Organic and local food
Sign up to
the
Organic Targets Campaign, which aims to have 30% of UK land
organic by 2010, at Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming.
Encourage your MP to sign Early Day motion 366 in support of this campaign.
Europe’s largest organic research membership organisation is the Henry Doubleday Research Association. They have a great educational schools’ and kids’ site
Regional listings of farmers’ markets
Challenge your food shops to give you ‘Real Food’ – free from genetically modified ingredients and toxic residues. Food from real farms, not factories; food that safeguards wildlife, livelihoods and you! Visit Friends of the Earth’s web site.
What’s wrong with supermarkets?
Fair trade and food boycotts
Read what kids at a London comprehensive school have found out about world trade.
Ethical Consumer has information on who owns what ‘health food’ companies – did you know that Quorn is owned by the genetic engineering multinational AstroZeneca?
Oxfam’s campaign to make all world trade in all goods fair.
Norwich-based Banana Link, working for sustainable production and trade in bananas
That fair trade chocolate is just Divine
GM foods
Test your knowledge on GM foods in a quick quiz at the Development Education Project web site (click on ‘GM foods quiz’ at the top of the page).
“What's it like to be a guinea pig? Well you should know because you are one in the great power-and-profit game of the agbiotech corporations and governments.” Read Tiki the Penguin’s guide to genetic engineering for kids (and grown-ups)
General
Only 8% of UK farmland is given over to crops that provide for people directly. The rest goes to feed livestock. We would need only a fifth of our current cultivated area to be self sufficient in this country if we grew food for only human consumption. Find out the arguments for being a vegetarian or a vegan at:
Life’s too short to believe the mainstream media. Check out:
www.monbiot.com (Lots of good articles about current issues, including food)
Picture
from: Food
and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
The world in your cupboards
Once upon a time you couldn’t buy bananas in Britain and oranges were an expensive Christmas treat. People didn’t drink tea or coffee or fizzy drinks, everyone — even the children — drank beer which was brewed at home or nearby (it was safer and more nutritious than drinking from dirty water supplies).
A thousand miles from field to plate?
Nowadays, food that seems like it couldn’t be more ordinary — like tea, coffee, oranges and bananas — comes from a long way away, and passes through many people’s hands before it reaches our cupboards. A lot of energy is used up to carry the food from where it is grown to your local supermarket shelves. We often use more energy (measured in kilojoules) to grow, package, transport and buy our food than we get from eating it. One way of thinking about this energy is ‘food miles’ — how many miles did your food travel from the place it was produced to get to your cupboards?
Eating oil
- Onions imported from New Zealand will have travelled almost as far as the average UK family car does in the course of a year.
- Rather than importing what they cannot produce themselves, many countries appear to be simply ‘swapping food’. In 1997, the UK imported 126 million litres of milk and exported 270 million litres.
- In 1998, 12.2 million pigs, cattle and sheep were transported between EU member states.
- In one
Welsh supermarket you can buy beef that was raised only 50 miles away.
However, the cattle had to travel 140 miles to be slaughtered, then
to another place where the meat is processed, then 125 miles by lorry
to the supermarket chain’s distribution centre, and then back
to the original supermarket — making a total trip of 500 miles.
Statistics from the report ‘Eating Oil’, details in 'Further reading’.
Organic food — leaves no nasty residues?
Other food, like milk and wheat, is produced in this country, but usually in ways that can be very damaging to the environment (as is the food from far away). Chemical fertilisers, weedkillers and pesticides might mean that farmers can produce more food that is bigger and looks better, but they leave harmful residues in the soil, and there is concern that chemicals can also build up in animals and humans (see the box below). Many people now want to buy organic food so that they don’t contribute to the chemical destruction of the ecosystem.
“The basic definition of organic food is that it has been grown or reared on an organic farm. These farms gain their status by going through a two-year conversion period, during which the use of any chemical fertiliser or pesticides is banned. Once converted, the farm must promise to remain free from such chemicals and ensure that animals are fed with organic feed. Farmers must also promise that animals are kept and slaughtered in a humane manner.” (The Guardian, 'How to buy: Organic food,’ 21/5/02).
Manufacturers are still allowed to use up to 5% non-organic ingredients in a product labelled as organic. And there is no common world-wide definition of organic produce, which is a problem when you realise that — maybe because only 3% of land in the UK organic — 75% of the organic food consumed in the UK is imported from abroad… which brings us back to the problem of food miles.
A pesticides cocktail?
Friend of the Earth’s analysis of the latest Government survey of pesticide residue results published by the Pesticides Residues Committee (PRC) (www.pesticides.gov.uk) reveals that pesticides above legal and safety limits have been found in a wide range of fruit and vegetables. Some of the more disturbing findings of the report are:
- UK-grown non-organic strawberries contained dicofol at illegal levels. Dicofol is suspected to disrupt hormones. It is not approved for use on strawberries in the UK. The 3 organic strawberry samples were free from residues.
- Potatoes were found to contain aldicarb above safety levels. Aldicarb is a carbamate insecticide which works on the nervous system. It is highly toxic and is classified by the World Health Organisation as 'extremely hazardous'.
- Iprodione, a suspected hormone disrupter, was found above legal limits in UK celery although it is not approved for use on celery here.
- Lindane was found in mushrooms. This pesticide is now banned in the EU and there are fears that exposure to this pesticide may be linked to breast cancer.
None of the samples present immediate safety concerns for consumers — but the problem is that the study only looks at exposure levels in individual foods, not at the overall mix of pesticides that people are being exposed to. There is cause for concern about cases where several similar chemicals are found in one food — they could combine to create a "cocktail effect" stronger than the chemicals would have separately.
Because babies and young children are especially vulnerable to pesticide residues, new regulations that just about prohibit pesticide residues in baby food will come into force on July 1 2002. But how about toddlers — and the rest of us — who eat fresh fruit and vegetables?
The Government
has a policy to minimise pesticide use. These results suggest it is
not doing enough to implement it. Friends of the Earth are campaigning
to get the Government to crack down on dodgy chemicals in imported food,
and also to help farmers in the UK to get off the chemical treadmill.
www.foe.org.uk
Food for social justice?
Meanwhile, people in poorer countries, where a higher percentage of the population work on the land as farmers, cannot grow their own food to eat. How can this be? There are many complicated reasons, but here is the basic story.
Most poorer
countries are in Africa, Asia and Latin America. For several centuries,
some powerful European countries believed they had the right to explore
and take over these countries without consulting the people who lived
there and knew the countries best, and without respecting the way they
lived on the land. The European countries stripped these countries of
their natural resources (like minerals, timber, and land for farming),
made lots of money from them, and changed the peoples’ ways of life
for ever. They created systems of education, government and trade that
were like European ones. When independence movements in these colonies
became strong enough to put pressure on governments, and activitists in
other parts of the world acted in solidarity, governments started to pull
out of the colonies. But by that time they had destroyed traditional ways
of living and farming, and had made the colony dependent on them. Even
though the rich countries stopped actually ruling over other countries,
they still wanted to keep control over their the resources. Aid and loans
to governments are conditional on governments running the country in a
way that most benefits big business in the rich countries.
Rich countries often say that poor countries are poor because they can’t
manage their money and have lots of corruption (politicians keeping money
for themselves) or that they aren’t clever enough. But this ignores
the responsibility that rich countries have for making the poor countries
poor. (And anyway, sometimes the rich countries are inefficient or corrupt
too!)
So the poorer countries had to borrow a lot of money from the rich ones. But when you take out a loan, sooner or later it needs to be paid back. Governments can only pay back loans if they are making enough surplus money, and they can only make enough surplus money if instead of growing food for the people to eat, they grow the things that can be sold abroad (usually to the rich countries), such as coffee, tea, cocoa, bananas. That means that farmers are stuck farming just one product (monoculture) instead of all the food they need to eat. Often this agriculture ends up being controlled by big landowners and even foreign multinational companies, and small-scale farmers have to sell their land and become wage labourers. Or else they just have to sell their produce to the big companies, who can name the price they want to pay — and maybe the farmer doesn’t make enough money to live on, even if they have sold lots and lots of the crop. And you can't feed your family on coffee.
There are still rich and poor people within each country. In poorer countries, there are a few people who profit from how food is grown and exported. And we know that even in rich countries like the UK there are people who don’t have enough food to eat or who can’t afford to eat healthier foods.
The problem
is not debt itself — strangely, the US owes $2.2 trillion: almost
as much as the entire developing world's debt put together. The problem
is that poorer countries have no control over the global banking system
that ‘manages’ international lending and borrowing, which
is just run by the richer countries that lend money.
‘Fair trade’ food projects are a grassroots attempt to challenge
some of the devastating injustice of the world trade and debt system.
They make a partnership between groups of farmers in the poorer countries,
on the one hand, and shops and consumers in the richer countries, on the
other. Instead of selling at low or changeable prices to merchants in
the middle, farmers sell at a decent, fixed price to fair trade traders.
The fair traders then deal direct with the companies that process the
product — for instance, with the factories that turn cocoa beans
into chocolate — and then sell the product to shops and supermarkets
where it is sold to consumers (like me). The farmers get a fair price
for their crop and they know that they can depend on it. Usually, they
also decide that a portion of their income will be spent on projects that
benefit everyone in their community, like buying equipment for the local
school or digging new wells.
We eat an estimated sixty billion dollars worth of chocolate every year. But thanks to a long-term decline in world prices, millions of families whose livelihoods depend on cocoa production are facing extreme poverty. It's enough to make you choke.
But it doesn't have to be that way. The Kuapa Kokoo cooperative, in the Ashanti region at the heart of Ghana's cocoa-belt, is working with Fair Trade organisations to challenge the system. It is helping its 35,000 members to get their fair share of the profits generated by cocoa.
When Kuapa sells to its Fair Trade partners in Europe, it receives a guaranteed minimum price, as well as a 'social premium' which is invested in community projects such as building wells and schools. And when the price in cocoa drops - as it has been generally doing for the past 20 years - Kuapa's farmers still have a secure income.
Cocoa farmer
Lucy Mansa talks about the change that trading on fair terms has made
in her life: "We rely on the money we get from cocoa for everything:
for food, clothes, medicines, and school fees. Getting payment for our
cocoa beans used to be very hit and miss. When we didn't get paid, we
went without. Kuapa Kokoo pays all its farmers a fair price for their
crop, in cash, and on time. I am very happy: since I joined Fair Trade
I can afford to send my children to school."
from the Fair Trade section of www.maketradefair.com
Of course, we could all just stop eating food that came from far-off countries where people do not receive a decent price for their products and their labour. That would be one way to challenge unfair trade — and it would also cut down on food miles. We don’t NEED to eat chocolate or drink coffee to keep alive — they are really luxury foods. We could give up using sugar from sugar cane (which can only be grown in tropical climates) and instead bought sugar from sugar beets (which can be grown in the UK). Food habits do change — forty years ago, you wouldn’t find avocados or kiwi fruit in your local grocer’s. But if you decide you do want to buy food from far-off places — and most people do want things like tea and bananas — then it is a really good idea to look for the fair trade label.
While you’re looking to buy fairly traded produce, you might also want to think about where else your food budget might be going. Woodcraft Folk, amongst other groups, know that the food multinational Nestlé promotes powdered baby milk in countries where the water supply is not safe to make the milk — and they boycott Nestlé goods (www.babymilkaction.org). For over twenty years, from the 1960s to the 1980s, many people didn’t buy South African goods like Cape apples, to put pressure on the South African government to end apartheid. Now, people are boycotting Israeli foodstuffs to protest against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
For a list
of UK boycotts of food and other goods, see
www.ethicalconsumer.org/boycotts/boycotts_list.htm
Some people think that food boycotts do more harm than good to the people you are trying to support. Some Black South Africans were among the many people who argued that the boycott against South Africa affected the poorest people worst, threatening their jobs, while the ‘middlemen’ still made their profits. What do you think?
While we need to look at what kinds of international campaigns will change things for the better, we also need to seek out and listen to the perspectives, opinions and experience of those people in the countries that we are trying to help. This is one reason why fair trade food is such a good idea — it means that producers have a big say in how the trade should benefit their communities.
Meanwhile, back on the home farm… Maybe one day there could be a fair trade labelling system for food grown in this country? European and North American farmers almost certainly receive a decent price for their crops, because there is a complicated system of farming subsidies, where the government gives farmers money to make sure they don’t go out of business. But farms are bigger in this country, and perhaps the person who picks the peas in the Home Counties, or the apples in Kent, doesn’t receive the minimum wage for their work. This kind of work is often done for very low wages by migrant workers from other countries who follow the harvest seasons around Europe.
Monopoly markets?
- In 1970 the average UK household spent 25% of its income on food. The equivalent figure today is little more than 10%.
- In 1950 there were 221,662 food shops in Britain, by 1997 this had gone down to just 36,931.
- In 2000, food sales through supermarkets reached £76.78bn — a growth of 30% since 1995.
- The top five supermarkets currently control 88% of the market, with the remaining 12% divided equally between food co-ops and independent grocery stores.
- The profit margins of the big five supermarkets average about 6% in the UK, compared with about 2.5% in Europe and the US.
- A litre of milk in March 2001 cost 22p to produce. Farmers were being paid 17.6p for each litre, the supermarket was selling it for 35p, that’s 17.4p profit for supermarkets and a bill of 4.4p to tax payer for subsidies, which means that we are subsidising the supermarkets!
Statistics from Corporate Watch — What’s wrong with supermarkets?, and Schnews
Where do you buy your food? Most food in the UK is bought from one of the top five supermarket chains. As these have opened more and more branches, small, locally-owned food shops have had to close down, which means people have less choice about where to buy their food, and more and more money goes to the same few company coffers. Supermarket chains between them have monopolised our food shopping. There are ways to stop this getting worse. Lots of people try to buy food from small grocers on their high street. Some people set up schemes where people club together so that they can place big orders directly with food producers — without having to go to the supermarket! These are called consumer cooperatives, and often they concentrate on buying healthy wholefoods (which used to be hard to find before the supermarkets realised how popular they were). It’s the same principle as cutting out the middle merchants in the chocolate or coffee market with fair trade, and it’s also how the big Coop shops started out once upon a time in Rochdale.
Some wholefood companies that buy, package and distribute wholefoods from around the world to consumers in this country are workers’ cooperatives. This means that everybody who works for them is equal, they all get a say in how the company is run and they all get a decent wage. It’s a challenging way to run a company but some wholefoods workers coops have been running for many, many years. You might have some Suma food in your cupboards. Ask if your local wholefood shop is (or used to be!) a coop.
Mutant munchies?
Scientists are finding out more and more about the genes that hold the ‘secret codes’ for all life on earth, and they are learning how to change these genes to build in particular advantages to certain kinds of crops. Although farmers have always tried to make the things they grow stronger and more resistant to disease through selective breeding, the rate of technological progress has speeded up greatly. The problem is, humans have never altered other species’ genes to this extent before, and no-one is quite sure how it will affect the environment, where everything, in the end, is connected in some way to everything else.
Moreover, the private companies that are doing or funding research into genetic modification are usually doing that so that they can make more money. Some companies own the ‘patents’ for particular seeds — this means that instead of farmers being able to save some of the seed from crops grown this year to plant next year’s crop, the traditional way, they have to buy new seed all over again.
The food and chemical multinational companies that promote GM crops often argue that they help fight world hunger, because they make more plants resistant to drought and disease, so there will be more food. But there are plenty of varieties of crops that are already resistant to disease that are not genetically modified, and in fact there is already enough food in the world to feed everyone. The problem is not disease but distribution. The problem is not a lack of science and technology, but of how power and profits are distributed in the world — capitalism.
The media have supported big ‘agri-business’ by talking constantly about the lack of evidence on the environmental damage and the benefits of having stronger seeds. But the real issues are money and social control — big companies want to have control over which crops grow where, and they want to make as much money as possible out of them.
Women and food
You’ve probably noticed that generally, women are thought to be better at cooking than men, and surveys of housework show that they usually spend more time on work in the kitchen than men do. Think about your own family. Who works more to feed everyone (from shopping to washing up), men or women, girls or boys? Are the tasks shared out equally?
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations says that work isn’t shared out equally between men and women where people work on the land, either.
Rural women are the main producers of the world's staple crops — rice, wheat, maize — which provide up to 90 percent of food for poor people who live in the country. Women sow, weed, apply fertilizer and pesticides, and harvest the crops. Also, once the harvest is in, rural women provide most of the labour for storage, handling, stocking, processing and marketing of the harvest. They do an even bigger share of the work to grow secondary crops, like lentils, beans, peanuts, and vegetables. These are grown mainly in home gardens to feed the family. They provide essential nutrients and are often the only food available during the lean seasons, or if the main harvest fails. Looking after livestock, women feed and milk the larger animals, while raising poultry and small animals like sheep, goats, rabbits and guinea pigs. On top of all that, they have the main responsibility of preparing food and cooking for the family, as well as looking after the needs of children and elderly members of the household.
The FAO calls women “essential custodians of agro-biodiversity”. This is a fancy way of saying that women have special knowledge about genetic resources for food and agriculture. They know what plants and animals are best for what uses, and they know it is important to have a wide range available so that all kinds of human needs can be met.
Despite their crucial contribution to global food security, women farmers are frequently ignored and invisible in development strategies. Farmers are still generally seen as 'male' by policy-makers, development planners and agricultural service deliverers. For this reason, women find it more difficult than men to gain access to valuable resources such as land, credit, technology, training and services. This gender bias and gender blindness extends to matters as basic as the design of farm tools. But women's full potential in agriculture must be realised if the goal of the 1996 World Food Summit — to halve the number of hungry people in the world by 2015 — is to be achieved.
- Women make up 51 percent of the agricultural labour force worldwide — but they own less than 2% of land worldwide.
- Women constitute 53 percent of the agricultural labour in Egypt.
- In Southeast Asia, women provide up to 90 percent of labour for rice cultivation.
- In sub-Saharan Africa, women produce up to 80 percent of basic foodstuffs both for household consumption and for sale.
- Fewer than 10 percent of women farmers in India, Nepal and Thailand own land.
- A study in Bangladeshi villages found that women worked almost 12 hours a day — compared with the eight to ten hours a day worked by men in the same villages.
- In Africa and Asia, women work about 13 hours more than men each week.
- In many regions, women spend up to five hours a day collecting fuelwood and water and up to four hours preparing food.
- An analysis of credit schemes in five African countries found that women received less than 10 percent of the credit awarded to male smallholders.
All statistics and other information in this section from the 'Gender and Food Security’ web site of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations.
What about sharing out the food, as well as the work for the food? Women often go without food in order to feed their children or menfolk better. In rich countries, women go without food because they are trying to conform to the skinny ideals of beauty that Western culture promotes. Maybe women work harder to produce food, but actually get to eat less of it… (for more on this, see the book ‘Food and Culture’ in Further Reading).
Further Reading
Manchester Development Education Project produce Global Express, an up-to-the-minute magazine resource for teachers of 8-14 year olds on world events and global issues in the news. There are plenty of back editions that relate to food (11, 13, 14, 25). www.dep.org.uk/globalexpress and click on ‘back editions’. These are free to download and have photocopiable activities pages.
New Internationalist Issue #322, April 2000, on Fair Trade. See in particular the ‘Dream Scheme’ article. Issue #323, May 2000 on Pesticides; #325, July 2000 on Fish; #317, October 1999 on bananas. Articles on-line at www.newint.org
The Great Food Gamble, by John Humphrys (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2001). An accessible, well-written account of all the risks we are taking with our food by a well-known BBC Radio 4 presenter. Includes chapters on pesticides, GM, soil, antibiotics, fish farming, etc., but doesn’t cover food miles.
Eating Oil: Food Supply in a Changing Climate, by Andy Jones (Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming, and Elm Farm Research Centre, 2001). This detailed report, with lots of statistics, is all about the energy we use in food production and consumption — food miles galore.
Consuming Geographies: We are where we eat, by geographers David Bell and Gill Valentine (London, Routledge 1997). A comprehensive, well-written university-level book covering all the complexities to do with food and place, like, the changing tastes of British fast food, class differences in food consumption, etc. Each chapter begins with a famous geographer’s favourite recipe!
Food and Culture, by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (London, Routledge 1997. This is a university-level compilation of important writing on the sociology and anthropology of food, with different sections: interpreting meals; eating together and fasting; food, body and culture; the political economy of food (commodity and scarcity). It also has powerful writing about gender and food.
Sweetness and Power, by Sidney Mintz. This is a study of the links between the sugar plantation industry, the slave trade, the growth of capitalism and the British Empire, and the promotion of new exotic products, like sugar, amongst the British working class. It is a fascinating introduction to how the food trade developed to connect and change the lives of people who live far away from each other across the world.
Brave New Seeds: The Threat of GM Crops to Farmers by Robert Ali Brac de la Perriere and Franck Seuret (Zed Books). Farmers around the world are being pressured by half a dozen giant corporations to grow genetically engineered crops. What are the possible downsides for them, particularly for those hundreds of millions of farmers living in developing countries? On their environment? On their health? On their independence? On their traditional export crops? On their access to the marketplaces of their own countries? This important book comes out of a dialogue between farmers' representatives and experts.
Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology, by Vandana Shiva (London, Zed Books and Third World Network, 1993). “Monocultures spread not because they produce more, but because they control more. The expansion of monocultures has more to do with politics and power than with enriching and enhancing systems of biological production.”
Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply by Vandana Shiva (London, Zed Books). 'Cutting down forests or converting natural forests into monocultures of pine and eucalyptus for industrial raw material generates revenues and growth. But this growth is based on robbing the forest of its biodiversity and its capacity to conserve soil and water. This growth is based on robbing forest communities of their sources of food, fodder, fuel, fiber, medicine and security from floods and drought.' Shiva charts the impact of globalized, corporate agriculture on small farmer, the environment and the quality of the food we eat. With chapters on genetically engineered seeds, patents on life, mad cows and sacred cows and the debate on shrimp farming.
In The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, there is a shocking and powerful chapter about anorexia nervosa, bulimia and other eating disorders, and how they have become rife amongst young women in the USA and other ‘Western’ countries, striking down young women and undermining their physical and mental capacities when they should be at their fittest and most able if it weren’t for the obsession about thinness that prevails in the dominant cultures of the ‘West’.
Barriers to re-localisation of food production and supply, by Tim Lang and Martin Caraher, Centre for Food Policy, Thames Valley University, UK. This is comprehensive, but very academic — it needs printing off the web and reading offline rather than at your computer screen! http://www.inesglobal.org/lang-caraher.html
