Respected South African academic and author Raj Patel – visiting Western Australia this week – has blogged Slow Food Perth on his website:

[11 Sep 2007] SLOW Food was an invention of the Italian Communist Party, and has some important roots in workerist organising, with a radically egalitarian vision of why everyone needs to be able to savour food more. In Slow Food sites outside Italy, this rather tends to get lost, and Slow Food becomes just an alibi for a certain kind of conspicuous consumption. So I was very pleased to speak with someone from Slow Food Perth, where I am at the moment, and where people are aware that theirs is a political project. They’ve got edible schoolyard-type projects, and they’re a great resource on how to avoid supermarkets in Perth (which, I’ve been told by more than one reader, is very hard to do). If you’re in this neck of the woods, do check them out.

More information
Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved website

A few Slow Food Perth members went to hear a stimulating presentation by Raj Patel at the University of Western Australia on 11 September 2007. He was visiting Australia to talk at the Brisbane Writers Festival about the release of his book Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the Worlds Food System.

Felicity Lawrence’s review of his book in The Guardian newspaper this week included the following comments: ;This is a book full of insight that makes an important contribution to understanding that the politics of food is not a narrow matter of shopping, ethical or otherwise. It involves the urgent study of globalisation and social justice, and the politics of modern capitalism itself.’

Below is an excerpt from Raj Patel’s website Stuffed and Starved with an Australian twist:

‘Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.

‘Global hunger and obesity are symptoms of the same problem and, what’s more, the route to eradicating world hunger is also the way to prevent global epidemics of diabetes and heart disease, and to address a host of environmental and social ills.

‘If you think this is a problem far removed from Australia, think again. Latest figures suggest that two out of three Australian men are overweight or obese, as are about half of Australian women, and a quarter of Australia’s children. Over 400,000 Australians have diabetes and don’t even know it. And this happens at the same time as hunger persists in Australia, particularly in aboriginal communities. Indeed, in some studies, almost one in four households were reported as going hungry one or more times a week.

‘These are two sides of the same coin. Overweight and hungry people are linked through the chains of production that bring food from fields to our plate. Guided by the profit motive, the corporations that sell our food shape and constrain how we eat, and how we think about food. The limitations are clearest at the fast food outlet, where the spectrum of choice runs from McMuffin to McNugget. But there are hidden and system constraints even when we feel we’re beyond the purview of Ronald McDonald.

‘The concerns of food production companies have ramifications far beyond what appears on supermarket shelves. Their concerns are the rot at the core of the modern food system. Even when we want t o buy something healthy, something to keep the doctor away, we’re trapped in the very same system that has created our ‘Fast Food Nations’. Try, for example, shopping for apples.

‘At supermarkets in North America and Europe, the choice is restricted to half a dozen varieties: Fuji, Braeburn, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious and perhaps a couple of others. Why these? Because they’re pretty: we like the polished and unblemished skin. Because their taste is one that’s largely unobjectionable to the majority. But also because they can stand transportation over long distances. Their skin won’t tear or blemish if the apples are knocked about in the miles from orchard to aisle. They take well to the waxing technologies and compounds that make this transportation possible, and keep the apples pretty on the shelves. They are easy to harvest. They respond well to pesticides and industrial production. These are reasons why we won’t find Calville Blanc, Black Oxford, Zaberga Reinette, Kandil Sinap or the ancient and venerable Rambo on the shelves.

‘Our choices are not entirely our own because, even in a supermarket, the menu is crafted not by our choices, nor by the seasons, nor where we find ourselves, nor by the full range of apples available, nor by the full spectrum of available nutrition and tastes but by the power of food corporations.

‘It should come as little surprise, then that this situation isn’t something we can shop our way out of. Our current way of eating, whether the drive through or the supermarket, is part of the problem. These corporations are in the business of persuading us otherwise. But we ought not to be fooled. The evidence from Britain and the US points to supermarkets reducing choice, trampling on alternatives, and siphoning money out of local economies.

‘If we’re to reclaim our food system, we’ll need to do something far more systematic than buying ‘fair trade’. We’ll need to reclaim how our food comes to us – by having a democratic conversation about how our lives force us to consume so much of the wrong kind of food, at the same time as the world’s poorest, who work in agriculture, are left behind.

‘The need for this democratic conversation about food is something that supermarkets can’t provide. For we are more than merely consumers. We’re human beings, with a sense of empathy and compassion to those around us – it would be odd indeed if we could simply pluck these virtues off the supermarket shelf. Changing the world has never been easy, but for the sake of all of us, stuffed and starved, change couldn’t be more urgent.’

Organic farming can feed the world, according to a landmark US study, as Paul Mole reports in the Western Australian rural weekly, The Countryman.

[06 Sep 2007] RESEARCHERS at the University of Michigan claim organic agriculture can produce yields equal to conventional farming in the developed world and up to three times as much food on farms in developing countries, while boosting food security.

The report’s leading author, Professor Ivette Perfecto, said the university’s controversial conclusions, which have caused frenzied global debate, dispelled the myth levelled at organic producers that they cannot produce the same yields as traditional farming systems. The study was based on more than 290 separate comparisons of the two approaches to farming. In addition to equal or greater yields, Professor Perfecto said crop returns on a global per capita basis could be achieved without putting more farmland into production.

US scientists also claimed that so-called green manures provided enough nitrogen to replace synthetic fertilisers, while legumes could also fix as much nitrogen in the soil as common man-made top dressings.

Muchea certified organic and biodynamic farmer Wayne Brock and Organic Growers’ Association of WA president Annie Kavanagh backed the study’s findings, saying a range of modern agricultural industries had vested interests in conventional farming techniques.

Mr Brock, who has grown organic crops and livestock since the early 1980s, said his 16-hecatre block could comfortably furnish demand for Muchea’s annual per capita vegetable requirements.

‘We’re getting just as much if not a little bit more out of our plants compared to the conventional grower,’ he said. ‘Globalisation is a great thing, if you’re having a dinner party and you want some mangos, then fine, you can buy mangos 12 months of the year, but it’s a a total myth that organic yields can’t compete.’

Ms Kavanagh said organic agriculture suffered from a lack of research cash. ‘When you look at conventional farming and things like genetically-modified cotton they get enormous amounts of money to carry out research all the time, but unfortunately organic agriculture has to rely on a lot of anecdotal evidence,’ she said.

‘WA has been running successful broadacre organic farms for about 30 years. Farmers should also realise that they can shift to organic agriculture slowly by adapting parts of their farm, one bit at a time, and not all of it overnight.
Because of the high cost of fertilisers, developing countries have been forced to adopt organic methods.’

Vegetables WA president David Anderson admitted organic yields were improving all the time, but he balked at the suggestion organics could feed a hungry planet.

‘To be honest, I haven’t seen this particular study and I’m not sure organic agriculture can equal conventional farming yields,’ Mr Anderson said.

‘But the industry has made quantum leaps recently in terms of production that needs further field research. Organics is a new farming system that I think needs more time to fully develop.’

A recent report from the University of Iowa, full article on link below

“The study shows that well-managed organic crop rotations, which are key to organic farming practices, actually lead to higher yields than conventional chemical methods and rotations. (In the current ethanol-infused corn boom, farmers are forgoing the traditional corn-soybean rotation and growing continuous corn, which requires a greater amount of chemical fertilizers to keep the yield up.)

Finally, organic farming gets criticized for its tillage practices, which critics say leads to soil erosion and leaches nitrates into groundwater. The critics say conventional “no-till” farm methods, associated with genetically modified crops and heavy doses of herbicides, are superior”.

More information
http://www.countryman.com.au