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| Sustainability: The new ecology of food |
By: REGINALDO HASLETT-MARROQUIN, Guest Columnist
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Posted: Friday, May 14, 2010 11:04 pm
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Local, sustainable foods are “in.” But what I think should be “in” is reworking the whole system of food and agriculture from the bottom up. At the Rural Enterprise Center, a program of Main Street Project, we’re pushing the envelope far into the future of sustainable agriculture enterprise development. Along with dozens of partners, we’re organizing resources to become part of a new food and agriculture system or ecology — one designed with the well-being of everyone in mind: farmers, business, communities and consumers.
A “sustainable food and agriculture system” in our new framework addresses three core issues.
Social responsibility: A socially sustainable agriculture and food system does not depend on cheap labor and the conditions associated with it. People who work for minimum wages don’t do so happily. They live in poverty and are one step away from economic disaster. The current food and agriculture system perpetuates these conditions around the world. In the quest for bigger, global profits, it suppresses the creativity and innovation needed to help more food growers provide for their families and actively participate in community life.
Ecological sustainability: I’m talking about the way we transform energy into highly organized systems of energy or food. For agriculture to be sustainable, it has to be energy self-sufficient. That means it has to produce more energy than goes into it, and that it cannot require or produce toxic by-products, or fundamentally alter the systems that make up our overall ecology. Under our current systems, we manage energy transformation at a highly inefficient rate and pollute and render large amounts of resources unusable — among them, fresh water, soil, oceans, the air and economic resources that leave communities never to return.
Economic sustainability: First, a sustainable food and agriculture system must deliver economic returns to the farmers, enterprises and surrounding communities where food is produced. A system that pushes farmers out of businesses by the millions every year cannot be sustained. Second, it must cover the cost of sustaining the ecology around it so that we can produce efficiently (from the energy standpoint) and for a very long time.
Finally it must be organized in a way that creates, circulates, increases and sustains a process of wealth creation and distribution through the support of enterprises that are socially and ecologically responsible. In the end, we are talking about cycles, not linear equations, a large-scale systems re-engineering, not project based thinking.
In the coming months, I will explain how we approach the creation and implementation of systems that do all three of the above and more. Since we are not the first and will not be the last to work on this sort of systems change, we will also address how we go about learning from others, engaging institutions and individuals in our work, and how we then turn all of this work into relevant solutions that can be applied at a large scale. I hope you’ll check back for more of the story.
— Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin is the director of the Rural Enterprise Center in Northfield. |
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