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Community Food Security

© Bob Ewing

 Hot! Yes, finally Summer and for three days in a row. Yesterday, nearly torrential rains often mixed with hail, prevailed, throughout most of the day. A mid-morning power outage added to the drama.

Then around 4 p.m, the sky cleared and it was hot, humid. Great growing weather, made even better by today's 30 C weather. The tomato plants are smiling. Now they need to flower. I do have flowers on the plants that look the weakest. The strong hardy looking plants are all leaves but no buds, not yet anyway.

This week we begin a look at a local response to the globalization of our food supply.

Community Food Security programs enable communities to build sustainable economies. The following is a quote from the DRAFT of the Community Food Assessment commissioned by the Food Action Network(FAN): "Community Food Security is a strategy for ensuring secure access to adequate amounts of safe, nutritious, culturally appropriate food for everyone, produced in an environmentally sustainable way, and provided in a manner that promotes human dignity. It features cooperation among all contributors in a local/regional food system, including growers and producers, citizen groups, community agencies, governmental organizations, businesses, academic researchers and environmental advocates. Its actions are based on those of the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion: building personal skills, strengthening community action, building healthy public policy and creating supportive environments (including the general principles of food safety that are ensured by monitoring and enforcement activities)."

When we apply permaculture design to the creation of Community Food Security Action Programs, as we are doing here in Thunder Bay, we begin moving towards creating a sustainable community. Local production, distribution and consumption are vital to the creation of any vibrant community. Over the next few weeks we will look at some specific programs and ow they work.

I'll leave you this week with these words from E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful:

"Study how a society uses its land and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be" (p.94)

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