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Local urban advocates connect globally to turn food issues into opportunities
- Details
- By Andrea C. Bergstrom
- Friday, September 24, 2010
- Hits: 618
Call it what you want — urban agriculture, metropolitan agriculture or locally grown. By any description, the effort to use urban land to raise food for residents has quickly evolved from hip trend to vital global practice. As concerns about food safety and access increase, these challenges are leading to innovative solutions that have the potential to revitalize a post-industrial region.
And Flint is on the cutting edge.
Next week, 10 Flint-area and 10 Detroit-area residents will head to Rotterdam, Netherlands, to convey the broad scope of food system work in the Flint-Detroit region with participants at the first Global Summit on Metropolitan Agriculture.
They will convene with others from around the world to share and learn better ways to support the development of urban food systems that are more locally based, accessible and sustainable. The delegation from Flint and Detroit was organized and sponsored by Michigan State University and the C.S. Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems.
The summit runs from Sept. 28 through Sept. 30. Participants will attend discussions and workshops and visit sites in the Netherlands to observe innovative urban agriculture programs already in place.
"Flint and Detroit are working in partnership to attract and pool resources," says Terry McLean, horticulture educator and urban agriculture coordinator for the Michigan State University Extension, who is attending. "We want to connect and showcase the great projects underway in Flint and Detroit, and leverage our expertise to develop a robust regional food system."
Others attending from Flint represent Youth Karate Ka Harvesting Earth Farm, Edible Flint, Genesee County Land Bank, Food Bank of Eastern Michigan, Mr. Rogers Just Say No, Ruth Mott Foundation and the Flint River Farm.
While at the conference, members of the Flint team will be checking in on the growflint.org blog to give updates.
According to a 2007 United Nations report, more than half the world's population now lives in urban areas and depends on a global food system. The increasing demand for cheap food has resulted in perishables — even basics such as fruits, vegetables and eggs — that are being transported thousands of miles before reaching the people that eat them.
The extreme distances food is being transported has put food quality and safety in jeopardy. Transportation needed to move those goods is having a substantial negative impact on the environment. Increases in fuel costs have sharply affected price and availability of food around the world, to the extent that about 40 food riots occurred in 2007 and 2008 in cities such as Mexico City, Cairo, Haiti and Mozambique because food was simply not available.
These dire situations can seem far removed from the bounty of food we envision in the U.S., but many believe they are the early warning signs for a potential food crisis here.
"The food system in the United States is vulnerable as well," says Stephen Arellano of the Ruth Mott Foundation who is attending the summit.
"Nearly all domestically-produced food in the U.S. is grown by just one percent of the population," reports Arellano, "and across the country, there is an average of just three days worth of food in grocery stores."
Leaders in Amsterdam, Chennai, London, the Detroit-Flint region, Johannesburg and São Paulo have convened teams from many sectors to address urban food production and have piloted projects that address everything from land use, food security and animal welfare to sustainable food production, economic growth and environmental issues.
The solutions being offered strengthen the ability for communities to develop strong, healthy, local food systems and shorten the distance between farm and plate. Benefits of these innovations include the creation of jobs, reduction in fossil fuel consumption, improved public health and more connected residents.
After the summit, Flint and Detroit's participants will continue to collaborate with the larger global team in the development of Metropolitan Agriculture — The Innoversity. The MetroAg Innoversity's objective is to provide a forum for knowledge sharing and co-creating the metropolitan agriculture vision and practice around the world.
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