Politics and LFS: The ambiguous relationship between food policy, LFS development, and food security

 

My case studies in Milan and Singapore demonstrated the range of potential impacts that local food policy may have on urban food security, along with the ambiguity as to what extent policy has impacted local food movements. In Milan, the ambiguous relationship between LFS, food policy, and residents’ cultural connections to food are illustrated by the following, enduring questions: Did the development of LFS impact the development of the MUFPP and Milan Food Policy or vice versa? How did Milanese residents’ historical and cultural connections to local food contribute to the development of food policy?

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It also remains unclear how Singapore’s policy has impacted to different types of local farms’ development and subsequently increased or inhibited the city’s food security. Government policy currently supports high-productivity, high-tech farms. While that same government policy aims to increase the country’s food security, many locals’ perceptions of what healthy, safe food entails contradicts the production techniques on farms the government supports. Meanwhile, many local food organizations, which prioritize their social and environmental missions over agricultural productivity, are developing with little aid—and often hindrance—from the Singapore government. One persisting challenge is the Singapore government’s growing verbal support of rooftop farms yet lack of political infrastructure that allows for the successful development of rooftop farms.

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Both Milan’s and Singapore’s recent LFS developments depict the disconnect between the impact of LFS on food policy and vice versa, which makes it more difficult to study the impact of LFS and food policy on the cities’ food security. To begin to resolve this dilemma, city and state food policy must outline more clear metrics, so researchers and policymakers can determine its effectiveness. Furthermore, LFS organizers should work with local governments to make policy more conducive to their goals and food security. ComCrop, a Singaporean urban farm, depicts a best-case practice of collaboration between the government and local business: ComCrop’s leaders have collaborated with the Singaporean government to make the building code more conducive to the development of urban farms.

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Local governments should also directly collaborate with local food organizations to disseminate their food policy. For example, Brisbane’s Community Garden Guide, a pamphlet designed to assist residents in starting their own gardens, ensures that local food organizations and policy support each other. Of course, that may not always be possible, such as in Singapore, where the government prioritizes agricultural principles that many small, local farms do not embrace. Still, where applicable, direct communication between local governments and local food organizations may increase LFS organizers’ and participants’ awareness of the local government’s food-related goals, which will enable synergistic collaboration.

 

Community Gardens: Solving management (and other) challenges to remain viable over time

 

Budapest gardens’ community-based models contribute to their positive social impacts; however, their tenuous management structures also cause their greatest challenges. Zsuzsanna Fáczányi, a doctoral candidate studying Brisbane community gardens at Szent István University, provided insight into the challenge community gardens in Budapest face—to maintain the proper land, funding, and management structure to ensure the gardens’ functioning as lively, social spaces for people to connect and share experiences. Fáczányi suggested that an ideal form of garden creation would be for community members to join together and then petition the local government to help them create the garden. That would avoid community development challenges that manifest when gardens are created in a “top-down” manner, or when gardens are set up and presented to the community as a means to increase community development. If community members have the initiative to launch their own community garden, that might indicate the garden’s long-term sustainability.

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Many of Brisbane’s community gardens were created exactly how Fáczányi proposed: they emerged from community members’ drive to create their own food-producing spaces. Yet garden leaders still often struggle to apply for and secure proper funding, ensure adherence to city legislation, and ensure all members are equally committed to the garden’s physical and social elements. Most garden coordinators whom I spoke to in Brisbane do their work on a volunteer basis. Therefore, despite that community members joined together, galvanized neighborhood and political support, and created gardens based on shared, community principles, the gardens still depend on a few individuals who dedicate many of their personal hours each week to the gardens’ upkeep.

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Securing garden leaders who are able to contribute extensive time resources is a challenge for local food organizations worldwide. In Brisbane, I encountered two potential solutions to this challenge for community gardens: one, appoint retirees to lead community gardens and two, have an external organization pay garden coordinators. However, neither of these solutions are perfect. Having volunteer garden leaders may not maximize community gardens’ potential to serve broader demographics, such as people who don’t have excess time and financial resources. It also may unfairly strain the garden leaders’ time resources, whether or not they have other work obligations. Furthermore, paying the leader of a community-based organization poses the question of how well one employee can guide an organization to best serve the needs of the community.

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Declining Membership of Consumer Cooperatives & the Mainstreaming of LFS

 

In Milan, I learned about GAS’ successes in supporting LFS development yet that their membership peaked more than a decade ago. I also briefly examined market-based local food purchasing schemes, such as “bio” stores. In Tokyo, I learned that teikei membership peaked more than three decades ago; so, I shifted my research focus to study the transition teikei to mainstream market alternatives.

 

The number of GAS in Italy peaked between 2008 and 2012.[1] However, there is no substantial data on declining GAS numbers. Through my own interviews, I was also unable to pinpoint any discernable switch from people’s interest in GAS to other forms of LFS. Dr. Chiara Demaldè, a food systems and critical consumption researcher at the University of Bergamo, confirmed the lack of data available to determine the rise of other local food networks in Milan. In fact, her current research aims to fill that data deficit by mapping all forms of local food organizations and marketplaces in Bergamo, a neighboring town to Milan. While Demaldè recognizes GAS’ recent decline, she noted how GAS has increased consumer demand for environmentally and socially sustainable food nationwide. This demand is now fueling the rise in bio food stores and farmers markets throughout Milan, as well as the increasing amount of organic and fair-trade food found in supermarkets.

 

In contrast to GAS’ recent decline, teikei began to decline, and market-based local food purchasing avenues began to emerge, in Japan in the 1980s. My research in Tokyo was focused on third-party organic distributors, which have stayed relevant for decades by shifting to online purchasing; however, it’s also important to note the conventionalization of local and organic food in regular supermarkets (including regular supermarkets’ online shops), which occurred in parallel to third-party distributors’ development.

 

While the decline of consumer cooperatives in Milan may not follow the exact trajectory of those in Tokyo, a greater understanding of the nuances of teikei’s decline may inform future LFS development in Milan. Indeed, Teikei emerged from isolated historical events (food safety crises), while GAS developed from Italians’ demand for economic solidarity and cultural connections to food. Furthermore, community-based organizations comprise a prominent part of Italy’s—particularly Lombardy’s—vibrant civil society.[2] Nonetheless, answers to the following questions would provide insight into whether conventionalization of local food can provide an affordable, accessible, and still impactful (that is, contribute to a more environmentally friendly and socially just food system) form of LFS for Milan, even GAS membership declines:

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• Was the decline of teikei in the 1980s due to the lack of imminent food safety threats or the rise of alternative means to purchase local and organic food? To what extent has the lack of recent food safety threats contributed to young people’s prioritization of prices and convenience over purchasing local and organic food?

• Which will occur first: The conventionalization of local food to the extent that its prices are lowered enough to compete with non-local food prices? Or young people’s increased interest in purchasing local food so they will buy it through existing, alternative avenues at current prices?

• Will the teikei distribution model ever regain momentum?

 

Furthermore, to what extent can conventionalization of local food assure consumers that they are still making the positive social, environmental, or political impact that they intended? For example, produce labels in grocery stores throughout Tokyo include names and pictures of farmers that grew the produce; however, many consumers I met questioned these labels’ legitimacy. Daichi and other third-party distributors’ similar means of conveying producer information may garner more trust from customers: their catalogues have hundreds of pictures of producers plus in-depth descriptions of various producers.

Daichi also maintains much consumer trust from decades ago, when it was neither an online shop nor merged with Oisix.

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Still, interviewees in Milan, Budapest, Tokyo, Singapore, and Brisbane pinpointed their distrust of corporations and industrialized agriculture as a primary motive for purchasing food through consumer cooperatives and other LFS. Thus, it seems unlikely that most teikei and GAS members would trust large supermarket chains to connect with local farmers on their behalf. LFS participants and researchers I met on three continents stated their fears regarding the conventionalization of organic and local food: lowered quality standards, as well as compromise between socially just and environmentally sustainable production, if a label like “organic” or “fair trade” ensures one of principles but not the other. Consumers’ hesitance to buy “mainstreamed” local food prompts the following question: what matters more, increasing consumers’ access to local food or ensuring that there’s a smaller group of consumers who may access the highest quality[3] local food? Consumer cooperatives are an exceptional way to provide dedicated consumers with high quality local food at a lower price than possible through other retail methods. However, is it possible to provide local food at that same price through conventional retail avenues? 

 

Preliminary shifts of local purchasing in Milan—from GAS to higher-priced bio stores and farmers markets—may have decreased the affordability of local food. In contrast, current research efforts, like LFS mapping projects at the University of Bergamo, are a step towards accessibility. The resulting maps should provide consumers with knowledge of how and where to buy local food. Increased consumer demand should also help keep local food sellers in business. However, local food maps don’t necessarily mean that local food prices will decrease. Which is most beneficial for a city’s food security: making local food more accessible to broader segments of the population or maintaining the highest standards and principles of local food production and consumption?

 

Local Food Misconceptions & the Need for Awareness

 

In cities around the globe, people’s diminishing knowledge about how to grow food and where their food comes has prompted an increase in local food movements and LFS. However, due to the rapid rise of LFS, people’s motivations to develop and partake in LFS are often unclear or misguided. In Kampala, Milan, Budapest, Tokyo, Singapore, and Brisbane, I encountered the following misconceptions, which must be clarified to promote the development of efficient, sustainable LFS that promote economic and environmental solidarity while fostering urban food security.

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First, many LFS participants I interviewed based their statements on the misassumption that local food production is environmentally benign. Many local farms were small, environmentally-conscious organizations; more generally, however, local farms may or may not use more environmentally-friendly production methods than rural farms. For example, many (local) Singaporean farms use intensive agricultural methods and chemical pesticides. Furthermore, interviewees in Milan, Budapest, Tokyo, Singapore, and Brisbane falsely conveyed how the “zero-kilometer principal” or “food miles” directly indicates the environmental damage caused by food they eat: many factors, in addition to transport miles, factor into a food’s carbon footprint. Furthermore, local food production may use excess natural and labor resources due to a lack of economies of scale and growers’ experience.[4]

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Many interviewees in Milan, Budapest, Tokyo, Singapore, and Brisbane also made dubious claims about the relationship between organic and safe food. My interviewees—a small set of people largely in favor of local food—spoke about how food grown organically is safe and that food grown with pesticides or chemicals is unsafe. However, neither of those statements are necessarily true. This is an extremely nuanced topic, which includes controversial and highly varying information regarding organic certification standards, different governments’ adherence to organic certification standards, what exact pesticides and chemicals are used, what agricultural methods are used, and what somebody defines as “safe” or “unsafe.” Furthermore, there has been little comprehensive research to-date on the acute health effects of regularly-used pesticides and chemicals used to grow food.

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Finally, this last debatable concept is something that even I, through the span of this report, may have yielded to at times. Much of what I wrote about food security in Tokyo and Singapore, in particular, is related to the concept that organic and non-intensive agricultural production may better ensure a city’s food security than non-organic, agriculturally intensive production. However, more environmentally-friendly methods often imply less productivity per land area and per growing season, which might decrease a region’s food security in the short-term. In the long-term, intensive agricultural production might diminish agricultural yields, yet the long-term may not be the most relevant to certain food security and urban development narratives.

While each of these stated misconceptions may be founded in cultural traditions and beliefs, they must be corrected in order to ensure the development of LFS that efficiently increase food security. For that reason, Tan stated that ComCrop’s, Singapore’s pioneer rooftop farm, ultimate goal is to increase awareness about the nuances of local food:

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“So, there is some movement about growing your own food. There will be of course awareness about the need for sustainability, but the nuances of those are usually not explored in detail. For example, there are many small groups saying that they are local farms. But then when you look at it, what are they producing, what are they producing for, how much are they producing? And I mean, does it make economic sense—are they able to sustain themselves in the long run? I mean, those are questions which people don’t often ask. I won’t disagree that just being aware of local farms is good. But I think as the understand of the need for these things evolve, we should also start thinking about what constitutes the farms that we want to support. I don’t believe anyone ever sets up to not be productive, but the way they go about it could be quite different. So, I think it’s quite important that people don’t just say, ‘For health reasons, I should buy organic.’ Or say, ‘I should just support local because I’m patriotic.’ It’s not just that. It’s something bigger. I mean, a lot of what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, is because of our needs as a country… also as responsible people, and those are things I think it’s good to see. Really, it’s nice to say that you want to get everyone to grow your own food, but coming from a farmer’s perspective, I know that firstly, that’s not going to go down well with all people…”

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Beyond consumers’ misconceptions, LFS created without proper management and financial strategies may cause local food organizations to use excessive labor, capital, and natural resources to make less than optimal social, environmental, and economic impacts. Thus, socially-oriented local food organizations must have more well-defined programs to teach participants and visitors about the nuances of LFS’s benefits and drawbacks. Production-focused LFS must be planned well enough to ensure their purpose and avoid using excessive resources.

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[1] Demaldè, C. (June 16, 2017). Personal Interview.

[2] Forno, F., & Graziano, P. R. (2014). Sustainable community movement organisations. Journal of Consumer Culture, 14(2), 139-157.

[3] See "A Note on GAS Members’ Interpretations of Food Security" 

[4] This has been a persisting personal research interest, which actually prompted an additional research project I conducted in Fall 2017, “Quantifying the True Environmental and Economic Costs of Urban Agriculture.”