Already on this blog (the successor to Alternative Estuary), we’ve posted up a fair number of pieces about food supply and security. This is what has gone up so far:

Seed banks – gaining control…

Another reason to grow our own food:)

Food deserts, food supply and taking back control

Why what we do IS political

Now more than ever, we need to grow our own food

A common theme is pointing out that whoever controls the food supply controls the populace. That applies wherever you are on the globe – it is a universal truth. Having seen how governments have behaved over the last two years, assuming even more powers and imposing drastic restrictions to ostensibly deal with Covid, a growing number of people are waking up to the truth that government and the corporations they serve do not have our interests at heart. As this truth dawns, they’re starting to ask more questions about our food supply chains and the corporations that control them. There is a growing interest in ways of bypassing these supply chains and bringing food production down to a more local and sustainable level where we have more control over it. This is one of the core components of our project.

The last thing these corporations and the governments that do their bidding want is for food production to be a more local, community focused affair. Something that is dealt with in some depth in this insightful piece:

An Inconvenient Truth: The Peasant Food Web Feeds the World – Colin Todhunter | OffGuardian | 5.2.22

Smallholder peasant farming is regarded by these conglomerates as an impediment. Their vision is fixated on a narrow yield-output paradigm based on the bulk production of commodities that is unwilling to grasp an integrated social-cultural-economic-agronomic systems approach that accounts for the likes of food sovereignty and diverse nutrition production per acre.

This systems approach also serves to boost rural and regional development based on thriving, self-sustaining local communities rather than eradicating them and subordinating whoever remains to the needs of global supply chains and global markets. Industry lobbyists like to promote the latter as ‘responding to the needs of modern agriculture’ rather than calling it for what it is: corporate imperialism.

Although promoting community food growing, community allotments and the like may on the surface to be a feel good, ‘fluffy’ project, the way we see it is that it’s anything back. It’s actually quite a subversive act which for the moment, is one that in a fair few locations, can still fly under the radar of the authorities. Mind you, with the accelerated push towards the fourth industrial revolution, that can’t be guaranteed. So, literally and metaphorically, we need to dig in…