Duncan Fisher argues that a decentralised approach to our food systems can reduce carbon pollution and combat food insecurity.
Now: a highly centralised system
Our global food system is unstable, unreliable, and over-centralised – and, therefore, vulnerable. The danger in letting this situation continue should not be underestimated: it only takes 48 hours for chaos in the food supply chain to turn into a crisis. In the hierarchy of risks, hunger sits near the top. Our supply chain depends on a handful of supermarkets, served by a handful of software systems, and connected to a small number of ports. Our food supply is under ever increasing threat from climate change, war and political instability that creates new trade barriers. Consumers pay the price for this situation, with rising costs forecasted to continue as the supply goes down. This will, in turn, ratchet up the number of people falling below the level of affording to eat. The future will be marked by sudden shortages as a result of individual crises. We have experienced these already in the recent past.
But the current situation is a relatively recent development, which started after the Second World War. Photographic archives in Wales show towns surrounded by fields growing for local markets. The Common Agricultural Policy took a hatchet to this system as did the generalisation of capital, with the whole system taken over by large food corporations. Our current approach does little to address this, having separated discussions about food poverty from the discussion about sustainable agriculture and decarbonisation. We need to consider both the risk to our climate and the risk to our security.
So how do we prepare for the future as it currently presents itself to us? A key part of the solution lies in diversifying the food supply.
At the present moment, when farmers have lambs, they know where to sell them. Replace the lambs with carrots, though, and the picture is very different. There is no clear route to market and no way of telling the price. The trade needs rebuilding, and increasing demand for locally grown food can help support diversification. Another gap is the available skillset: the farmers of tomorrow will need to acquire specialist skills in the intensive agroecological growing of fruits and vegetables. These skills have the potential to increase the productivity of land, to the tune of 151 times the current Welsh average income per acre. Existing farms have a role to play, by diversifying their operations between specialist small operations and larger field scales. We must also free farmers from the current system, which locks them in an unequal and unsustainable relationship with a global food system driving their prices down, and resulting in farmers living on the edge of subsistence. To keep the profit local, we need new supply chains that are shorter and locally owned, including by farmers themselves.
In 2100: Towards a decentralised food system
So how do we prepare for the future as it currently presents itself to us? A key part of the solution lies in diversifying the food supply, which means having a much larger proportion of our food grown either locally or regionally. I am not simply thinking about rural areas feeding themselves. Most people live in cities and so our key challenge is to devise supply routes into cities from their rural hinterlands. In France, all cities have a statutory duty to plan for the feeding of their population from the rural hinterlands.
We must start to rebuild a new agricultural food economy. At the very local level, based on a weekly cycle, we need more individual trading, box schemes for example. The weekly cycle is driven by fruit and veg, with other foods being traded through these new channels. Procurement by local authorities for schools is another key opportunity. The largest opportunity of all for our farmers is feeding the cities, both in Wales and in England, like Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester.
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A second aspect of our new food economy infrastructure will be to secure stable livelihoods for farmers on whose skills our future will depend. Today, more and more young farmers are getting trained in intensive agro-ecological farming. Institutions like the Black Mountains College are already training the farmers of tomorrow. However, those farmers are currently unable to set down roots in Wales, where agriculture competes with the housing market at prices inaccessible to most growers. There is little land to rent, and while some farmers do lease out land, we have found this is not a scalable model. Farmers must live close to their farms. At the moment, one option we are advocating is the purchase of land into community ownership and making land available for new small farms, with homes. And we have to ensure that these homes cannot be sold out of farming, as homes for wealthy people, or as tourist accommodation, which is more profitable than growing food.
Our future food economy must be more diverse, with land being used for multiple purposes: growing food, energy generation, carbon sequestration and other rural businesses. Land needs to be available in smaller quantities to new farming families. These new farms need to farm agro-ecologically, pursuing carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation at the same time as growing food. They will be reliant on mutual aid and support – clusters of farms, otherwise known as villages. Pooling resources – facilities, marketing, sales, processing – is vital to economic viability.
Writing about what needs to be done is easy. The challenge is to do it, and that’s what we are starting in Powys – building new affordable farms for a future generation of farmers growing agro-ecologically for more local markets, and building a new food economy for all farmers of the region.
This essay is part of a series commissioned in collaboration with the National Infrastructure for Wales.
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