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Messing with the System

Designing the System
#1

Last week I attended the Sustainable Innovations Forum hosted by the UN. Day 5 was focused on the global food system. In summary, consensus opinion we have maybe 7 years left to mitigate humanities impact on the climate system to prevent the worst and secure the food supply. Baked in already is the suffering of hundreds of millions who will be displaced and/or impacted by climate change in the coming decades.

The only viable immediately available form of sequestration that scales sufficiently is photosynthesis, which is land use and agriculture.

The Sierra Club hosted a Grassroots Teams Leadership meeting, we decided to prepare for and participate in the UN Global Food Summit 2021. The focus of this summit is on raising public awareness of the impact our diets and consumption patterns have on the natural world.

"The Secretary General is calling for collective action of every citizen to radically change the way we produce, process, transport, market and consume food. "

The Sierra Club connected me with the Rural Coalition for a workshop scheduled in early December. I will speak on developing entry level markets, aggregation and distribution, customer communication, merchandising strategies.

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There are tens of millions of Americans who lost their jobs and are at risk of eviction by the end of December. There is so far no viable idea at State or Federal level what to do about that. An estimated 10 million jobs will never come back.

What seems to be a first line of defense is to partner with like minded people and protect food and shelter. I have connected a non profit specialized to connect people into Intentional Community with Sustainable Harvest focused on developing small farms. The idea is to create Kibbutz type collectives to scale the development of community level food systems.

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in need of development:

Identifying and listing national and regional resources available to support community level development efforts

Developing a canvassing tool to assess community level resources, providing a gap analysis to identify needs

Internet based software to connect CSAs (consumer supported agriculture) with aggregation and logistics services.

Identifying social investment funding sources, creating a brokerage between potential clients and funders.

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#2

thank you @Klaus for your vigilance, scope and depth of vision and insight.
to what extent is your approach applicable/ scalable outside the usa ? anyhow i’m inspired to tune in further and also bring this conversation to cicolab sometimes.
which voices need to be at the roundtable?

#3

Hello Charles, the approach is universally applicable and scalable. When I worked for Metro C&C as a corporate marketing strategist, they operated in 30 countries. While they all grow different types of crops and make different menus, everyone eats breakfast, lunch and dinner. Farmers grow food, aggregators collect and distribute, wholesaler support retailers. Brokers gather information, make predictions, inform the markets, buy and sell. These are macro structures that work differently in India than in Germany, but they all achieve the same outcomes.

The thought leader in Europe is Prince Charles. I haven’t focused much on what is happening in Europe or elsewhere beyond random news reports, but Prince Charles stands out as having been a very early promoter of soil health. Here is a speech he gave at Georgetown University in 2011. He founded 'Accounting for Sustainability with the idea that externalities had to be incorporated into the cost for true valuation of products.

The UK is also on the forefront because of Brexit and the looming risk to their food supply. Here a report: https://bbsrc.ukri.org/documents/transforming-the-uk-food-system-call-text/

France of course is home of the 4p1000 Initiative and deeply engaged in protecting and transforming where needed its agricultural sector.

Who should be at the table? In the US the NGOs have to take the lead and protect low income and disenfranchised populations, the challenge is to unite everyone under one common vision / narrative. In the EU companies like Metro or Aldi have the infrastructure in place to help markets develop. They do need regulatory and tax support to be incentivized. Prince Charles has a good narrative to start with, but now it becomes technical. How does one operationalize and shift this massive food system, which impacts every single facet of our lives? We basically know, but haven’t been able to muster the energy necessary to impact so many people’s interests.

At this point it is about shaping a narrative that describes what a sustainable regenerative food system looks like, and how to get to it. Systems thinkers with the technical know how to understand markets.

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#4

here another article from the UK, implementation of financial incentives to regenerate agriculture and land management.

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#5

thank you — i mentioned you and linked to this thread, at the cicolab roundtable channel on mattermost CSC Agora
https://chat.collectivesensecommons.org/agora/pl/zi4i1rrbh78uif1rut7xzoszco

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