environments. Indeed, it is impossible to build a truly Green Revolution without what Alan Savory calls a Brown Revolution: one that enhances soil organic matter, leading to sustainable productivity gains.²⁷

Women work on a small farm in Orissa, India. (2006 IDEI, Courtesy of Photoshare)

In Kenya, researchers and farmers developed the “push-pull” strategy to control parasitic weeds and insects that damage crops. The strategy consists of “pushing” away pests from corn by interplanting corn crops with insect-repellent crops like Desmodium, while “pulling” them toward small plots of Napier grass, a plant that excretes a sticky gum that attracts the pest and traps it. The system controls pests without using costly and harmful insecticides. It also has other benefits, as Desmodium can be used as fodder for livestock. The push-pull strategy doubles maize yields and milk production while improving soils. The system has already spread to more than 10,000 households in East Africa through town meetings, national radio broadcasts, and farmer field schools.

Agroecological practices enhance on-farm fertility production. Malawian farmers call it a “fertilizer factory in the fields.” These practices reduce farmers’ reliance on external inputs and state subsidies.

This, in turn, makes vulnerable smallholders less dependent on local retailers and moneylenders.

Similar examples exist around the world. In Japan, farmers found that ducks and fish were as effective as pesticide for controlling insects in rice paddies, while providing additional protein for their families. The ducks eat weeds and insects, thus reducing the need for labor-intensive weeding, otherwise done by hand by women, and duck droppings provide plant nutrients. The system has been adopted in China, India, and the Philippines. In Bangladesh, the International Rice Research Institute reports 20 percent higher crop yields, with net incomes increasing by 80 percent.²⁸ In 1998, after Hurricane Mitch, agroecological plots on sustainable farms from southern Nicaragua to eastern Guatemala had on average 40 percent more topsoil, 69 percent less gully erosion, higher field moisture, and fewer economic losses than control plots on conventional farms.²⁹ This greater resistance to climatic disruptions will be vital in the coming decades.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Cutting edge innovation in agroecology is taking place in research centers in Santa Cruz, Nairobi, and Beijing. Scientists are discovering Iroko trees that build a carbonate-layer in the soil from CO2 captured in the atmosphere, offering new opportunities for long-term carbon sinks.³⁰ They are designing future perennial cereal systems for sustainable grain production.³¹ And they are developing mycorrhizal products that could be applied in small doses to mimic in modern farming the mycorrhizal systems that exist between fungus and trees, a source of extraordinary productivity.³²

It would be unwise, however, to wait for a silver-bullet solution to emerge from years of research and development. The most urgently needed effort for increasing food security is the scaling up of existing systems. Understanding what keeps agroecology underdeveloped is a necessary first step.

The Obstacles to the Necessary Change

We identify at least seven, largely self-reinforcing obstacles to the expansion of agroecological practices.

First, small-scale farmers, the primary practitioners of agroecology and the main beneficiaries of its expanded use, are marginalized in policy decisions. Small-scale farms use land and water more efficiently, and economists have long demonstrated the inverse relation between farm size and land productivity.^33-40 However, a number of factors in the real world favor large farms: Large-scale operations are more competitive in the agribusiness sector because of facilitated access to credit (including from state-owned development banks). Large farms have a greater ability to integrate globalized food chains and to comply with the standards of the retail industry, including quality and sanitary standards but also social and environmental certification schemes. They also benefit from recent technological innovations that are designed to meet their needs, such as genetically modified crops, information technology, and zero-tillage machinery.^40,41 In addition, decentralized small farmers experience agency problems and transaction costs that cannot be underestimated.³⁵

At the same time, the belief that larger farms are more productive continues to be disseminated by influential authors.⁴² This is a mistake. Large, mechanized, monocropping operations are more competitive than small farms for the reasons explained above, but competitiveness and productivity are different things. Big farms outperform small farms according to only one measure of economic efficiency: productivity per unit of labor. Indeed, one agricultural worker on a modern, mechanized farm in the most fertile regions of the world can manage as much as 100 hectares of land, with a total output of 1,000 tons of cereal a year. A small-scale farmer with only a hoe can manage just one hectare, with a productivity per hectare as low as one ton a year in many African regions.^43,44 But the global expansion of highly mechanized farming is something the planet simply cannot afford. The agroecological approaches highlighted above not only are more resource efficient—that is, they produce more from less—they also, with appropriate kinds of support, have a higher productivity per hectare, a different measure of productivity. The fact that some agroecological approaches require more labor can actually be positive, if the harvest provides sufficient incomes, since it can slow rural flight to cities and encourage rural development by attracting off-farm labor in rural areas. This is not a minor advantage as many countries face double-digit rates in urban unemployment.

Villagers sow crops like wheat, barley, and mustard on the mountain slopes of the Himalayas in Nepal using traditional farming techniques, such as terracing and labor intensive agriculture. (2009 Jesse R Lewis, Courtesy of Photoshare)

Second, agroecology has rarely been supported by mainstream trade and agricultural policies. While agroecology supports diversified production systems, short food chains, and a balance of power among all actors, the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s and the schedules of commitments under the Agreement on Agriculture of the World Trade Organization (WTO) led to a rapid (albeit still partial) liberalization of agricultural trade. This liberalization, in turn, encouraged the building of an export-led sector based on monocultures and the globalization of food chains, making transnational agribusiness companies increasingly influential.⁴⁵ Similarly, while the development of agroecology would have required a strong state to empower small-scale farmers, disseminate best practices, and invest in agriculture, the “Washington consensus” was imposed on most developing countries through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

This orientation toward economic deregulation and privatization resulted in a 25-year downsizing of public services and disinvestment in agricultural systems.^46-50 The dominance of neoliberal thinking during the last three decades has had lasting impacts on agricultural policies. Although some questioned this dominant model after the 2007–2008 food price crisis, it continues to influence current debates and many elites in developing countries continue to believe that they must mimic the modernization-liberalization path pursued by developed countries.

The combination of the first two obstacles explains why small farmers are unable to compete with large-scale enterprises. Although the World Bank has put more emphasis on their importance in its 2008 World Development Report,⁵¹ small-scale agriculture is still seen as nonviable in many mainstream policy discourses.

Third, the development of agroecology is impeded by the absence of security of land tenure for a large fraction of small-scale farmers. Improved security of tenure plays a vital role in agroecology: it encourages the planting of trees, the more responsible use of soils, and other practices with long-term payoffs (planting fruit trees, for example, also contributes to improved nutrition and health). However, some recent developments are increasing the threats to security of tenure: large-scale land acquisitions and leases (widely known as land grabs) are putting an enormous pressure on land access for vulnerable land users. Yet the policy debate on their regulation continues to be largely influenced by the belief that any private investment, whatever form it takes, will contribute to food security.⁵²

Fourth, the common belief that a Green Revolution complemented by a “gene revolution” could solve global hunger puts scientific and technological progress at the core of efforts to alleviate hunger, diverting attention from a broader exploration of agricultural development.

Agroecological research struggles with inconsistent research investments as well as a “lock-in” situation (an accumulation of obstacles) in agricultural research systems, which both hinder its development.⁵³

Fifth, agroecology has been mischaracterized as a return to the past and as incompatible with the mechanization of agriculture. Agroecology is not about a return to a model of agriculture that relies solely on human power for tilling and harvesting. Agroecological approaches are perfectly compatible with a gradual and adequate mechanization of farming. However, for the farmers who have only hoes for tools and who live in areas where oil is scarce, the first step toward development may well be use of animal traction rather than tractors. A forced path toward mechanization—one that focuses on rapid mechanization of farming or use of technology that is not affordable for small-scale farmers—could aggravate rural depopulation. One tractor replacing the daily work of twenty landless laborers is only progress if nineteen jobs are created in the secondary and tertiary sectors.⁴³ Yet most developing countries currently cannot offer urban job opportunities to those who leave the farming sector. Instead, the production of simple mechanical equipment adapted to smallholders and fit for agricultural techniques that conserve soil and water will actually result in more jobs in the manufacturing sector in developing countries.⁵⁴

An agroforestry system in Morocco that combines a staple food crop (cereals) with a cash crop (the oil from argan trees is used in expensive cosmetics). The argan trees provide an extra source of income, especially for women, who have established cooperatives in Morocco to process and sell the oil. (Gaëtan Vanloqueren)

Sixth, the absence of full inclusion of externalities in agrifood price systems has enabled the development of industrial farming despite important social and environmental costs, and has hindered a comprehensive valuation of the benefits of agroecology.⁵⁵ The success of large plantations is, in part, attributable to the fact that the price of food does not reflect the real costs to society resulting from their operations, particularly from the impacts of their modes of production on the soil and climate⁵⁶ and on public health.

And, finally, organizations with vested interests in the status quo have ignored or resisted the benefits of agroecology.

Scaling Up Sustainable Agriculture: Policies for Change

Despite these obstacles, the scaling up of existing agroecological practices is achievable if we can develop a policy framework to move from successful pilot projects to nationwide policies.⁵⁷ Six key principles could help us do this.

First, we need better targeting. Focusing our efforts on the needs of smallholders may seem obvious, yet only a few existing programs effectively target this group. Today, 50 percent of the hungry live in small-scale farming households, living off less than two hectares of land, and 20 percent are landless.⁵⁸ This is unacceptable. Nor is it adequate to fixate on productivity improvements in breadbasket regions while ignoring the people who live in more inhospitable environments such as semiarid lands or hills. Trickle-down economics failed the test in Africa and South Asia—the two regions with the highest incidence of hunger. In the 1960s, investing in the Punjab (as the Green Revolution did) did little to improve the situation of farmers in the eroded hills of Karnataka.

Second, the redistribution of public goods must be prioritized in food security policies. Agroecological practices require public goods such as extension services; storage facilities; rural infrastructure (roads, electricity, and information and communication technologies) for access to regional and local markets; credit and insurance against weather-related risks; agricultural research and development; education; and support to farmers’ organizations and cooperatives. The investment can be significantly more sustainable than the provision of private goods, such as fertilizers or pesticides that farmers can only afford so long as they are subsidized. World Bank economists have rightly noted that “underinvestment in agriculture is […] compounded by extensive misinvestment”⁵⁹ with a bias toward the provision of private goods, sometimes motivated by political considerations.⁶⁰

A 1985–2001 study of 15 Latin American countries in which government subsidies for private goods were distinguished from expenditures on public goods indicated that, within a fixed national agriculture budget, a reallocation of 10 percent of spending to supplying public goods increases agricultural per capita income by 5 percent, while a 10 percent increase in public spending on agriculture, keeping the spending composition constant, increases per capita agricultural income by only 2 percent.⁶¹ In other words, “even without changing overall expenditures, governments can improve the economic performance of their agricultural sectors by devoting a greater share of those expenditures to social services and public goods instead of non-social subsidies.”⁶²

Thus, while the provision or subsidization of private goods may be necessary to a point, the opportunity costs should be carefully considered. Extension services that can teach farmers—often women—about agroecological practices are particularly vital. In today’s knowledge-based economies, increasing skills and disseminating information are as important as building roads or distributing improved seeds. Agroecological practices are knowledge-intensive and require the development of both ecological literacy and decision-making skills in farm communities.

Market failures affect the provision of these services. There is just too little incentive for the private sector to invest in these domains, and transaction costs are too high for local communities to create these goods themselves. States must step in. Seeds and fertilizers at subsidized prices are not a substitute for these public goods, although they may be competing for the provision of private assets in public budgets. Increasing the share of public goods in the government’s budget would have a significant positive impact on rural per capita income.

Third, if we want the best food security policies, we need a richer understanding of innovation that includes indigenous, local, and traditional knowledge. Simply put, not all innovations come from experts in white coats in laboratories. In large areas of Asia, farmers now join farmer field schools, a group-based learning process that enables farmer-to-farmer instruction. In India, farmers pool their seeds in community seed banks, which are administered through institutional arrangements to ensure the availability of planting material and the preservation and improvement of agrobiodiversity. And in Ghana, scientists launched radio broadcasts in local languages to popularize the best techniques to grow rice without additional inputs, rather than breeding new rice varieties.

These techniques were identified through consultations with peasant groups, and they resulted in an average yield increase of 56 percent.⁶³ Farmer field schools and community seed banks are not new technologies: they are social or institutional innovations. Such innovations are important to future food security because they can channel farmers’ experiences into knowledge-sharing processes with a considerable multiplier effect and at minimal cost.

Fourth, programs and policies must involve meaningful participation of smallholders. While some of the largest efforts to reinvest in agriculture shy away from a genuine engagement with representative farmer organizations, participation, if done properly, has several advantages for food security. First, it enables us to benefit from the experience and insights of the farmers. Second, participation can ensure that policies and programs are truly responsive to the needs of vulnerable groups. Third, participation empowers the poor, a vital step toward poverty alleviation because the lack of power exacerbates poverty: marginal communities often receive less support and are less able to advocate for their rights than the groups that are better connected to government. And finally, collaborations between farmers, scientists, and other stakeholders will facilitate innovation and create new knowledge.⁶⁴

Existing projects demonstrate that participation works. Farmer field schools have been shown to significantly reduce pesticide use: large-scale studies from Indonesia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh recorded 35 to 92 percent reduction in insecticide use for rice.⁶⁵ At the same time, the schools have contributed to a 4 to 14 percent improvement in cotton yields in China, India, and Pakistan.⁶⁵ In Syria, Nepal, Nicaragua, and many other countries, participatory plant breeding schemes have been introduced in which researchers work directly with farmers, often combining traditional seeds with modern varieties.⁶⁶ This practice empowers poor rural women who are key actors in seed management.⁶⁷ In Latin America, the Campesino a Campesino movement has demonstrated that, when given the chance to generate and share agroecological knowledge among themselves, smallholders are very capable of improving their methods.⁶⁸ In Cuba, a country that met its own peak oil when cheap oil imports from the USSR stopped, the adoption of agroecological practices was supported by the National Association of Small Farmers: between 2001 and 2009, the number of promotores (technical advisers and coordinators) increased from 114 to 11,935 and a total of 121,000 workshops on agroecological practices were organized.⁶⁹ Participation, a key principle in the activities of the grassroots organizations and NGOs that currently promote agroecology,^68,70 should be an element in all food security policies, from policy design to management of extension services. Experts, technical advisers, and farmers should be encouraged to collaborate in identifying innovative solutions.⁷¹

Fifth, states could use public procurement to speed a transition toward sustainable agriculture. In several European countries, schools have already started sourcing food from local producers with sustainability criteria. In June 2009 Brazil decided that 30 percent of the food served in its national school-feeding program should come from family farms.⁷²

Women in Myanmar work in a rice field using organic farming methods. (2009 Kyaw Kyaw Winn, Courtesy of Photoshare

Sixth, performance criteria used to monitor agricultural projects must go beyond classical agronomical measures, such as yield, and economic measures, such as productivity per unit of labor. In a world of finite resources and in a time of widespread rural unemployment, productivity per unit of land or water is a vital indicator of success. Overall, measuring efficiency in the new agricultural paradigm of agroecology requires a comprehensive set of indicators that assesses the impacts of agricultural projects or new technologies on incomes, resource efficiency, hunger and malnutrition, empowerment of beneficiaries, ecosystem health, public health, and nutritional adequacy.

The assessment of progress should be appropriately disaggregated by population, so that improvements in the status of vulnerable populations can be monitored.

Promoting agroecological approaches does not mean that breeding new plant varieties is unimportant. Indeed, it is vital. Already, new varieties with shorter growing cycles enable farmers to continue farming in regions where the crop season has already shrunk and where classical varieties did not have time to mature before the arrival of the dry season. Breeding can also improve the level of drought resistance in plant varieties, an asset for countries where lack of water is a limiting factor.

Reinvesting in agricultural research must involve continued efforts in breeding, though caution is needed due to the drawbacks of current seed policies and of intellectual property regimes on seeds.⁷³

Just as breeding should not be discontinued, but rather done with the participation of the farmers most in need, fertilizers should not be forbidden. Agroecology provides the larger framework for their use, and it emphasizes that fertilization can be pursued through natural means, such as nitrogen-fixing trees.

Linking Sustainable Farming to Markets: The Political Economy of Food Chains

The above principles are not sufficient in themselves. Efforts by agronomists will be pointless if the right institutions, macroeconomic regulations, and accountability mechanisms are not established and implemented. In other words, farmers need enabling economic and institutional environments, allowing the 500 million households that depend on small-scale farming today not only to put food on the table, but also to market their surpluses. Public action is needed, not in order to “feed the world,” as stated in the food security policies of the past century, but rather in order to “help the world feed itself.”

Many, including respected food security pundits, think smallholder farmers are incapable of producing sufficient food for rapidly growing urban markets. This is simply false. The reality is that small food producers face a number of obstacles when trying to market their surpluses. We met with smallholders in Benin who insisted that improving market conditions is a greater priority than—and a condition for—improving crop productivity.⁷⁴ An enabling market environment does not mean greater trade liberalization and a favorable environment for investment, as proponents of the “new conventional wisdom,” a slightly adapted version of the Washington consensus, contend.⁷⁵ Rather, it means supporting the diversification of trade and distribution channels in order to create the conditions for genuine choice by small farmers between rural and urban markets and, in some cases, the high-value markets of industrialized countries.⁷⁶ It also means preventing gains from being wrested from smallholders by better-resourced farmers.

Today, the limited number of buyers, the paucity of information on prices, and the absence of storage facilities all contrive to deprive farmers of any choice but to sell during the harvest period, when prices are at their lowest. A rapid and significant expansion of storage facilities capable of preventing postharvest losses in rural areas is needed. Mechanisms such as warehouse receipt systems are spreading across Asia and Africa. Such systems enable farmers to sell crops to warehouses at harvest time, but obtain the additional revenue generated when the food is sold at higher prices during the dry season.⁷⁷

States should also aim to improve equity in the food system, especially in global supply chains where inequity is most pronounced. In too many cases, global food chains primarily reward large producers who have access to inputs (land, water, and credit), technologies, and political influence, and who can meet the volume and standards required by global buyers and retailers. Where small food producers are willing to be integrated into global food chains, states should actively support them through technical assistance and cheap credit, if needed. The promotion of modern farmer cooperatives is one way to improve the market position of producers, especially women. Ultimately, what matters, from a social point of view, is that the incomes of the poorest increase, whether they choose to serve local, regional, or global markets. As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has remarked, hunger is not necessarily a problem of food availability; it is primarily a problem of people lacking the purchasing power to procure the food they need.⁷⁸

Because the power relationships that exist in food chains are so central to global hunger—over two-thirds of those who are hungry today produce food—centralized control over key agricultural functions must be dismantled.⁷⁹ In the Brazilian soybean market, 200,000 farmers attempt to sell to five main commodity traders. Three large transnational commodity buyers—ADM, Cargill, and Barry Callebaut—dominate the Ivorian cocoa industry. Four firms carry out 45 percent of all coffee roasting, and four international coffee traders control 40 percent of an industry on which 25 million producers depend. The result of this power distribution is that a significant portion of the reinvestment in agriculture will be captured by global players, instead of vulnerable food producers.

Stopping the Damage: The Role of Land

Farmers around the world face increasing pressures from large-scale development projects (including dams), extractive industries, logging, land conversion to agrofuels, and the creation of special economic zones. The result is that the poorest farmers are priced out of land markets and that evictions are rising everywhere, cutting farmers off from their livelihoods.^80-82

States should strengthen customary land tenure systems, while at the same time weeding out their discriminatory components against women, and should reinforce tenancy laws in order to significantly improve the protection of land users. There is also ample empirical evidence of the positive impacts of land redistribution on the livelihoods of smallholders as well as on broader rural development.³⁷

Agrarian reform with a strong redistributive component has been an important element in economic growth in South Korea and China. The belief that land redistribution is communism has led many to reject it out of hand. But, if it is part of comprehensive rural development policies that support the beneficiaries of land redistribution, complemented by an implementation of the six principles we put forward in this paper, it can contribute to increased food security and nutrition, prevent environmental losses, and put people to work in rural areas, thus reducing the effects of ecological, financial, and economic crises. The current wave of large-scale land acquisitions and leases unfortunately moves us in the opposite direction: in many cases it amounts to nothing less than a counter-agrarian reform that poses threats to food security.⁵²

Farmers-in-Chief

Our “farmers-in-chief”—heads of states—can make the new paradigm on agriculture, food, and hunger a reality.⁸³ The strategies highlighted in this essay can shape productive, sustainable, healthy food systems for the twenty-first century. Concrete recommendations to states and donors have been identified to scale up these promising agroecological farming systems and to shape an economic and institutional environment that will allow them to thrive. If significant progress is not achieved in the next three years, huge opportunities will be missed for feeding the world’s poorest people, mitigating climate change, and avoiding worsening water scarcity. In that case, coming generations will judge us harshly.

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Olivier De Schutter.
UN special rapporteur on the right to food; professor at the University of Louvain in Belgium

Gaëtan Vanloqueren.
Research associate at the Earth and Life Institute of the University of Louvain in Belgium; Adviser to the UN special rapporteur on the right to food

Original article available here:
The New Green Revolution: How Twenty-First-Century Science Can Feed the World

Why Have Permaculture Design Courses for Women?

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:55:00 +0000

Why set up permaculture design courses just for women? There are both practical and historical reasons to do so. Let’s begin with the practical and round off with a little permaculture history.

Firstly, it can be useful for women to have opportunities to learn new skills in an all-female environment.

“As soon as the equipment came out, the men took it over and we never got a chance to do anything with it,” a young woman commented as she recounted her first experience with permaculture.

It reminded me of another young woman expressing her pleasure at getting a barbeque fire going after having considerable difficulty getting it to catch.

“As soon as it’s obvious I’m having trouble, a man comes and takes over, so I never have the chance to learn how to do it.” Neither of these young women are shrinking violets; they are both used to holding their own in mixed company.

Nor were they complaining; only commenting on a cultural bias that causes men to cluster around tools while women hold back.

In an all female environment women can support each other to acquire new skills together.

Secondly, women generally have less disposable income than men, so creating low cost courses specifically for women enables more women to attend. Thirdly, women still have a greater responsibility for caring for children, so courses with at least some childcare also make it easier for women to attend.

The first permaculture design course for women was held on my farm in north-eastern New South Wales, Australia in 1983. The first gathering of permaculture course graduates had occurred in South Australia earlier that year. We were a small group — about forty of us: only three of us were women.

It may be nearly thirty years ago, but I remember clearly what a wonderful feeling we generated by being together. And how I thought Bill was exaggerating wildly when he told us that we — this ragtag assemblage of individuals — would spread the ideas of permaculture all around the world!

I remember particularly Bill’s assertion that in order to spread the ideas of sustainability, a permaculture organization would itself have to be sustainable. He commented that having so few women in it was not a good indicator of sustainability. Suddenly all the men’s eyes were on us three women. “Where are all the women?” one of them asked us. “Don’t ask us: we’re here. Why don’t you ask your wives, who are at home.” That took the spotlight off us for the moment. But later, we women talked about that conversation and the fact that all three of us found it somewhat intimidating to be so few women among such a large majority of men. It was then than we — Judith Turley, Susie Edwards, and myself — came up with the idea of holding a permaculture design course just for women.

We had no idea what difficulties we were setting for ourselves when we decided we would need to make this course low cost and that there would have to be child-care. Somehow we surmounted apparently endless difficulties and 26 women — with 12 children in tow — attended and completed that course. Many mentioned marking out a series of swales around a hillside as a highlight and our mounting enthusiasm peaked as they presented their practice designs. I wonder if any of us ever forgot the culmination of our concert: the flight of a tissue paper hot air balloon which one woman constructed with my young son (he’s 40 now) and how a shooting star shot through the sky above it as it reached its zenith.

Many more women have completed subsequent women’s courses here and in other countries, and women’s courses have been particularly well attended in developing countries where cultural constraints between men and women are considerably more limiting that in the West.

The success of women’s courses lies not only in increasing the number of women involved in permaculture; or in the considerable number of women’s course participants who have gone on to teach permaculture themselves, or to incorporate sustainability into other professional occupations.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of teaching women is that when they incorporate any of these ideas into their daily lives, their children pick up these sustainable practices as an integral part of their lives too.

What: Permaculture Design Course for Women
When: 30 October — 12 November, 2011
Where: Just up the road from the PRI’s Zaytuna Farm, at Eternity Springs Art Farm
Cost: AU$950

More info here:
Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) Course for Women (Eternity Springs, The Channon, NSW, Australia)

As Farmers’ Markets Go Mainstream, Some Fear a Glut

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 23:08:00 +0000

FLORENCE, Mass. — John Spineti started selling plump tomatoes and shiny squash at farmers’ markets in the early 1970s and saw his profits boom as markets became more popular. But just as farmers’ markets have become mainstream, Mr. Spineti said business has gone bust.

Farmers in pockets of the country say the number of farmers’ markets has outstripped demand, a consequence of a clamor for markets that are closer to customers and communities that want multiple markets.

Some farmers say small new markets have lured away loyal customers and cut into profits. Other farmers say they must add markets to their weekly rotation to earn the same money they did a few years ago, reducing their time in the field and adding employee hours.

“It’s a small pie — it’s too hard to cut it,” said Mr. Spineti, who owns Twin Oak Farms in nearby Agawam. Mr. Spineti, who was selling vegetables and small fig trees, his farm’s specialty, at the Wednesday market here, said his profits were down by a third to a half over the last few years.

Nationwide, the number of farmers’ markets has jumped to 7,175 as of Aug. 5; of those, 1,043 were established this year, according to the federal Agriculture Department. In 2005, there were 4,093 markets across the country.

Here in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, where hand-painted signs for fresh vegetables dot winding roads and eating local has long been a way of life, some farmers and market managers are uttering something once unfathomable: there are too many farmers’ markets.

This summer there are 23 farmers’ markets in the area, which encompasses the Connecticut River Valley, according to the Federation of Massachusetts Farmers Markets.

At the Wednesday farmers’ market in Florence, shoppers perused plum peppers, freshly cut sunflowers, jars of homemade pickles and fragrant bunches of basil, rushing them into cars before a midafternoon thunderstorm.

Rick Wysk, who spent the morning pulling beets out of the eight acres he tills at River Bend Farm in nearby Hadley, says his business at farmers’ markets is half what it was five years ago.

“You have a certain amount of demand, and the more you spread out the demand, you’re making less,” said Mr. Wysk, who has been selling at markets for 13 years. He believes his business is further hurt by additional markets that opened this year in Northampton and Springfield.

“We’re Western Mass. We’re not New York City. We’re not Boston,” Mr. Wysk said. “We’ve got people, but not the population in the bigger markets.”

More densely populated areas, however, seem to be where the problem is most acute. In Seattle, farmers have spent the last few years jumping from new market to new market. In San Francisco, there are simply “too many farmers’ markets,” said Brigitte Moran, the executive director of the Marin Markets in San Rafael, Calif.

“We have this mentality of, oh, we have a Starbucks on every corner,” Ms. Moran said. “So why can’t we have a farmers’ market? The difference is these farmers actually have to grow it and drive it to the market.”

Dale Davis, the owner of Stony Hill Gardens and Farm Market in Chester, N.J., cut three New Jersey markets this year because sales were down and the extra travel crimped his profit, and he blames a spate of new suburban markets.

“You send out these guys with fuel and they’re picking and loading,” Mr. Davis said in a telephone interview while selling squash and other vegetables at the Hoboken Farmers’ Market, “and you can’t end up on the long end for too long.”

Stacy Miller, executive director of the Farmers’ Market Coalition, a nonprofit organization that supports farmers’ markets, said that the growth had been a boon to most communities and that many places still lacked markets that connect residents with fresh, healthful food.

But, she acknowledges, some markets are saturated. One reason is that more community groups want to open farmers’ markets without doing “sufficient planning to ensure the demand is keeping up with the supply,” Ms. Miller said.

Read the full article here:
As Farmers’ Markets Go Mainstream, Some Fear a Glut
Katie Zezima, The New York Times

New York Times: The Permaculture Movement Grows From Underground!

noreply@blogger.com (Permaculture Synergy) — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 19:31:00 +0000

Permaculture Featured on New York Times

The Permaculture Movement Grows From Underground
Michael Tortorello, New York Times

AS a way to save the world, digging a ditch next to a hillock of sheep dung would seem to be a modest start. Granted, the ditch was not just a ditch. It was meant to be a “swale,” an earthwork for slowing the flow of water down a slope on a hobby farm in western Wisconsin.

And the trenchers, far from being day laborers, had paid $1,300 to $1,500 for the privilege of working their spades on a cement-skied Tuesday morning in late June.

Fourteen of us had assembled to learn permaculture, a simple system for designing sustainable human settlements, restoring soil, planting year-round food landscapes, conserving water, redirecting the waste stream, forming more companionable communities and, if everything went according to plan, turning the earth’s looming resource crisis into a new age of happiness.

It was going to have to be a pretty awesome ditch.

That was the sense I took away from auditing four days of a weeklong Permaculture Design Certificate course led by Wayne Weiseman, 58, the director of the Permaculture Project, in Carbondale, Ill.

The movement’s founders, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, coined the term permaculture in the mid-1970s, as a portmanteau of permanent agriculture and permanent culture.

...Yet in recent years, Mr. Mollison’s ideas seem to have bubbled up from underground, into the mainstream. “I just trained the Oklahoma National Guard,” Mr. Pittman said. “If that’s any kind of benchmark.” The troops, he said, plan to apply permaculture to farming and infrastructure projects in rural Afghanistan....

(27 July 2011)

Very long article about permaculture in the New York Times!

Read the full article here!