Democracy, community agriculture and sustainability
Creating a healthier and happier food system benefits everyone, from the environment to the health of the individual. Nick Rose looks at how participatory democracy can impact our relationship with producing and consuming food.
For people to support a major reform of this nature, to have a sense of ownership over it, and thus commitment to it, they need to be involved in the decision-making process, preferably from the earliest possible opportunity.
What Dr Reid is talking about is a more participatory form of democracy, one in which ordinary people get to have a genuine say in the making of decisions that affect their lives. This is quite different to representative democracy, where virtually all political and economic decision-making is delegated to elected representatives.
We, the people, rarely participate in any way in the making of important political and economic decisions. Rather, we get to pass judgment on the way in which our politicians take these decisions on our behalf, in periodic elections. In between times, the political pulse is tested via opinion polling – but as Dr Reid says, this is no substitution for considered and informed debate and discussion.
The way we conduct our affairs at the moment is, of course, not the only possible way to do it. Just because it’s the way we’ve inherited in this country doesn’t mean automatically it’s the best. Switzerland has a centuries-old form of direct, participatory democracy that has proved successful and resilient. In the 1980s, the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre embarked upon a novel and highly innovative experiment of participatory budgeting, creating mechanisms for thousands of citizens in the city of 1.5 million to have a direct say in spending decisions and the implementation of projects.
Porto Alegre’s experience has inspired similar initiatives in hundreds of other Brazilian cities. One of the most remarkable success stories of just what can be achieved with citizen empowerment is that of Belo Horizonte, described by Francis Moore Lappé as ‘The City that Ended Hunger’. Now this movement has spread internationally, with experiments in the UK, the US, Africa and Asia. In Venezuela, thousands of communal councils, involving between 200 and 400 families, are now involved in the determination of local development and infrastructure projects; and this injection of direct, participatory democracy has unleashed a motivated, active and engaged citizenry.
Could it happen in Australia? If the spectacular growth of the local and fair food movement is any indication, it already is. All around the country, coalitions of farmers, environmentalists, community gardeners, health professionals, social entrepreneurs, academics and policy makers are busy working away on re-tooling our food and farming systems so that they will be fit for a century of challenges.
Ordinary citizens are leading the way with their actions, and increasingly local governments are following. The City of Melbourne, for example, is developing a Food Policy, and the City of Yarra last year produced a series of urban agriculture guidelines.
For all our societal complexity and technological sophistication, if we don’t get our food systems right, we are in big trouble. With the globalised food and farming system accounting for as much as 33 per cent of all greenhouse emissions, as well as a whole raft of other negative social and environmental consequences, whether or not we can transform the way we produce and distribute food, and what we do with the ‘waste’, will play a decisive role in whether we can make the transition to genuine sustainability.
At the heart of that transition is the need for a paradigm shift in our relationship to food, recognising its multi-dimensional character, and valuing the work of those who produce it. Making that transition requires sustained education, conversations, and genuine participation. It’s about the transition from being a mere consumer to becoming an engaged food citizen: taking back, together, responsibility for the systems that sustain and nourish us, so that they will also nourish our children. That is what Food Connect stands for, and it is shining a beacon towards a sustainable future for us all.

Nick Rose is National Coordinator of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (ASFA) and a Director of the Food Connect Foundation. He was recently awarded a Churchill Fellowship to travel to the US and Argentina to investigate innovative models of urban agriculture. He is also an expert member of