Building Community Food Security

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Mary Lou Shaw 
Mother Earth News 

My husband and I have been developing our central-Ohio homestead for the past 10 years, and it now produces most of the food we eat. Our Dutch Belted cows and Dorking chickens give us meat, milk products and eggs. The animals also contribute to the compost that creates our excellent garden soil, which grows our nutritious vegetables and fruits that, in winter, fill our root cellar and line the shelves of our basement pantry. Bees from our own hive sweeten our food and pollinate our crops.

We’re thankful that we have healthy food and that our farm can sustain itself largely without outside inputs. That said, we realize the majority of people in our community buy their food from grocery stores. The availability of such food is totally dependent on oil. It’s farmed with large tractors and petroleum-based chemicals, and it’s transported, processed, packaged and refrigerated using fossil fuels. As petroleum reserves dwindle and oil continues to become more expensive, food prices will go up, causing some people to go hungry.

If my family were hungry, I wouldn’t think twice about climbing over a neighbor’s fence to steal a chicken or two. If our neighbors were hungry, I would expect them to do the same. Given this, none of us can feel secure about our own food supply until the food supplies of our neighbors and communities are also secure. If we use what we learn while producing our own food to help our community members produce food of their own, we can take great strides toward reaching community food security.

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How Seed Banks, Vaults and Exchanges Are Saving Our Food From Disaster

Seeds provide the kind of security to agriculture-oriented people that gold provides to the money-minded.

Seed Bank w/ instructions   on how to save seeds

Ari LeVaux
AlterNet

During the Nazi siege of Leningrad, a group of scientists at the world's oldest seed bank voluntarily starved to death rather than eat the wheat, potatoes, nuts and other seeds being stored at Leningrad's Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry. At the same time, courtesy of Stalin, the institute's founding visionary Nikolay Vavilov was starving to death in a Siberian prison -- but not before he'd gathered more than 50,000 samples from 40 different countries for his institute's collection.

Today the Russian government is attempting to sell Vavilov's land to private developers. The seeds can be moved, but not so easily transported are the hundreds of varieties of rare fruit trees planted in the institute's historic orchards.

Seeds are cheap these days, typically sold for fractions of a penny. But should supplies dry up, it will become difficult for a hungry populace to put a price on these tiny items, given the fact that they can produce infinite amounts of food. Seeds provide the kind of security to agriculture-oriented people that gold provides to the money-minded.

Free our food

 Wiki Image

By Deirdre Fulton
The Portland Phoenix

"From farm to table" isn't just a meaningless foodie slogan anymore. It's the rallying cry for the smallest of small-scale farming operations in Maine, which are fighting against what they consider to be burdensome state and federal regulations. In the process, they're laying the groundwork for a nationwide "food sovereignty" movement, aimed at restoring the direct relationship between food producers and consumers, while reducing government interference in local food systems.

It started on the Blue Hill peninsula, a cluster of tiny, rural, coastal towns about three hours northeast of Portland. A controversy over poultry regulations led a group of family farmers to Augusta, where they told legislators that state food-safety rules were too strict. They claimed that current law could require them to spend tens of thousands of dollars in permitting fees, equipment, and new facilities, just to butcher a few chickens and sell the meat to their neighbors.

At a public hearing and later at a work session, the farmers were told — sympathetically, but still — that if the state were to loosen its meat-inspection conditions, federal funding would be pulled. Hal Prince, director of the state's Quality Assurance and Regulation division within the agriculture department, explains that in order for the state to run its own meat-inspection program, its standards "have to be at least equal to the [US Department of Agriculture]." The USDA chips in about $200,000 — roughly half of the program's operating costs.

Food security is 'priority' for Washington: Clinton

Clinton announced humanitarian aid
for Libya's rebels on Thursday
© AFP Tiziana Fabi

AFP

ROME (AFP) - US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned on Friday about rising food prices and said food security was "a foreign policy priority" for the United States in a speech to the UN's food agency.

"Global food crises are once again on the rise," Clinton said in Rome, adding: "Food security is a foreign policy priority for our country."

"We must act now effectively and cooperatively to blunt the negative impact of rising food prices and protect people and communities."

Open Source Ecology: Permaculture and Local Food Systems

Marcin Jakubowski
Food Freedom

We are proposing the integration of perennial agriculture, living gene bank, open source equipment, and agroecology – or what we call open source agroecology - towards a replicable package of providing healthy, local food for everybody. We propose community supported production as a means of linking the urban and rural landscapes in a mutual inter-independence for providing food, biofuels, lumber, and other products. Can this become a viable and mainstreamable model for providing needs from local resources? What items of local production can be included in this? If our program is insufficient, what are we missing?


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