Thanks for the concise summaries.
Brings home again the complexity and wholistic nature of what we are dealing with.
Action and Change Needed Everywhere!
I will pass this on to our foodgroup.

best wishes

Hamid (Samadi’s dad) North Howe Transition Toun

Thanks for the wonderful writeup, It’s great for all of us that can’t possibly get to these events.

I was however able to hear Vandana Shiva here in Paris just the day before (Nov. 12). She was indeed a marvelous speaker, and I’ve been waiting for months and months for an opportunity to hear her. She was part of a panel at UNESCO presenting the latest manifesto of the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture:

Manifesto on the Future of Knowledge Systems: Knowledge Sovereignty for a Healthy Planet

Fortunately, the panel explained a little more clearly what this manifesto is about: turning away from the exclusion of traditional knowledge and from the corporate control and commercialisation of knowledge through patents, etc. (…biopiracy), and instead promoting the diversity of knowledge and cultures, the knowledge sovereignty of communities, and sharing of knowledge.

Their website:
http://www.future-food.org/
doesn’t seem to be updated with this latest manifesto, but shows their other work.

Cheers, Corinne in Paris

If Transition thinking doesn’t infiltrate local and regional spatial strategies it’s going to be an uphill struggle to feed us all.

Equally worrying for those with a logical turn of mind is that England (UK probably) doesn’t have a national spatial strategy.

The other was as you said was too many speeches from the stage and not enough opportunities for those on the floor to contribute and get their teeth into and contribute to and take the debate forward.

As one of the questioners put it, in spite of the rhetoric from the stage there was a surreal lack of a sense of urgency which was at odds with the information we were hearing – that the food crisis was soon not to be limited to the current one billion people in far away places but coming to a supermarket near you soon….

*Food networks being in place when the government decides to do something.

Whenever I pass through a city, I find myself noticing all those little bits of land that could be used for growing food, and which, rather maddeningly, aren’t. A reflection of poor design if I ever saw one.

Another interesting tangent that my mind has been on of late is a new socio-economic model that I’ve been working on. A sort of hybrid between capitalism and communism, where businesses are owned on a communal scale, everyone is allocated their own bit of land, and other such things.(Except that the chickens STILL won’t clear up after themselves – why can’t they use the muckheap?!)

I would have called it “Communalism” but that otherwise highly appropriate name has unfortunately been associated with a load of gun-toting anarchists. Ho hum…

The hosts from the Soil Association were too pleased to hear the many areas of agreement in his talk to say much about his enthusiasm for GM.

Thankfully Deborah Doane from WDM was on the panel who was not so constrained but had a long list of targets to focus on and the impact of GM being only one. She underlined how much power corporates have at the international level quoting from a Ghanian Finance Minister “if you don’t know what investors plans are a food plan is just wishful thinking.”

Sadly Watson not there at the end of the day to hear Vandana Shiva give a no holds bared attack on GM.

“The mix of crisis we face is a crisis of centralisation” she said. Shiva added that “the mess we are in with food comes from a reductionist view of the world.”

Something interesting developing here. As she says, governments can’t lead when money co-opts them. But Julia Wright says that food security is achievable only with “political will and cohesive action”… the truth, as John Michael Greer says this week, is that the economies which are responding best to current conditions are places like China and Cuba, rather than market-driven democracies like ours.

It is the debt that is preventing people from eating in India, just as it is the debt that the phantom bailout money, a fraction of which we are all about to start slaving to try and cover, is supposed to start paying off. The truth is that the debt can never be paid off since there is not the wealth in the world to cover it — yet money still buys politics.

You have superbly captured the essence of the day which, for me, was my first SA conference and (with a similarly early start and finish from Taunton)a really valuable event to attend.

I did catch the beginning of Eric Schlosser’s talk in the evening – but by then my note-taking abilities had died. Suffice to say that I will add Food Inc to my reading list and await eagerly release of the film in February! The brief description I listened to (after a perhaps 5 min film preview) was compelling – and discussion around cloned hog labelling (or not…) in the US was quite shocking.

I’m sorry we didn’t get to meet personally – especially after you made mention of Taunton Transition (I had no idea that they were making such good progress – no mention on their site of the week long visioning workshop you mentioned).

I’m just about to join the Transition Athelny team (moving house to North Curry next Friday) – but will also take a keen interest in what Taunton is up to (they are showing Age of Stupid at the local Brewhouse theatre on 22nd November by the way).

My return train journey involved beginning to read the fantastic new Local Food – and watching “The Making of” “Age of Stupid”.

Thanks again Rob. Cheers.