2013 Conference

Unexpected failures in food production or distribution could conceivably be so severe or long-lasting that they disrupt the food supply. What are the risks and how serious are they? What can be done to reduce the risks or cope with failures if they occur? This presentation will offer a preliminary examination of these questions, along with a resilience perspective that could help to explore the questions in greater depth. It will explore briefly what is already happening in government, civil society, and the private sector and what environmental professionals can do to help deal with this issue.

“Plant a Victory Garden: Our Food is Fighting” is a well-known slogan from the Victory Garden posters of World War I. That slogan was taken quite literally by the US, German and British military, who developed strategic plans to win the war by restricting access to food and destroying the civilian food system. The British government organized a naval blockade to import food for its citizens and restrict food and supplies to German and Austria Hungary. People barely survived on less than 1,000 calories a day, and by the end of the war, there was widespread famine in Germany and Austria. The food blockade was maintained for eight months after the war. It is estimated that three quarters of a million German people died from malnutrition and starvation. Germany’s vulnerability lead to long-term fears of food insecurity had dramatic implications for the German people and the rest of the world. Historians are radically reinterpreting the cause of the Second World War in terms of the collapse of the food system in WWI, focusing on the role that the German famine of WWI played in Hitler’s plans to invade rural area in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The urgency of feeding urban populations in war led to invasion of agricultural populations around the world. The food policies emerging after World War II established a food system that has long-term influence today. This paper investigates food justice in the World Wars to examine how food systems are destroyed or maintained under threat of collapse and how they are reconstructed.

The American food system—a complex network that links farm to fork—underwent substantial changes in the latter half of the twentieth century. The years after 1945 saw unprecedented increases in the productivity of American agriculture and the amount of food available to Americans. These gains helped strengthen the economy and improve health at home while also solidifying America’s power and prominence in global trade and world affairs. But there were also downsides to the strategy. For example, productivity gains led to increased dependence on synthetic chemical inputs and non-renewable resources like fossil fuels as well as not easily renewable resources like topsoil and fossil water. While a cluster of developments in science and technology—from synthetic pesticides and fertilizers to new breeds of plants and animals—were crucial preconditions for changes, equally as important were the efforts by American politicians, scientists and philanthropists to examine how they might explicitly shape the politics of peace and security by linking the nations of the world into a global food system that would promote prosperity and stability. Using changes in the ways food was grown, processed and sold, this paper explores how food was strategically deployed by the U.S. to promote peace and stability at home and around the world. Conversely, food also became a central element of alternative modernization strategies that arose in response to intensification efforts, as Americans sought to craft food systems they felt were more sensitive to goals including social and environmental aims. This paper examines the 20th century origins of the increasingly complex global network of food systems and argues that efforts to achieve key 21st century food security goals, including maintaining productivity and improving environmental sustainability, will be enhanced through better understanding of the key people and moments in the origins of the global food system.

Around the world fisheries are being stressed through a host of disturbances, not least of which is fishing, which substantially increased in the post-war period compared to prior human experience through history. Single-species stocks have collapsed in the past, but is it possible, even if improbable, that there could be a systematic collapse of global fisheries? The first part of this paper asks whether or not global fisheries could be described accurately as a panarchy of subsidiary adaptive systems in which global fisheries the highest level and scale, or if fisheries are disparate populations that cannot accurately be described as making up a coherent system through a series of tele-connections and interdependencies. If global fisheries can be described as the highest scale in fishery systems, then we should be able to analyze the potential of global collapse according to the adaptive cycle. If we cannot show the mechanisms and relationships that would indicate a global system, what would be highest level in fishery systems and what are the conditions of these varied levels? To advance thinking in these terms, the paper analyzes relevant variables, such as habitat changes in the World Ocean System, important to global fisheries to get an indication of directions, as well as historical collapses to understand and potentially build a social-ecological model of global fishery collapse. While US food security does not hinge on the health of global fisheries, fisheries are additive to the portfolio of foods that US consumers rely upon, particularly for protein and micro-nutrients.

Global climate change has the potential to negatively impact the resilience of world food supplies during the next several decades. There are numerous uncertainties on the impact of climate change at local and regional levels. For example drier conditions will prevail in Southern Africa, Australia, the Mediterranean, and Western North America. Climate change will also affect glacial and snow melt in the water towers of the Himalayan region with potential effects on downstream hydrology. Dramatic changes can be expected in water supplies, agricultural productivity, and access to food in many regions. The poor and other vulnerable groups in both rural and urban areas are likely to be at high risk to food insecurity in the affected regions. While 650 million of the most vulnerable people live in the arid and semi-arid regions of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, no region of the world, including North America, is free of the risk of disruption in its food supply. Lack of sustainability in food production is a key threat to food resilience. In this presentation, the linkages between potential impacts of global climate changes on food systems will be examined, and broader agricultural and adaptive strategies for food security will be addressed.

Food security, sustained access to sufficient and safe nutrition for all people, depends on a complex web of interconnections. What we eat is a product of the sun, water, and soil, mediated by social and economic systems and moved around by energy, via transportation infrastructure. Disturbances in any part of the system can affect all the rest. Fundamental systems concepts such as stocks, flows, and feedback help us organize what we know about the food system and identify points of vulnerability and leverage within the system. This talk presents a conceptual system dynamics model of the food system and uses it to examine risks in the face of uncertainty in different parts of the system. The model helps identify important reinforcing and balancing feedback loops that push the system toward or away from security, as well as key stocks that help the system buffer unexpected shocks. How can a systems approach help us understand the issue of food resilience? How can we understand in a complex system where the vulnerabilities are, where the risks are, and where the leverage points for making it less vulnerable and more stable, where those might be. My training is in systems dynamics thinking. So what I am presenting here is a methodological overview of how we might use a systems approach to help us think about food resilience.

Over two decades ago, Ulrich Beck suggested that modern society is defined by the distribution and allocation of risk. In this presentation I will discuss the differential distribution of risk in conventional and alternative food systems in the United States. In particular, I will highlight how conventional food systems often concentrate risk in small number of places and often place disproportionate amounts of risk upon disadvantaged populations. This is evident in the allocation of control in production, such as the case with chicken production in the United States, where chicken farmers must take on the risk of environmental problems and disease. This is also the case with consumption where risks associated with both acute and chronic disease are often disproportionately impacting low-income and minority populations. Alternative food systems, such as Community Supported Agriculture and Fair Trade, while relatively small in terms of impact on the food system, offer an alternative way of distributing risk. In the case of Community Supported Agriculture, in particular, we see a system that shifts the distribution of risk from crop failure from individual farmers to larger communities. The implications of risk distribution are significant for food system resilience since it highlights the differential vulnerabilities within the food system. Put simply, food systems disturbances, whether acute or chronic, are likely to have very differential and unequal impacts on different populations.

The Edible Peace Patch Project (EPPP) seeks to address the impacts of racism and poverty in the south side community by undertaking food system interventions in south St. Petersburg, Florida. The USDA has diagnosed several food deserts in some of the south side neighborhoods, and the neighborhoods that have grocery stores do not get the quality produce and healthy food offerings that more affluent neighborhoods receive. There are high levels of obesity and diabetes in this area. Good food is not available and the people who live in these areas suffer from it. In the midst of a national conversation about these food crises, it was just announced that Sweetbay, the only full service grocery store to serve the south side has announced that it is closing. The south side of St. Petersburg, the black part of town during segregation during Jim Crow segregation, suffers from the segregation of race and poverty. The schools in this part of Pinellas County reflect the condition of their community; the childhood poverty and the dropout rates are the most visible symptoms. Race continues to play a role in shaping oppression in St. Petersburg, Florida, shifting from the overt segregation of the Jim Crow era, to the spatial segregation of poverty and structural racism. Teen pregnancy is up, student test scores are down, and school dropout rates reflect a public system that is not succeeding at retaining its most at-risk youth. This is unsustainable by any measure. The Edible Peace Patch Project builds edible educational schoolyard gardens in Title I schools in this neighborhood to address some of the impacts of these conditions.

This presentation investigates GrowFood Carolina, a food distribution hub that opened two years ago in Charleston, SC. GrowFood states that they are, “revitalizing the local food system by providing essential aggregation, marketing, distribution, and logistical support to local growers. This support connects growers to local grocers, restaurants, community organizations and institutions, to make local and healthy food more accessible to the entire community.” I examine and analyze these claims, while relating them to the larger theme of food resiliency, given the brittleness of our industrial and global food system. My research includes participant observation at GrowFood events, as well as interviews with those who began and currently run GrowFood, and with local farmers and businesses that network with GrowFood. GrowFood provides an emerging example of the leading edge of changing our food systems, as their goal is to revitalize and sustain a 150-mile radius foodshed that links the rural with urban. Understanding their mission, values, goals, strategies, and the business and environmental practices utilized by GrowFood and their partners, can help us better understand and theorize about food hubs and their ability to help generate food system resiliency.

An increasing interest in the role of food resources within society and as a vehicle for understanding sustainability leads me to think that college curriculum should include at least one course focusing on Food, Society and Sustainability for broad consumption at the undergraduate level. Within Western society—and American academia, particularly—we have become passionate about the discourse of food in society, and have become intellectually concerned about its role involving human sustainability. The discussion for this presentation is intended to raise ideas about developing curricula that draws on this growing interest and discusses the necessary background research that it should entail. I explore ideas that I have developed so far and will elicit input from conference participants to incorporate into application for my further scholarship. My purpose is to develop scholarly research in the field of Food, Society, and Sustainability, but my hope is to develop a full curriculum proposal for a new course aimed at a wide range of mid-level undergraduate students and to supplement the offerings in a new minor in Sustainability.