Food Commons Institutions
Description
Hans van Willenwaard:
"In terms of institution building, enormous contradictions exist between a coalition of the pharmaceutical industry (Big Pharma) and giant food corporations (Big Food) on one hand – both prominently represented in the World Economic Forum (WEF) – and the comparatively small but vibrant minority of the practitioners of organic agriculture on the other. Organic agriculture here stands for a diversity of practices including agroecology, permaculture, biodynamic agriculture and other approaches to sustainable agriculture. In 1972 the first UN conference on the ‘human environment’ was organized in Stockholm, Sweden. In a historic parallel in Versailles, France, the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) was founded in the same year. IFOAM just concluded its 20th Organic World Congress in Rennes (OWC 2021), France and is one of the best examples of an independent civil society organization which unites a great diversity of stakeholders. A decade later, La Via Campesina, an organization for peasants, small-scale and family farmers, was founded.
Social innovation movements with a high degree of commons quality and still growing are Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) with its global association URGENCI, and the IFOAM network around Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS). More recent is the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) which promotes true cost accounting (TCA, also known as EFCA: environmental full-cost accounting) as a way to provide evidence of the hidden costs of conventional, industrial, agriculture based on ultra-processed, mass-marketed, extractive and exploitative practices with huge impact on soil fertility, occurrence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) – making cheap food expensive – and decline of community culture resulting in social displacement. IPES-Food is particularly worried about an intensified corporate lobby in the scientific world as a likely result of the UNFFS."
(https://th.boell.org/en/2021/09/22/food-as-commons)