What needs to be done

Growing Communities believes that if we are to create the sustainable, resilient food systems that will see us through the challenges ahead, we need to work together to take our food systems back from the supermarkets and agri-business and put the power back where it should be: with communities and farmers.

We believe the mainstream food system needs to be turned on its head and replaced with one which works according to the following set of principles. You can explore our Key Principles in more detail, but in summary:

A sustainable and resilient food system should:

• Involve food farmed and produced 'ecologically'
• Involve mainly plant-based food
• Involve fresh/minimally processed food
• Involve trade between appropriately scaled operations
• Increase the consumption of food sourced as locally, seasonally and directly as practicable
• Use resources in an environmentally friendly and low-carbon way
• Trade fairly
• Be transparent and promote trust throughout the food chain
• Promote knowledge
• Foster community
• Strive to be economically viable and independent
• Enshrine the principles in everything it does

We believe that a food system working according to these principles could enable us to reduce the amount of energy, fossil fuels and resources it takes to feed us while creating jobs and community in both urban and rural areas and producing delicious food that is good for us and the planet.

We also have a vision of what this sustainable, resilient food system might look like in the future, which can be expressed in the form of a diagram – the Growing Communities Food Zones. This shows what type of food could best come from where and is an initial attempt to illustrate what percentage of our food we might aim to source from different zones.

It starts with the urban areas in which most of us live and moves outwards applying a kind of food subsidiarity: raising what we can as close as we can  and then moving outwards taking into account the principles outlined earlier and a number of factors, such as soil type, climate, what grows best where, size of plots available, infrastructure and transport links available, the degree of mechanisation that makes most sense, and the perishability of the produce. ]

To get closer to that vision and make the systems that feed our cities more sustainable and resilient we need to produce food in way which:

• Does not depend on fossil fuels, artificial fertilisers and pesticides.
• Uses renewable energy plus more animal and people power.
• Backs this up with the appropriate technologies and machines.
• Restores the birds and the bees, the soil microflora and fauna.

And as a society we need to:

• Adjust our diets to reflect how much of what kinds of foods we can best produce, aiming for  everyone to have ‘enough’ and to minimise waste.
• Shorten supply chains and dramatically increase production based on human-scale, mixed farms located in and around urban areas
• Build appropriately scaled trading relationships - starting from the local and working out to global which enable micro producers, small farmers, coops, larger farms and imports to exist in harmony.
• Re-connect people with food and farming – involving them in the consumption, production, trading and celebration of sustainable food

Then we need to identify all the practical alternatives that fit the bill – farms, projects and enterprises – and ensure they multiply. Fast!

>> Manifesto for feeding cities: how we might get there