Legislators taste a whole new lunch

Nov 022012
 

To celebrate Farm to School Month, dozens of Oregon legislators headed to school cafeterias this October to check out what’s new on the menu.

Why did these legislator lunches take place? Statewide funding and legislation is key to growing Farm to School efforts in Oregon. House Bill 2800, passed in 2011, provides just under $200,000 in statewide funding to bring more Oregon-grown and processed foods into school lunches and support food, agriculture, and garden-based educational activities. Starting last week, school districts have the opportunity to apply for this funding to expand their Farm to School efforts.

Congressman Kurt Schrader (D, District 5) and Representative Brian Clem (D-Salem, District 21) eat a fruit- and vegetable-filled lunch with students after touring the Salem-Keizer Education Foundation’s (SKEF) Learning Gardens at Grant Community School.

Although the $200,000 will be awarded to just a few Oregon districts as part of a pilot program, Ecotrust research shows that every dollar spent on Oregon-grown and -processed foods has a significant multiplier effect on Oregon’s farming and processing industries.

In 2013, a growing group of Farm to School advocates will return to the legislature to ask for an expanded $5 million Farm to School grant program. These advocates, co-led by Ecotrust and Upstream Public Health, invited legislators to lunch to showcase the real impacts that Farm to School and school garden programming have for hungry kids and hard-working farmers in their communities.

Healthy school lunch gives young Oregonians – including the large number who experience food insecurity – a daily, balanced meal. Garden-based education helps increase children’s food literacy and teaches life-long healthy eating habits. Farm to School supports regional food economies and creates new markets for Oregon farmers.

Ecotrust helped organize three lunches: at Cascade Elementary in the Lebanon Community School District, Centennial Learning Center (CLC) in the Centennial School District, and Grant Community School in the Salem-Keizer School District. Increased funding from the state will allow schools like Cascade, CLC and Grant to sustain and expand their innovative programming and allow more schools across Oregon to develop successful programs.

Legislators get a taste of how school lunch is changing
On Food Day, October, 24, Representative Sherrie Sprenger (R-Scio, House District 17) toured Cascades Elementary. Student guides gave a tour of the district’s Planting Seeds of Change edible teaching and production gardens, which produced 800 pounds of food for the school meal program and a local hospital last year! (Learn more about the visit in this Democrat Herald story.)

On October 26, Senator Laurie Monnes Anderson (D–Gresham, District 25) and Representative Greg Matthews (D-Gresham, District 50) visited Centennial Learning Center. They experienced their innovative lunch program, which incorporates farm fresh produce. In August 2012, the district began incorporating a weekly share of vegetables from Dancing Roots Farm into its school lunches. All students learn to cook in the culinary program, which prepares breakfast and lunch daily for the school. Centennial Learning Center was also the first school in Gresham to pilot composting food scraps.

Senator Laurie Monnes Anderson (D–Gresham, District 25) and farmer Brian Dickerson of Dancing Roots Farm listen as Conrad Schumacher, Centennial Learning Center chef and teacher, describes the lunch they are about to eat, prepared by CLC students using vegetables from Dancing Roots.

Rep. Greg Matthews (D-Gresham, District 50) points out what’s on the menu for lunch at the Centennial Learning Center, highlighting vegetables from Dancing Roots Farm. He is flanked by the Oregon Department of Education’s new Farm to School Coordinator Rick Sherman, FoodCorps fellow Emily Ritchie, principal Jamie Juenemann, and the Oregon Department of Agriculture’s Farm to School Specialist, Michelle Ratcliffe.

On Halloween, October 31, Congressman Kurt Schrader (D, District 5), Representative Vicki Berger (R-Salem, District 20), and Representative Brian Clem (D-Salem, District 21) ate school lunch at Grant Community School. They joined Food Service Director Dave Harvey; representatives from the Salem-Keizer Education Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, and Ecotrust; and elementary students to tour the school garden, learn about the school’s composting program, participate in an apple taste test, and experience how the district is changing what students eat and how cafeterias source food. (Learn more about the visit in this Statesman Journal story and this Capital Press story.)

A raised bed in the Salem-Keizer Education Foundation’s Learning Gardens at Grant Community School overflows with abundant fall produce. Students at Grant report that kale is one of their favorite vegetables (!) – they turn it into tasty kale chips with School Garden Coordinator Brenda Knobloch.

FoodCorps service member Chelsea Thomsen and Salem-Keizer Education Foundation School Garden Coordinator Brenda Knobloch serve tastes of several varieties of Oregon apples to students in the cafeteria at Grant Community School.

From left: Representative Brian Clem (D-Salem, District 21), Representative Vicki Berger (R-Salem, District 20) and Congressman Kurt Schrader (D, District 5) check out the composting setup in the cafeteria at Grant Community School in the Salem-Keizer School District.

Photos by Stacey Sobell.

Ecodistricts Summit will work on smarter, more resilient cities

Oct 112012
 

The Portland Sustainability Institute will host the 2012 Ecodistricts Summit October 23- 26, as part of the ongoing effort to build smarter, more resilient, and more livable urban districts across the world. Policymakers, planners, developers, business leaders, and financers from around the world will forge solutions to some of the more pressing issues facing metropolitan areas.

Simply put, an Ecodistrict is a neighborhood or district dedicated to sustainability. The Ecodistricts Summit will allow for forward-thinking, collaborative ideas, bringing together some of the world’s best minds to tackle population, pollution, civic engagement, and community development.

Leaders will share tools and strategies for neighborhood-scale sustainability within cities.
[Photo Credit: Sam Beebe, Ecotrust]

 

 

Keynote speaker Carol Coletta is currently the leader of ArtPlace, an American initiative created by banks, foundations, and agencies (like the National Endowment for the Arts), that seeks to transform communities by investing in art and culture. She hosted and produced a nationally syndicated public radio show called Smart City, served as president of CEOs for Cities, and directed the Mayor’s Institute on City Design in Memphis.

Coletta has highlighted the importance of compact, local, intimate communities for creativity and connection.

PoSI is a nonprofit dedicated to building partnerships and incubating solutions that efficiently and strategically address infrastructure, transportation, and energy sectors of urban landscapes. This past spring, leaders from Austin, Bellingham, Boston, Charlotte, Cleveland, Guadalajara (Mexico), Mountain View, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Vancouver (B.C.) met at Ecotrust for the first-ever Ecodistricts Institute to discuss neighborhood-scale planning in their respective cities.

To connect with the summit on social channels follow @pdxinstitute on Twitter and Facebook with hashtages #ecodistrictssummit and #greencities.

 

 

How Washington can support fishing communities

May 112012
 

Lately, national fisheries policy makers have left local fishing communities hanging.

At issue is how to ensure responsible community-based fishermen — without huge financial backing — remain fishing, as the nation downsizes the number of boats on the water to protect fishing stocks.

Fishing communities need clear guidance from Washington.

Last November, a bi-partisan, bi-coastal, and bicameral group of eight members of Congress wrote a letter to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), requesting that the agency provide guidance on the implementation of the National Catch Share Policy  to the regional councils that manage our nation’s fisheries. The National Catch Share Policy is guiding how the councils divvy up the allowable catch on fisheries across the country — from cod to halibut to West Coast rockfish — among different fishermen.

 In most cases, those shares go to boats that historically caught particular fish, but they are tradeable and often end up in the hands of the highest bidder.  The members of Congress asked for agency guidance on options to help local fishing communities adapt to catch share programs, including approaches to implement the community provisions in sections of national fisheries law that would enable fishing communities to form Regional or Community Fishing Associations that would help local fishermen retain fishing access and jobs.

 Congressman Mike Thompson (D-CA), who represents California’s 1st Congressional District along the state’s northern coast, reiterated some of this letter in a March 2012 article in Pacific Fishing Magazine, calling for agency guidance on the implementation of the same community provisions and for strategies to consider input from fishing communities at the earliest stages of catch share program development.

 NMFS finally issued a response (pdf) to the congressional letter this past March, but unfortunately it is a response with little substance.  NMFS points to other activities (for instance, their work on electronic monitoring) that are not relevant to the request for guidance on national fisheries law’s community provisions.

 They say they have taken “a number of steps,” but do not describe what those are or will be.  They cite work on community efforts for the Pacific Groundfish Trawl catch share program, but the Pacific Council, which manages Oregon,Washington and California waters, abandoned efforts to set criteria for Community Fishing Associations to participate in that program.  They mention the proceedings from a January 2011 Catch Shares & Commercial Fishing Communities Workshop, yet the main outcome there was several clear recommendations to NMFS to provide guidance as to how communities can go about becoming a Regional or Community Fishing Association — guidance that communities are still waiting on.

 In the absence of clear agency leadership on this issue, communities are beginning to define what the community provisions supported by national law mean for them.

 The Community Fisheries Network was launched last month by Ecotrust, the Island Institute of Rockland, Maine and 13 community fishing and development organizations on both the West and East coasts.  Network members have developed standards for the governance of community-based fishing organizations to, in part, enable those communities to qualify to hold catch shares and  maintain community access to fisheries.

 The network is also set up to share information among fishermen, fishing communities, scientists and others, in order to improve the stewardship of marine ecosystems, to build up local and regional fishing economies, and to bring renewed energy and vitality to waterfront communities.

 Individually, members have taken progressive steps along these lines, whether it’s establishing their own seafood brands, pushing for marine protected areas in local waters or successfully lobbying for small boats and artisanal fishermen in fisheries policy. As these efforts multiply across the nation, community-based fishermen will ensure that catch shares held by communities are a sound, lasting investment in the country’s working waterfronts.

 Now it is up to national policy makers to support these communities.

Future We Want: Local food sovereignty, not land grabs

Apr 252012
 

As Ecotrust promotes a natural model of development, one that builds upon principles of healthy ecosystems, we’re paying close attention to global trends that affect the management of ecosystems and the services they provide – water, food, clean air.  One hot topic lately is the issue of land rights.

Arable land the world over is becoming an increasingly contested resource. In response to high food prices and relatively low land prices, an increasing number of investors and corporations have been buying up agricultural land in developing countries concentrated in Africa, but spanning the globe: Uganda, Sudan, and Ethiopia as well as Brazil, Cambodia, and Pakistan.

Land grabbing in Uganda

Land being cleared for a palm oil plantation in the Kalangala Islands in the Ugandan section of Lake Victoria. Jason Taylor/FOEI via Flickr.

 

Meanwhile, local, small-scale farmers and herders, who have customary rights but lack legal title to their land, are being pushed off their ancestral lands, often coercively, deceitfully, or through intimidation by the agribusiness companies themselves, the state police, or the local elites who benefit from the deals. Land grabbing has become a global issue: since 2001, an estimated 227 million hectares of large-scale land deals have occurred or are currently under negotiation.

Large-scale investments in agriculture promise to expand the global food supply and increase production of biofuels, which stand as an important, though flawed, alternative energy source. But can such investments accomplish these goals without trampling the rights of local smallholders or degrading other local services of nature – such as clean water, forest-filtered air, and biodiversity? Not as long as current systems of land tenure prevail.

Most international land transactions today occur between national governments who possess formal title to large tracts of land, and investors and agribusiness corporations from the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. However, due to the legacy of colonialism that pervades the legal systems of large parts of Africa and Asia, formal legal rights and customary land tenure patterns are often completely disconnected from one another.  From the perspective of the local people who live, farm and herd in these regions, agribusiness corporations have simply stolen their land.

In the short run, the increased world food supply will be used to feed growing populations in rapidly developing countries such as China and to bolster the food security of countries with fragile agricultural systems, such as Saudi Arabia. However, social and economic inequities will rise sharply as a result of these deals, as land becomes concentrated in fewer hands across the globe. In the countries that receive the investment, a growing proportion of land will be both foreign-owned and cultivated for export, undermining local food sovereignty.

So far, none of the proposed large-scale solutions to this problem have made a dent. United Nations human rights policy mandates that governments seeking to implement eminent domain on behalf of business seek free, prior and informed consent of affected local residents. However, this provision has not been enforced in most (if any) large-scale land deals. The World Bank, meanwhile, has proposed a set of guidelines for responsible agricultural investment, but its provisions have been weak.

The inadequate response of the multilateral agencies has sparked increasing involvement by NGOs and activists. Oxfam has recently released an influential – and controversial – report on the topic of land grabbing, and the global peasants’ movement, La Via Campesina, has been organizing protest events calling for the abolition of land grabs.

The International Land Coalition, an umbrella civil society organization, has most recently contributed to the ongoing effort by releasing its own report that draws from three years of research and analysis. Will the new attention given to this problem lead to adequate solutions that respect smallholders’ rights? Time will tell.

The most successful means of resistance to land grabbing have been local initiatives for sustainable land use, such as the community protected area in Cambodia profiled by Ecotrust’s Astrid Scholz in a recent blog post. In Rwanda, new and locally designed technologies for drying fruit and vegetables hold out the potential to expand small farmers’ access to export markets. These initiatives offer hope, but the question remains: are they scalable?

As we head to the global environment conference in Rio in June, are there sustainable, socially just, and scalable alternatives to land grabbing that respect farming and herding communities, increasing resilience while preserving biodiversity and traditional knowledge? We’ll continue to explore the themes of land rights and sustainability in the posts that follow.

How will we build the future we want? What are your ideas for radical institutional change? These are the questions the UN is asking in preparation for the Rio+20 Earth Summit in late June. In response to their Future We Want campaign, we’re curating transformative ideas for building a more resilient world. We’ll share some of the ideas we’re cooking up here at Ecotrust, but most of all, we want to hear from you. Email obrooks (at) ecotrust (dot) org.

Under the mango tree, a village’s future unfolds

Mar 262012
 

Cambodia — Angkor Wat, this country’s ancient temple complex, may be the eighth wonder of the world, but what’s truly remarkable about Cambodia is what people manage to transport on the ubiquitous 2-seater motor bikes that compete for road space with cars, bikes and other vehicles: entire families of four (dad driving, junior between his legs, mom riding side saddle on the back, cradling baby); 30 melons; 10 bundles of firewood; a bale of rice straw; groceries for a week; rattan cages with chickens, goats, or pigs destined for dinner; a pane of glass; 3 large bags of fertilizer; 6 cases of beer. Those are just a few feats of transportation I saw on the road during the three-hour drive from Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh to Kampot Province.

All of it was a testament to the entrepreneurial spirit of the country and its people: the roads are packed with little stalls and shops, markets are teeming with ancient artifacts and gadgets so new they won’t hit the United States for several more months. Everyone is busy going somewhere, the entire nation relentlessly entrepreneurial and looking forward, as captured by this ad on the back of a tuk-tuk, as the part-trailer, part-motorcycle hybrids are known.

Future leaders in training, Cambodia

And the most promising form of entrepreneurialism came in the company of 20 or so villagers in Kampot Province, who are working with a local organization with the incongruous name Save Cambodia’s Wildlife on the establishment and management of a community protected area that spans about 2,000 hectares of forestland and nearby coastal areas.

As SCW’s director Boony Tep explained, the protected area was the villagers’ response to a proposed palm oil plantation: they preferred instead to seek economic development opportunities that harness the region’s natural assets in ways that benefit the local population. The local villager who leads the protected area with quiet dignity is one of the few people over 40 I met in Cambodia, and I couldn’t help but wonder how he survived the Khmer Rouge regime that brutalized the country’s population, decimated its wildlife, and created upheaval that has repercussions to this day: forced expropriations and destruction of records during the regime leaves much of the land untitled and at risk of land grabs by unscrupulous companies like the one proposing to turn the forest into a palm oil plantation and the local villagers into wage laborers.

Sitting under the mango tree on the grounds of the local Buddhist temple, which serves as the de facto community center, several working groups of villagers described how they harvest and process goods produced by the lands and waters of the community protected area.

The rattan group built a communal processing shed and nursery where they produce furniture for city markets and seedlings for replanting.

The rattan nursery in Kampot...

... and the rattan processing facility, nearby.

 

The traditional medicines group was built on a wealth of local knowledge for the dried herbs, bark and plant barks that they sell for various ailments. A fisheries group enforces a local marine protected area, operates a crab bank — periodically rearing gravid females in tanks and releasing their young to replenish local stocks — and restores mangroves, which are vital nursery grounds for many of the local fish species caught for subsistence consumption and trade.

These groups and other were united in understanding that they want to use the area’s natural assets to make a better life for themselves and their community, while restoring and protecting local natural capital, social fabric and economic opportunities. Put in those terms, the natural model of development we are thinking about seems not such a novel idea to them, but rather self-evident.

All of these activities are underpinned by an innovative, home grown finance program: mostly younger women lead several savings groups, each comprising multiple families. As my host Brian Lund from Oxfam America explained as part of our introductions in his enviable Khmer, they are part of 100,000 people in Cambodia and more than 1 million worldwide that are taking development finance into their own hands, by building their own local savings groups.

The leader of one savings group beamed while saying they had saved well over 10 M Riel, or about $2,500 in less than a year — in a country where the majority of people live on $2 a day or less. The savings groups decide collectively to whom to loan money: typically for working capital, for terms of two to three months, and at rates better than the local microfinance institutions.

When the conversation finally turned to the question what Oxfam, SCW and others could do to support the community’s efforts, the suggestions were practical and humbling: more training, more ideas for including the poorest of their communities in the program, more capacity to take the future of their community in their own hands, perhaps getting involved in politics next.

I had what felt like years’ worth of education in those few hours under the mango tree — furiously scribbling notes, shooting pictures, and soaking up inspiration.

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