Back Fishing Lobster- Now What

There will be  a lot of soul searching on PEI today, by the many fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and lobster fishermen and their families.  One of these matters a lot more than the other.

Both groups are at least disappointed, many angry at how things turned out. There will be finger pointing, a hunt for villains.  I'm a Canadiens fan, so I'll leave the hockey to someone else.

The food business is a tough racket, especially for primary producers. A large Idaho potato grower Albert Wada, who helped organize the United movement to improve prices, put it this way, and it's no different for lobster fishermen:

"They occupy the lowest position in the economy… above them in the marketing chain are processors, packers, sales organizations, marketers, brokers, transporters, wholesalers and retailers…

Farmers get paid after all of them subtract their expenses and margins…

Risk must be passed back to the farmer for those above them to remain healthy and viable…"


So was the lobster "strike" a failure?  Definitely not.  It was hard to see processors agreeing to a price increase, because even they are many hands and a long distance from the eventual consumer.  We only have to remember the Polar adventures,  Ocean Choice shutting down,  North Lake needing new owners,  Mariner going bankrupt, etc. etc.  to understand that PEI processors are not spinning gold in those plants. Processors here are more the price messengers, and yes for them to stay in business, they have to short-change fishermen (see Wada above).

It's not to say that the decisions PEI processors make don't matter.  I continue to think (see earlier post) that it's the Maine lobster fishery and it's relationship to PEI processors that's casting a shadow over PEI.  Fishermen there can harvest year around with up to 1200 traps (300 or so on PEI with clearly defined two month seasons). Maine landed more than a hundred million pounds last year (four times what PEI lands), and this cheap lobster was gobbled up by Maritime processors throughout last Fall and Winter, swamping the market with low-priced products, making a lot of the processed lobster produced earlier from the PEI catch,  uneconomic. My guess is processors don't want to repeat that this year and hence the low shore price, and (again refer to last post) at least two processors continue to bring the U.S. product into their plants, so the economics must still work (for these two processors if no one else).   If it hasn't happened yet,  Maritime fishermen need to at least speak to fishermen in Maine to get a better understanding of how this market works. If the off-season fishing (when lobsters are molting and poor quality anyway) isn't that important to Maine fishermen (it can't be  a money maker at last year's prices)  then maybe some fishermen solidarity is possible. (I know that sounds naive).


PEI Premier Ghiz has asked former auditor general Colin Younker to look into the lobster market,  and provide some clarity about what's going on. It's a worthwhile exercise. PEI's lobster industry, like so much else, is unique.  It's heavily dependent on a smaller lobster that gets taken to a plant and ends up frozen or in a can. (PEI harvests 80% of the world's production of "canner" lobster.) Some see that as a blessing (lots of plant jobs) others as a curse (a lower valued product that will always return PEI fishermen a little less.)




So yes the strike hasn't led to higher prices in the short term (and often there's a price slump after Mother's Day) but it's at least spurned Younker's report, port meetings,  a chance to ask better questions, and an understanding that fishermen can act together if pushed too far. That's important for both fishermen and buyers to understand.   Tignish fishermen will get the blame for ending the strike, but don't forget that Royal Star is a co-op, the fishermen benefit from any profits the plant makes. (this is important context that many in the media missed,  because it makes the story a little more complicated?)

There are no simple solutions. There will be more discussion about price setting before opening day ( a marketing board approach is a possibility, but that's complicated by the fact that more than half the catch goes to New Brunswick for processing).

Bottom line:  going out at the beginning of the season and catching as much lobster as possible clearly isn't working so maybe leaving a hundred traps on the wharf at the beginning, and only bringing them out as supply and price dictates is worth a  try.  The Liberals had promised developing more lobster pounds in the last election, that hasn't happened yet.  Some fishermen see using the courts to sue buyers and brokers for price fixing (that was done successfully  in the wild blueberry business in Maine).  And surely all of those trade missions to Asia and India will start paying off at some point.

 The lobster industry has been a bedrock for many rural communities,  so this really matters.  Fishermen have now moved beyond whining and complaining, and expecting others to fix the problem. Gaining some clout in what's become a very hostile marketplace won't be easy, but this past week fishermen made a start. 

Lobster Strike : Fighting the Right Battles

I fully support and admire Maritime lobster fishermen for tieing up their boats when they discovered shore prices set around and under $3.00 a pound,  well below their cost of production.  Anyone who's read this blog knows I worry that farmers and  fishermen have been playing Survivor for the amusement and enrichment of food processors, brokers,  and retailers for too long.  Working to control the supply of commodities is really the only way to fight back, and that's just what the fishermen are trying to do.   It goes against the instincts of primary producers to work this closely together, and there are various legal restrictions limiting what's possible, but taking a stand that 1960's prices are not enough in 2013 is the right thing to do.

The fishermen are now fighting the low prices on three fronts. They've stopped fishing (writing this late Saturday May 11),  blockaded two processing plants in Beach Point and Georgetown (PEI Courts have ordered  the blockades be removed), and are now getting ready to stop trucks of lobster coming  from the Madeleine Islands and bound (we're told) for New Brunswick and the United States.

A couple of things that need more attention. The increased role of brokers in the lobster business is a major change in the last few years. There was a time when PEI plant owners would travel to the United States and negotiate sales face to face with buyers. Both knew the kinds of prices they needed to keep their businesses going and the importance of building trust and relationships. Brokers are a little different, they are true middlemen, and here's the important part, their business is built on "margins and volume", a percentage of the selling price, or a fixed per pound fee.  The important thing is that the actual price doesn't really matter to brokers, as long as they get their margin, and if they can keep prices low, the better chance to move bigger volumes. I'm not saying that getting rid of brokers would automatically put more money in the pockets of fishermen, I'm saying that fishermen need more confidence that whoever is out there selling is trying to get the best price, not just move the most volume.

The reason for the blockades at the two PEI plants is also important and I think underreported. These are plants that are buying and processing U.S. caught lobster from Maine.  This is something relatively new as well.  Maritime plants have been buying U.S. lobster when the Fall fishing season here is over (October), partly because of the use of foreign workers and the need to keep the plants working into the early winter, partly because of the improvement in the value of the Canadian dollar, and partly because the Maine lobster has been very cheap (see here: http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.ca/2012/08/asking-right-questions-about-lobster.html and here: http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.ca/2012/12/way-too-much-of-good-thing.html

Buying U.S. lobster NOW when PEI fishermen are landing the best quality lobster of the season seems wrong.  Furthermore I'm wondering whether this lobster is responsible for establishing the low shore price (other processors know they'll be competing with the plants buying the U.S. product). It's difficult to demand restrictions on U.S. lobster given Canada's absolute dependence on the U.S. market, but it certainly makes sense for fishermen to try to slow down or stop  this importation.  I don't know the contractual arrangement these plants have with U.S. fishermen, but this would be a concession processors could make to help end this dispute.

I'm not sure about blocking trucks from the Maggies. Fishermen there are getting paid better prices, and the product is going somewhere else. It feels like fishermen simply want another target to get the attention of the media, but hurting fishermen and co-ops elsewhere doesn't make much sense. Building alliances (even with Maine lobster fishermen who need better prices too) seems more constructive.

 It's hard to see how this will end. There's little reason for fishermen to go back on the water to lose money, but at some point Employment Insurance requirements will kick in (unfortunately EI benefits have become a lifeline for fishermen in the last few years) and they'll need some weeks of work.  Fishermen at least should be able to get some insight into the lobster market and whether they're being treated fairly, and everyone else in the lobster foodchain will stop taking the fishermen, and lots of cheap lobster,  for granted.  The only caution. Retailers and restaurants charge big prices because they can, it's what the market can bear. Fishermen need confidence that someone in the marketing chain is looking out for their interests too, demanding prices that will return fair value to the wharf.  Fishermen are standing up for themselves, and that's a good start.



















 

The Right Stuff

I was very fortunate to spend a week in Barcelona, Spain.  The Gaudi architecture was stunning, not a straight line or square corner anywhere, but what's really staying with me is the food.  Yes it was excellent, whether from one of the bakeries that are everywhere,  one of the hundreds of restaurants around the city, or the fabulous markets.  I saw things that would make a PEI food inspector or PETA member gasp, hanging cuts of meat that made it obvious they came from living creatures, not the sterile cuts on white trays we get in supermarkets here.  I saw dozens of prepared sandwiches in bakery windows, barrels of olives, unwrapped cheeses. It felt raw and genuine. What I didn't see were blocks of fast food restaurants run by teenagers, or, and this was really noticeable, large numbers of unhealthy and clearly overweight consumers. Yes everything looks better when you're on holiday but there was an artistry to the way meat was cut, coffee was made, fresh gelato (ice cream) created  that I don't see very often in North America (the big world traveler that I am).  It's not surprising that the slow food movement started in this region. There's a culture of pride in how food is produced and presented, not the cheapest and quickest is "always the best" like here.

I'm also just starting to read Michael Pollan's new book about cooking,  and he touches on many of the same  themes, that big food corporations here have taken over our food preparation, and that we're  losing a lot because of that including our health.  The difference for me is that there's an elitism here associated with slow food (I don't think it's intentional, it's just the contrast with the fast food culture) that you don't get in Spain.  They just haven't done things any differently for hundreds of years. I know many European countries like Spain are in financial trouble, and that I was seeing the best the country has to offer. I just saw a determined look in the faces of the farmers, butchers, restaurant and shop owners that producing, preparing and eating food properly is just too central to their culture to give up.  I hope they never have to. It's something we could learn from. I suspect I'll be coming back to this in the months ahead.

Speculators At It Again: Food in Their Sights

I'm not much of an investor. I've got a small portfolio of renewable energy stocks that have lost virtually all their value over the last decade. I'd get nothing if I sold them, so I hang on. I do get one small bit of satisfaction, that I've INVESTED in something that I believe in. There's a world of difference between that and speculating which is essentially the very wealthy playing games with commodity markets.  There's no interest or caring in the commodity in play, just a hope the price will move. Smart speculators can make money even when the prices go down.  A very smart piece on how speculation has been ramped up in the last few  years, and what it means to local markets, especially to the poor. It's nothing less than cruel. And a thoughtful piece from England where the weather is hammering small livestock producers.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/15636-the-damaging-links-between-food-fuel-and-finance-a-growing-threat-to-food-security

The Links Between Food, Fuel and Finance: A Threat to Food Security

(Photo: Idaho National Laboratory / Flickr)

Just when you thought the unhealthy ties between food, fuel, and financial markets couldn’t get more perverse, we get the announcement that Vitol, the world’s largest independent oil trader, is entering the grain-trading business, hiring a team from Viterra, based in Toronto, to run the show. And lest we toss this off as just another corporate deal, Javier Blas in the Financial Times reminds us that Viterra has itself recently been bought by Glencore, perhaps the world’s greatest global commodity speculator.
What could go wrong?
For the world’s poor, plenty. They’ve already endured three food price spikes in the last six years, fueled in part by financial speculators gambling on agricultural, energy, and metals commodities as they fled the wreckage of the housing and stock market crashes. This corporate deal may not change a thing, but it is a powerful symbol of what’s wrong with our broken food system.
Vitol isn’t alone, of course. Mercuria, another leading energy trader, recently hired commodity traders from Morgan Stanley to build an agriculture portfolio. The connections couldn’t be clearer: energy trader hires investment bank to get it into agricultural commodities. According to Blas, the moves reflect declining profitability in energy. Why? Too little volatility. Remember, the traders are speculating, not investing. They need large and frequent price movements to make money. And if there’s one thing agricultural commodities markets are, it’s bullish on volatility.
Blas points out that the extension into agricultural markets is a natural because it can “allow oil traders to profit from the link between gasoline and diesel and the biofuel market.” And who wouldn’t want oil traders, whose interest is making money trading on vast energy markets, to use their insider knowledge to make money from movements on agricultural commodities markets, when in fact oil price movements are one of the main drivers of agricultural futures prices?
As a recent Oxfam report documents, the links go the other way as well, with the Big Four grains traders –Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, known collectively as ABCD – heavily invested in financial trading in the very commodities over which they have a high degree of control.
UNCTAD brought home these perverse connections in a short policy brief last year. They offered two telling graphs that compared price movements of the stock market (red), oil prices (green) and commodity prices (blue) in the first eight months of 2002 and 2012. (Forgive the resolution; they are clearer in the UNCTAD brief.)

In 2002, before the rise of biofuels and before deregulated financial markets had gone full-in on commodities, price movements were largely independent of one another. Particularly notable is the opposite movement of the stock market from oil and from the broader commodity index, the very relationship that led portfolio managers to recommend commodity investments as a hedge against stock market losses.
In 2012 that hedge was a fiction, though still a profitable one for traders who get paid partly by the trade. As the graph shows, co-movement is nearly complete. Co-movement suggests that supply and demand fundamentals in oil and broader commodities markets, which are indeed independent of one another, no longer determine price. UNCTAD attributes this to “herding behavior” among financial investors still flush with speculative capital in search of quick returns.
UNCTAD’s conclusions: “Because of these distortions, commodity prices in financialized markets do not provide correct signals about the relative scarcity of commodities. This impairs the allocation of resources and has negative effects on the real economy. To restore the proper functioning of commodity markets, swift political action is required on a global scale.”
It hasn’t happened yet, as the financial industry uses the profits from trading to weaken regulations and tie them up in court, a battle that is still going on in the United States.
Why does this matter? Because what happens on international commodity markets does not stay on commodity markets. It ripples out through an increasingly interconnected world. Large international price movements, which may or may not be driven by supply and demand fundamentals in those particular markets, drive commodities prices all over the world. Price transmission is by no means immediate nor complete; local conditions and weak integration with global markets still have an impact on local price movements. But global price volatility is highly contagious.
Consider Uganda, a net exporter of maize. As the graph below shows, maize price spikes transmitted to local retail markets, with a short lag. High demand from Kenya, in response to high global prices, contributed to price transmission. Not atypically, the high prices were “sticky,” holding on despite declining global prices. This is often an indicator of the market power of local traders, who can extend scarcity-prices by inducing continued scarcity.
The food security impacts? An estimated 65% of Ugandans’ cash income is used for the purchase of food, and the urban poor are most dependent on purchased maize, which gives them 20% of their calories. With the price spikes, the poor get poorer. (See my report.)
Energy traders hiring Wall Street firms to get them into agricultural commodities is truly the least of our problems when it comes to the unhealthy links between food, fuel and financial markets. But it is yet another powerful symbol.
More important is getting Wall Street to stop gambling on food, and getting food out of our gas tanks.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/03/lets-not-bet-the-farm

Let's not bet the farm

Frozen lambs warn of our vulnerability to climate change – and the free market doesn't offer any shelter from food insecurity

• 
• • Colin Tudge
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 3 April 2013

Gareth Wyn Jones and his dog Cap with a pregnant sheep that was trapped for four days beneath snow on his farm in Llanfairfechan. Photograph: Dave Thompson/PA

 

How should we – not just the farmers but all of us, in Britain and worldwide – respond to the report from Wales that sheep are dying by the hundreds in snowdrifts up to 20 feet deep?
We could just apply the logic of the neoliberal free market, and do whatever seems cheapest. Then – as Britain came within a whisker of doing under Tony Blair – we would probably let all our farming go the way of our mining, since others can grow food (or dig out coal) much more cheaply than we can, and we can always buy whatever we need on the world market.
Or, still within the spirit of the free market, we could just tell the sheep farmers to get on with it – or else clear off and do something else. Indeed, in the words of farmer David Pittendreigh, chairman of the National Sheep Association in Wales, "It's survival of the fittest now!" – and the neoliberal market is nothing if not Darwinian. The government will probably take this line. It will be another of its "tough decisions".
Or, although this would be a huge departure, we could get serious. First we should acknowledge that the economics of the neoliberal free market are too simplistic by half, and for farming it is disastrous. For common sense and past experience suggest that we shouldn't let farmers go to the wall just because the weather changes or some sheikh decides to hike up the price of oil.
We need our agriculture, and we need it to be secure. The Napoleonic wars and the two world wars showed how vulnerable we are if we take our farming for granted and allow it simply to take its chances. Blockade is not an immediate threat, but food imports are precarious nonetheless. Other countries – including those we rely on, like Brazil – could be hit even worse by climate change than we are. If there is food at all on the world market then others, like China, could outbid us, and may need to.
In fact the only sensible course for all countries is to strive for self-reliance – growing all that is necessary to get by – while using (fair) trade to buy in luxuries that others really can grow better (in our case, bananas and coffee). Trade routes should be open too, because in times of crisis they will be necessary. The serendipity is that unless the weather fails utterly, most countries could be self-reliant if that was the policy. Britain certainly could, and so could most of the countries of Africa that are now the beneficiaries of Red Nose Day.
But for Britain to achieve self-reliance we would need a balance of arable, horticulture, and pastoral, in general on mixed farms and with the lowest possible inputs – and this is quite at odds with the dogma of the global market. As things are, it would be more profitable to increase the yield of grain in East Anglia even more, to fatten beef cattle to sell to Chinese millionaires, as recommended by secretary of state Owen Paterson at this year's Oxford Farming Conference.
So if we were serious – if we really thought about the present with compassion, and considered the future at all – we would acknowledge that neoliberal market economics just won't do. This isn't so shocking. We merely need to reinstate the strategy that was espoused both by the Tories and Labour in the pre-Thatcher years – treat each individual farm as a business (a million miles from Stalin's state-owned collectives) but ensure that all businesses of all kinds conform to principles of common sense and common morality. In principle, we just need capitalism with an acceptable face: not neoliberalism but social democracy.
Secondly, we should at last acknowledge that climate change is real, and prepare for it as urgently as our grandparents prepared for the second world war (except that the present threat is bigger). Specifically, we should accept that hill sheep are necessary – because Britain has an awful lot of upland and grass is our biggest crop, and sheep and cattle make best use of it.
The Guardian's report quoted Glyn Roberts, whose sheep survived in Snowdonia because he got them into the farmyard before the snow came. In Iceland, extreme cold is usual until May, yet sheep are among their biggest industries and a principal item of diet – basically because the farmers keep them in cozy wooden sheds for about half the year. We Brits simply need to accept that terrible weather of all kinds is liable to become the norm and take steps accordingly. The capital investment in sheep sheds would be huge, of course – but minute compared with what we have of late been spending on bankers, and surely far less than we are currently squandering on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Sheds in these times are appropriate technology, while GMOs are purely speculative (though in line with the neoliberal urge to maximise short-term wealth.
Will the coalition take serious things seriously? There is no sign of this. None of the major parties has any coherent strategy for food and agriculture – only the usual Paterson-style pleas for short-term lucrative exports. So if we, people at large, give a damn we have to do what needs doing for ourselves. The only immediate hope lies with grassroots movements – and the one bright ray is that these are spreading. This whole approach is discussed on the Campaign for Real Farming website, www.campaignforrealfarming.org.

Canada: Leading the Way Backwards Again

I'd written about soils and desertification last week, so was disappointed to see this today. I don't think any comments are needed, and probably shouldn't be written down anyway, I'll just say them out loud to myself.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canada-first-country-to-pull-out-of-un-drought-convention/article10475872/

Canada first country to pull out of UN drought convention

ENVIRONMENT

• by MIKE BLANCHFIELD
• March 28, 2013

The Harper government is pulling out of a United Nations convention that fights droughts in Africa and elsewhere, which would make Canada the only country in the world outside the agreement.
The federal cabinet last week ordered the unannounced withdrawal on the recommendation of Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, ahead of a major scientific meeting on the convention next month in Germany.

The abrupt move caught the UN secretariat that administers the convention off-guard, which was informed through a telephone call from The Canadian Press.
The cabinet order “authorizes the Minister of Foreign Affairs to take the actions necessary to withdraw, on behalf of Canada, from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, in those Countries Experiencing Severe Drought and/or Desertification, particularly in Africa.”
Canada signed the convention in 1994 and ratified it in 1995. Every UN nation – 194 countries and the European Union – is currently a party to it.
The UN body has a research committee dedicated to finding ways to stop the spread of droughts that lay waste to farmland across the planet, particularly Africa.
Scientists, governments and civil society organizations are headed to Bonn next month “to carry out the first ever comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of desertification, land degradation and drought,” says a notice from the United Nations Environment Program.
“Also, for the very first time, governments will provide concrete data on the status of poverty and of land cover in the areas affected by desertification in their countries.”
The issue of encroaching deserts has become urgent because of renewed droughts that have plunged millions into poverty in Africa’s Sahel belt last year and in East Africa the year before.
The Bonn-based secretariat for the UN body said no Canadian official had contacted them about the withdrawal.
“We cannot comment on something that is not communicated officially to the secretariat or to the United Nations,” said a spokeswoman, who added she planned to contact the secretariat’s legal office for advice.
Mr. Baird’s office referred questions to the Canadian International Development Agency, which rejected a request for an interview.
A spokesman for International Co-operation Minister Julian Fantino said in an e-mailed statement that “membership in this convention was costly for Canadians and showed few results, if any for the environment.”
Mr. Fantino’s office refused to answer follow-up questions, including how much money was being saved by the move, and when Canada planned to notify the UN of its decision.
Government documents show Canada provided a $283,000 grant to support the convention from 2010 to 2012.
NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar said the decision “shows … that the government is clearly outside of what is international norms here. We’re increasing our isolation by doing this.”
He also questioned why the government didn’t announce the decision.
“The questions are Why are we doing this? Who is behind this? And it would appear they just got caught doing this. They didn’t make an announcement about this,” Mr. Dewar said.
“Was this something they were hoping no one would notice?”
The decision could stoke more criticism of the Harper government’s record on the environment.
Canada, along with Japan, Russia and New Zealand, joined the United States in opting out of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
The government has also faced widespread criticism for muzzling scientists, leading to a recent complaint to the federal information commissioner to look into the matter.
Its decision to cut the funding for the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy has also sparked an outcry.
Mr. Baird has suggested the closing of the think tank was because the government did not want to pay for advice that did not fit with the government’s general direction.
The roundtable had warned repeatedly that the federal government would not be able to meet its targets for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions without putting a price on carbon, an idea the Conservatives vehemently oppose.
“Desertification, along with climate change and the loss of biodiversity, were identified as the greatest challenges to sustainable development during the 1992 Rio Earth Summit,” says the secretariat’s description of the 1994 convention.
It calls the convention the “sole legally binding international agreement linking environment and development to sustainable land management.”
Canada has also been an active participant in the convention, and has said it was in the country’s national interest to be a party to it.
The Canadian International Development Agency – soon to be merged into the Foreign Affairs Department – has administered Canada’s participation and affirmed that fact in an undated, 40-page report.
The report says that Canada is an “Affected Party” under the treaty because of “the existence of drylands in the Canadian prairies.”
The convention, the report states, requires Canada “to ensure that desertification issues are integrated into its national sustainable development plans and policies.”
The convention also obliges its parties “to report on activities undertaken to address the problem,” says the CIDA report.
“Our status as Party to this Convention is in our national interest because this Convention (and related issues like biodiversity), and the global thinking which is emanating from it, will benefit our own vision and approach of how we address our own, and the world’s drylands,” the report concluded.
In a May, 2008, speech to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, Canada’s representative said in a prepared text that “Canada has been a strong supporter” of the convention.
The text said that “Canada applauds” the efforts of the convention’s executive secretary “to elevate the profile of desertification as a key environment and development issue, and will continue to support activities to combat desertification, land degradation and drought” in keeping with the goals of the convention.

The Many Sides of Slow Food

It's grey, wet, cold on Canada's East Coast, with hardly any signs of Spring,  so how about something to feel hopeful about.


http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/slow-food-quickens-the-pace/?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

Slow Food Quickens the Pace

• by MARK BITTMAN
• March 26, 2013

AMSTERDAM — It may be that Slow Food’s original focus on taste and the quality of food — on gastronomy — simply seemed too narrow, and therefore elitist. But at least since its “Puebla Declaration” [1]in 2007, Slow Food has become a force to be reckoned with, probably the only international organization that integrates concerns about the environment, tradition, labor, health, animal welfare … along with real cooking, taste and pleasure.
Slow Food was founded by Carlo Petrini, who remains its president. He was a food writer when he launched a protest in 1986 against the opening of an enormous McDonald’s branch (more than 400 seats) in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna (better known to Anglophones as the Spanish Steps) — the first McDonald’s in Italy. More than 20 years before the coining of the term “locavore” and “the Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Petrini saw the battle as being against the industrialization of food, and now, a generation later, he was clearly prescient.
The situation has gotten both better and worse in the intervening time: fast food is practically hegemonic; cooking is often seen as little more than a lovely hobby for those with “time”; the number of small- and medium-size farms has plummeted; and although there is good food to be had by any who can afford it, overall production could hardly be more industrial.
There is, however, a growing movement of people who believe that we can reduce both hunger and obesity while improving the quality of food, the life of farmers, the impact of agriculture on the environment and health, and so on. And Petrini has become, especially in Europe, a man to be listened to on all of these subjects, an elder statesman who’s recognized as a founding father of this movement.
We were both at the Food Film Festival here, organized by a branch of Slow Food called the Youth Food Movement. I had an opportunity to sit and chat with Petrini. (“Chat” may be the wrong word, since we spoke in three languages, only one of which I’m any good at; there is interpretation and a small amount of paraphrasing here.)
First I asked if my original misperceptions of Slow Food as an organization of “gourmets” was wrong. He had two answers to this. First: “The nature of Slow Food has changed. When we began Terra Madre” — a biennial conference in Turin, Italy — “we were joined by Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, and we realized that ‘gastronomy’ was perceived by everyone in different ways, because our histories and conditions are different. But we all realized we had something in common, and that this fraternity was an important value.”
But, he reminded me, “gastronomy is holistic. It’s not only recipes and cooking but agriculture, physics, biology, genetics, chemistry, history, economy, politics and ecology. If we adapt this vision of gastronomy, our relationships with food and each other changes.”
One problem, of course, was that gastronomy became equated with “gourmet-ism,” or something of concern only to bon vivants. (He uses the word “gastronomer” as we might use “foodie” or, more kindly, one who appreciates the pleasures of food.) But now, he said: “A gastronomer who is not an environmentalist is just stupid. Whereas an environmentalist who is not a gastronomer is sad. It’s possible to change the world even while preserving the concept of the right of pleasure.”
These, of course, are not the only challenges:
“People in rich countries need to regenerate our way of thinking to give value to food, which has been lost in the last 50 years. As a result, we have a systems crisis: by using more energy than we produce to grow food — and we’re using 76 percent of our water for agriculture — we’re reaching the end of the planet’s resources. And young people understand we can’t survive with this and are beginning to act. Not just Slow Food and this Youth Food Movement. Look at Occupy.
“The main difficulty is that politicians don’t understand that we need a new paradigm. They continue with the old ones: finance, production, consumption and waste.
“So we’re producing enough food for 12 billion people, yet 1 billion out of our 7 billion aren’t eating enough. And we hear that because there will be 9 billion people in 2050, we must produce more. But more production creates more environmental problems and more waste.”
On solutions: “First is the local economy. Rather than move food from one country to another, we need to change the system of distribution and help the farmers around our houses. We have people who want to farm but cannot — why can huge companies get credit but young farmers cannot? — and we have a broken knowledge chain that we need to rebuild. We need a stronger and more productive dialogue between ‘official’ science and traditional knowledge.
“We have to break down the separation between production and consumption and say ‘we are all citizens’ — a new concept of respect for agriculture is very important. We must give back the value of menial work, pay farmers fairly and use their products, even if it means giving them away to poor people. Obviously that’s better than wasting it.
“This is a process related to a new civilization.”
My interpretation: a democratic food system is possible only in a real democracy, and working for or creating one of these means working for or creating both.
Have we made progress? Should we be hopeful? When I ask these questions, his response is almost exactly what I heard from Wendell Berry a year ago. “Everything has to start again, but everything already has started again,” Petrini said. “Sometimes I see this crisis and I’m not optimistic, but then I look at the communities that are changing the way they live. This is a river that is flowing under the soil and it is soon going to come out.
“We can access a new vision, but it will take patience. Politics is a problem, but you can already see the way. It’s straight and determined, but this is a slow revolution. Slow. Slow.”
Finally, I asked him about the rumors of him becoming Italy’s minister of agriculture: “That would be crazy,” he answered. “Slow Food is more important.” Maybe so.
1. Which includes statements like “Our well-being cannot be measured purely by quantitative indicators and without taking into account the well-being of other species and of the planet itself.”

If You Care About the Soil, This Really Matters

I tried in my journalism career, and now in columns and this blog to not overstate things.  I think it's important to try to persuade with facts and arguments, not hyperbole, and I also accept that we all have beliefs and opinions that have been hard won, and we give them up very reluctantly.  So I say "this really matters" with care, but I really think this does.

Last month a man called Allan Savory gave a "TED TALK".  (TED is a buffet of smart people talking about important things. Googling TED when you've got a spare minute or two is never time wasted.)  Savory has spent his life trying to understand  desertification, that agonizing loss of soil fertility that threatens so many,  and is getting worse because of climate change. He's discovered (and presents a lot of visual proof of his findings) that properly managed, intensive livestock production improves soil fertility, producing food that otherwise wouldn't be available. This is totally contrary to what most of us have been told, that livestock overgrazing is the CAUSE of desertification.  So please take a few minutes to view his presentation. It will give you something  to feel very positive about.

http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change.html