Community Food Security: A Growing Movement

by Christopher D. Cook and John Rodgers

Agribusiness produce typically travels over 1,000 miles before it reaches the consumer. Yet this food has a far easier time reaching the supermarket than do low-income urban residents. Food industry consolidation and supermarket redlining of low-income areas, has produced a chaotic and vastly inequitable US food system where small farmers battle for dwindling market opportunities and low-income consumers face prodigious barriers to obtaining healthy food.

Fortunately, an emerging national grassroots movement is turning this common plight into common ground, challenging a US food system that lacks two vital ingredients - community and security.

Merging food sufficiency and sustainability with grassroots economic development, activists from New York to Austin, Texas, to Los Angeles are forging an alternative US food chain of urban farms, farmers' markets and urban-rural agriculture ventures. Their common goal: making nutritious and affordable food more available in poor communities.

Stressing locally based economic development, ecological restoration, hunger prevention and sustainable agriculture, the community food security movement offers an innovative approach with far-reaching potential.

Reviving Communities

One of the poorest sections of San Francisco is home to one promising urban ecology effort. On any given day, the office of the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG) bustles with energy as teen-age gardening interns drop by to pick up paychecks, brag about their vegetable crops, or prod the group's executive director, Mohammed "Mo" Nuru, to give them more farming work.

Nuru's vision of a local food base stems, in part, from his memories of growing up in Nigeria where "everybody farmed" and food security was a strong measure of a community's strength.

Once strictly a gardening group, SLUG now promotes small-scale urban agriculture projects as a means to help economically depressed communities. SLUG's aim, Nuru explains, is not only to give summer jobs to kids or provide inexpensive produce to the poor, but also to restore community vitality.

With rows of organic vegetables, flowers and a greenhouse, SLUG's four-acre Alemany Youth Farm is a meeting ground for jobs, community pride and nutritious food. In newly landscaped backyards, Alemany residents tend 6-foot-square planter boxes filled with tomatoes, collard greens, red chard and string beans - produce often unavailable in low-income areas. Local households are now gaining direct access to affordable, nutritious food instead of sacrificing tight food-stamp budgets to high-priced convenience stores or cross-town bus trips in search of a supermarket.

A More Democratic Food System

The Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) links 124 groups - comprised of sustainable agriculture advocates, urban redevelopment organizers and environmental activists, food banks, family farm networks and anti-poverty organizations - that are working to build alternative systems of food production and consumption by opening consumer markets in the US for small-scale, diversified agriculture.

CFSC argues that the extreme competitive pressure exerted by multinational agri-food corporations has made it difficult to preserve community-oriented and ecologically conscious agriculture.

"Our food system - from production through consumption - has been experiencing major restructuring in the last 15 years," says Kathleen Fitzgerald, director of the Sustainable Food Center in Austin, Texas. "And small farmers and low-income consumers have been on the losing end of these developments."

According to Fitzgerald, 12 million US children go hungry while some 500,000 farms and ranches have gone under in the past 15 years - a rate of 87 per day.

The goal, explains Community Food Security Coalition co-founder Andy Fisher, is "a more democratic food system."

A US Community Farm Network

The concept of a food security coalition emerged almost simultaneously on the East and West coasts in the early 1990s, as researchers and activists began creating new working relationships between anti-hunger organizations and sustainable-agriculture groups.

Mark Winne, director of Hartford Food System, a community gardening and food policy organization in Hartford, Connecticut, was building a national network of local food security projects that shared resources and ideas. Meanwhile, UCLA Urban Planning Professor Robert Gottlieb and researcher Andy Fisher were documenting the shortcomings of US food policy - as well as the disjointed efforts by sustainable-agriculture and anti-hunger groups to change it.

In a policy paper that later would become a cornerstone of the movement, Fisher called for comprehensive reform of traditional policies to alleviate hunger. "Food security represents a community need, rather than an individual's plight," he wrote. Reorienting the US food economy toward communities, Fisher insisted, needs to begin with a systemic analysis incorporating issues such as food industry consolidation, supermarket redlining and excessive reliance on long-distance transportation of processed commodity crops.

The coalition draws on several movements with strong, wide-ranging constituencies. Prominent among these is the sustainable agriculture movement, which has been fighting to protect small family farmers, while promoting environmentally sound farming techniques. The community food security concept has helped inject hunger issues into the sustainable agriculture movement, redirecting attention to programs that benefit lower-income people.

The California Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (CSAWG), for example, has played a major role in developing and implementing community food security plans. Among their collaborative projects, CSAWG and the California Alliance for Family Farms are working to create direct marketing relationships between small-scale diversified farmers and local schools and food banks.

The community food security movement comes on the heels of similar efforts in developing countries, especially those in the South, where community-based urban agriculture is one response to burgeoning unemployment, ecological decay and malnutrition. According to a 1993 report by the Ottawa, Ontario-based International Development Research Center (IDRC), "Globally, about 200 million urban dwellers are now urban farmers, providing food and income to about 700 million people. In some large Latin American centers, a third of the vegetable demand is met by urban production."

With "Third World" conditions of poverty, unemployment and malnourishment mounting in US cities, Andy Fisher's proposals for community food security programs caught on quickly. In a time when many progressive groups are retrenching, food security organizers are literally growing a movement from the grassroots, directly challenging a food system dominated by agribusiness conglomerates and their powerful lobbies.

The coalition has already managed to wrest an important legislative victory from the Republican-led Congress. The Community Food Security Act (CFSA), a coalition-authored section of the 1996 US Farm Bill, funds local projects "designed to meet the food needs of low-income people, increase the self-reliance of communities in providing for their own food needs and promote comprehensive, inclusive and future-oriented solutions to local food, farm, and nutrition problems."

Administered by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the CFSA will provide $16 million through the year 2002 to community-based food programs. Grassroots organizations would receive one-time seed grants to build self-sustaining economic relationships between farmers, food stores and low-income consumers. The funding, albeit meager, strengthens alternative concepts and institutions to address the structural, economic and nutritional problems of people who are locked out of the system.

New Links; New Twists

Some Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) arrangements - in which nearby residents fund local farmers in exchange for a season's worth of crops - are taking a new twist. In Los Angeles, the Southland Farmers' Market and UCLA are collaborating on a CSA project that delivers fresh farm produce weekly to low-income neighborhoods.

In the heart of Eastside, the poorest neighborhood in Austin, Texas, organizers have set up a community garden and farmers' market in a vacant lot. More than 40 percent of Eastside's families live below the poverty line, hunger and nutrition problems are widespread and the supermarkets are few. The community garden serves as a hub for nutrition education for families and grows enough produce to provide each resident with one vegetable or fruit every day of the year. Every weekend, the Eastside Community Farmers' Market sets up shop alongside the neighborhood garden, featuring more than 20 local farmers, many of them certified organic growers.

A pilot effort in Oakland, California, has sought to bring farm produce to food banks and residential rehabilitation centers by brokering produce sales from local farmers to food service managers.

In Austin and other cities, activists are promoting municipal food policy councils and linking food security and access to reliable transportation. A special food-shopping bus route in Austin provides low-income consumers from Eastside with transportation to markets offering cheaper, better produce than can be found in neighborhood convenience stores. CFSA's Andy Fisher stresses the need to educate municipalities. "They deal with water, utilities and housing, but they don't deal with food as a municipal issue," Fisher says.

It is evident that grassroots groups, by themselves, lack the time and resources to challenge the daunting inequities of the national food system and international forces of industry consolidation. Movement organizers do not expect their coalition, nor any congressional legislation, to be a panacea for such mammoth trends. But they are redefining progressive food aid approaches, broadening and diversifying policy debates and creating a dynamic coalition with far-reaching potential.

Christopher Cook is a San Francisco-based journalist. John Rodgers is a healthcare researcher.

Adapted from a Backgrounder report by the Institute for Food and Development Policy, 398 60th St., Oakland, CA 94618, (800) 274-7826.

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The Earth: The Ultimate Safety Net

In 1992, the US Department of Agriculture authorized the Farmers' Market Nutrition Program (FMNP) to supply fresh-produce vouchers to recipients of Women, Infants and Children (WIC) assistance. In its first three years, the program issued vouchers to some 800,000 WIC recipients in 24 states, the District of Columbia and the Cherokee nation. These vouchers have been redeemed at hundreds of farmers' markets that participate in the program. Although impressive, these aggregate numbers belie the minimal funding committed to the FMNP: Each WIC participant gets just $20 a year in farmers' market coupons to supplement food stamps.

According to Kai Siedenberg, coordinator of the California Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, 87 percent of the 6,615 farmers nationwide who have participated in the FMNP have increased their overall sales. And for many WIC recipients, the program is their first entrée into the fresh-produce market. Tom Haller, head of the California Alliance for Family Farms, cited a CAFF survey that found that most WIC recipients had doubled their intake of fresh fruits and vegetables since entering the program.

But, with welfare cutbacks, food security activists are working hard to fill the void left by a fraying federal safety net and overstretched public and private funds. Most government food aid programs never were designed as a long-term solution to poverty and hunger, but rather as a plan of last resort.

Meanwhile, the CFSA money provided by the USDA falls far short of the need. In 1996, 121 locally based program requested more than $21 million - only $1 million was available.

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800 Million Urban Farmers Worldwide

NEW YORK - Urban farming is helping to lift hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty and is improving the health and nutrition of the world's city dwellers. According to a report by the United Nations' Development Program's Urban Agriculture Network, urban agriculture may be practiced by as many as 800 million people worldwide - in developing and developed countries alike.

Urban agriculture - which is most prevalent in Asia - ranges from growing crops on rooftops to raising livestock in backyards and farming fish in ponds, streams and lagoons.

For the poorest of the poor, urban agriculture provides access to food and helps stamp out malnutrition. For the "stable poor," it provides a source of income and high quality food at a low cost. For middle-income families, it offers the possibility of savings and a return on investment in urban property.

The world's poorest urban households spend as much as 90 percent of their income on food. For these people, urban agriculture offers an opportunity for a better diet and a chance to shift household spending toward other needs, such as health care and housing.

In Sao Paulo, Brazil, urban households - rich and poor - devote about 50 percent of their income to food. In Lima, Peru, the rate climbs to 70 percent, and in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, it is as high as 80 percent. Urban agriculture is also helping to create jobs. In some cities, as many as two-thirds of all families are engaged in agriculture, with as many as a third of these having no other source of income.

But benefits of urban agriculture extend beyond better nutrition, poverty reduction and jobs for the poor. The environmental benefits are equally significant.

Urban agriculture turns waste from a problem into a resource, reduces the public cost of waste management and provides a better living environment. In Khartoum, Sudan, about one-fourth of the city's garbage is consumed by farm animals. And in California, 200 wastewater reclamation plants save nearly 800,000 cubic meters (28.3 million cubic feet) of water a day, with most of the treated effluent put to agricultural use.

"It has become clear that urban agriculture has been underrated in all but a handful of countries - and mostly overlooked by the international development community," says UNDP Assistant Administrator Anders Wijkman. The UNEP report concludes that "By putting simple laws into effect, urban agriculture can become a formidable economic force in the 21st century."

Adapted from Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities. To request a copy, contact UNDP, Urban Development Unit, DC1-2080, 1 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017, Fax: (212) 906-6471.