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  • From: "Dori Green" <dorigreen00 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: market-farming Social Issues
  • Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 08:51:18 -0400


Hi, everybody! I'm responding to Victoria Mundy Bhavsar <toria AT pop.uky.edu> here because it's a great discussion topic for all of us. Good luck with your talk, and thanks to you for spreading the word about why farms are important to communities!

Market farming -- not just CSA operation -- answers a lot of the most basic social issues.

Classism -- we are all connected at the level that we can all live only about 30 days without food, 4 days without potable water. Distinctions fall away at this level. Farmers are more connected to the reality that our food and water access is more fragile than we might like to think, we are the first line of defense for life itself. And at the same time, we are also still just other people who eat.

Control -- through connection to local farmers, people are able to regain a margin of control over their own access to food and safe water. Farmers can be a great source of education and when we talk to our customers we can learn a lot, too.

Hunger -- the UN has pretty well established that world hunger is not a problem of supply, but of distribution and politics. Cornell University has a good publication on this (I have a copy but darn it, it's in a box right now). You can probably find it listed someplace at the http://www.cornell.edu site.

Another great resource for speakers on this and similar topics is _Empty Harvest: Understanding the Link Between Our Food, Our Immunity, and Our Planet_ by Dr. Bernard Jensen and Mark Anderson.

Economy -- again an issue of distribution and politics. And class, of course. Local farms can help people satisfy their primary survival needs (do a web search on "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs", Psychology 101). People whose primary survival needs are satisfied -- even if they're still officially "poor" in money terms -- can then function at higher levels. Gaining even a measure of control over their survival needs can make a huge difference in somebody's life.

Ecology -- people who don't know where their next meal is coming from just can't address higher stuff like saving the planet. And there are a LOT of people stuck in poverty and the pressure of daily survival. By providing a forum in which we're all equally valuable and connected (that food and water thing), farmers can make it easy for people to do the little right things that can add up to saving a planet.

I'm a big fan of CSAs, but I'm not a fanatic. Opening one's farm to the great unwashed hordes is not for everybody -- herding civilians is sometimes hard work and not for the squeamish (ugh the mess when that out-of-control hyper kid tackled the duckling). Farmers can also make valuable connections to other people who eat through once-a-week markets. I wouldn't limit my talk to how CSAs answer social issues, but I would include how local farming answers them and how CSAs can be _one_ good value-added marketing tool for farmers.

Dori Green
Ash Grove Community Farm & Center for Sustainable Living
Corning, NY

http://www.ic.org/agrove

Send me a private e-mail for FREE subscription to our e-group agcf AT yahoogroups.com -- light traffic, shared files, calendar of events, links.

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  • Re: market-farming Social Issues, Dori Green, 04/10/2001

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