The trouble with a lot of local food advocacy is that food issues are either elitist in tone or divorced from political sentiments or movements. Some organizations seem to view local food as a niche that will find its way into the current market. Many Calgary area restaurants serve up local food as a delicacy, claiming that they support local farmers and sustainable products. Then you read their menu and realize that the average person could not afford to eat locally. We need to pay more for food, that much is certain, but we also need to make local food a preferred choice for people who have no interest in food as an elite product. Local food, as a movement, has a radical nature that can energize people for change.
A recent press release from the National Farmer’s Union speaks to the fact that issues of food security are intertwined with just about ever dimension of our lives, from poverty to social inequality to environmental issues. March 8th is International Women’s Day, and it is quite clear that agricultural issues have always been bound up in ongoing struggles for women’s equality and justice:
National Farmers Union Women’s President Colleen Ross, who farms near Iroquois, Ontario, said rural women produce half the world’s food, and account for between 60 to 80 percent of the food in most developing countries. She said the global food crisis could be overcome more quickly if food production and trading systems recognized the value of family farms, and especially the labour of women. “In Canada, women have been forced to rely on off-farm jobs to keep their family farms viable,” she said. “The chronic loss of farmers in this country and around the world is one symptom of a global food crisis.”
The destruction of rural farming communities in the global south and our own country have actually led to further global inequality. Where women have traditionally played an active and important role in agricultural activities and their local communities, the mass exodus from the countryside to the city has forced many into unimaginable poverty. Women who produced food for themselves and their communities now find themselves working for starvation wages to produce t-shirts and Barbie dolls for the North American market.
If you’re just thinking of local food in terms of a pleasant niche that the market has found a place for, think again. A locally-based democratic food system would require some radical systemic change. Localism has the potential to spur real social change worldwide.
Photo of the tea harvest in Kenya courtesy franz88 with a CC license.
