Since Slow Food Nation in 2008, it seems that Slow Food USA has been adrift, even while validly trying to redefine its identity, shed the image of elitism, and embrace food justice as a core concern. Nevertheless, we share the hope that Slow Food will remain effective as a broad “big tent” organization dedicated to “taste education” through preserving and promoting food that “good, clean and fair” and the farmers, fishers, and others who produce it.  At the same time, food consciousness and activism doesn’t start and end with Slow Food. The traditional strength of SFUSA has been to recognize, promote and support biodiversity in the food system, the producers and other organizations which are already doing good work in this area. Slow Food’s genius is that it has international “brand recognition” and a cachet that makes its efforts more visible and a valuable partner in promoting the good work being done by peoples and organizations advancing sustainable   production and consumption of healthy food in the world. It would do well to re-envision itself as one of the   organizations collaborating to foment the ”blessed unrest,” that is, the grassroots groundswell which will be required to ensure the health of the land and the health of our diverse people. Here is a wish list of positive actions which Slow Food USA staff and board can do to right its course:

1. Encourage the Brooklyn staff members to get out of the office into the field far more often, so that they can truly work in service to farmers, farmworkers, fishers, and others in various food communities.
2. Keep up-to-date records of who the current chapter leaders are and carry on real conversations with them (not just email blasts and tweets) to learn of food systems innovations forged in their community that can be adopted elsewhere; help tell their success stories to a wider audience.
3. Revitalize and support the Ark of Taste and re-engage with collaborative biodiversity initiatives such as Renewing America’s Food Traditions to help communities protect, promote and best utilize their food heritage and diversity as a buffer against food insecurity in the face of climatic and economic uncertainty.
4. Refocus food and farmer justice efforts on policy changes at the local and state levels where chapter members can be full participants in fostering positive reforms.
5. Reinstate and activate the disaster relief fund set up after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to mobilize support for farmers and food insecure families following forthcoming disasters, many of which will likely be related to climate change.
6. Bring both urban and rural farmers, ranchers, fishers and foragers on board and into regional leadership positions to help heal the Urban/Rural Food Divide
7. Adopt the model of collaborative conservation by working as partners with other diverse constituencies, NGO’s and alliances to protect land, water and food diversity for all, developing alliances “across the aisle” while bringing public and private sectors together to meet tangible community food needs.
8. Host “Healing the Food Divide” forums in communities across the country to encourage rural and urban activists to forge stronger bonds to ensure healthy food systems.
9. Use social media network as support for—not replacement of—true grassroots community organizing to re-localize food systems by 25% by 2020.
10. Re-affirm and re-align itself with the core vision, mission, message and activities of Slow Food International and the other 149 country members (see below).

If you would like to endorse this statement to the Slow Food USA Leadership, please sign in on the following page.

REFERENCE:

Slow Food International

Our Philosophy

Slow Food stands at the crossroads of ecology and gastronomy, ethics and pleasure. It opposes the standardization of taste and culture, and the unrestrained power of the food industry multinationals and industrial agriculture. We believe that everyone has a fundamental right to the pleasure of good food and consequently the responsibility to protect the heritage of food, tradition and culture that make this pleasure possible. Our association believes in the concept of neo-gastronomy – recognition of the strong connections between plate, planet, people and culture.

Our Vision
We envision a world in which all people can access and enjoy food that is good for them, good for those who grow it and good for the planet.

Our Mission
Slow Food is an international grassroots membership organization promoting good, clean and fair food for all. 

Good, Clean and Fair

Slow Food’s approach to agriculture, food production and gastronomy is based on a concept of food quality defined by three interconnected principles:

GOOD a fresh and flavorsome seasonal diet that satisfies the senses and is part of our local culture;

CLEAN food production and consumption that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health;

FAIR accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for small-scale producers.

Co-producers
Collectively our consumer choices can bring great change to how food is cultivated and produced. To highlight this, we consider ourselves co-producers – an eater who is informed about where and how their food is produced and actively supports local producers, therefore becoming part of the production process.

Local Identity 
We are committed to protecting traditional and sustainable quality foods, defending the biodiversity of cultivated and wild varieties as well cultivation and processing methods. Through maintaining the diversity of regional food and agricultural traditions, the wisdom of local communities can be maintained to protect the ecosystems that surround them and offer sustainable prospects for the future.

Making Connections

Slow Food believes that food is tied to many aspects of life, including culture, politics, agriculture and the environment. This is why we are an active player in a wide variety of areas, from education to agricultural policy. To work across this wide sphere, Slow Food defends biodiversity in our food supply, promotes food and taste education and connects sustainable producers to co-producers through events and building networks.

See Endorsers as of 02/17/12

Download this pdf list

 If you would like to endorse this statement to the Slow Food USA Leadership, please sign in on the following page.

by Ryan Randazzo
The Arizona Republic

Is an oyster farm compatible with wilderness values?

The purpose of the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act – under which the National Park Service alleges authority to prepare an environmental impact statement on Drakes Bay Oyster Co. operations – was “to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony.”

Drakes Bay Oyster Co., the authors say, is a perfect example of the kind of activity envisioned in the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, which the National Park Service, in its effort to remove the aquaculture company from Drakes Estero, seems to be conveniently forgetting.

The 80-year tradition of shellfish aquaculture in Drakes Estero is a quintessential example of exactly such a productive harmony. The continuation of the oyster farm was deemed appropriate when Drakes Estero was designated potential wilderness by Congress. The farm is clearly compatible with natural-resource conservation, species recovery and the protection of wilderness values today. It cultivates more than half of the shellfish harvested in the San Francisco region without measurable impact on the wildlife or the ecology of Drakes Estero.

The intent guiding the Point Reyes National Seashore General Management Plan makes “potential wilderness, agriculture, ranching and mariculture all co-equal management objectives.” Tragically, for the past eight years, the Park Service has attempted to obfuscate the clear intent of Congress: to establish Point Reyes National Seashore as a cultural landscape where dairy farms, ranches and shellfish aquaculture would demonstrate to the American public that conservation and sustainable food production are indeed compatible.

The Park Service now asserts that the oyster farm is not compatible with wilderness and must be removed. Can memory loss within the Park Service be reversed? It can and must, given the Park Service’s near-decade of denial of the original operating instructions for Point Reyes National Seashore.

Historic documents confirm that the Park Service also has suffered memory loss regarding the state’s rights. The state Constitution requires the state, in any grant of public trust tidelands, to reserve to itself the “absolute right to fish.” That, in fact, was done in 1965 by AB1024, requested by the Park Service and authored by then-Assemblyman William T. Bagley.

Bagley reports: “My (Bancroft Library) files contain 1965-66 letters (from) the state Fish and Game Commission claiming it retained all fishing rights: ‘All State laws and regulations are in effect … and … are applicable to the (then) Johnson Oyster Company.’ The National Park Service replying: ‘We are agreeable to your interpretation.’ These formal, authoritative, contemporaneous statements define the specific rights reserved.”

In addition, the state attorney general, in 1965, confirmed that, by state law, oysters are “fish” and are therefore outside the management authority of the Park Service.

Bagley continues: “In 1974, the Park Service, writing with reference to proposed wilderness designation of the Estero, states: ‘Control of the (shellfish aquaculture) lease … indefinitely is reserved by the State.’ The present state lease expires in 2029 … the state has constitutionally protected the public trust rights. My 59 years of law practice tells me that this whole controversy may very well be moot. The state controls the right to lease its fishing rights.”

The Park Service never had the legal authority to manage oyster-growing or harvesting activities in Estero waters. This means that the current environmental review process regarding the oyster company should not have been undertaken.

By all appearances, the Park Service is using the environmental impact study to achieve its desired outcome to remove the farm. The current environmental review process must be suspended, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar must require the recalcitrant Park Service leadership to support, rather than disrupt, sustainable shellfish production in Drakes Estero.

Notably, all across the country – with the exception of Point Reyes – the Park Service is committed to working with fishers, farmers and ranchers to demonstrate how sustainable food production is essential to biodiversity conservation. Bagley’s archival evidence should be sufficient to restore Park Service memory of the original intent of the seashore and the understanding of the authors of the Point Reyes Wilderness Act that shellfish aquaculture and wilderness were in fact compatible.

We hope for a fresh start in the relationship between food producers and the Park Service at Point Reyes, one that is based on collaborative conservation and provides not only a real-world example of “conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony” but also of human beings as integral to the hole, not apart from it.

We can and must do this if we are to save ourselves and our beleaguered planet. Drakes Estero offers us an incredible opportunity. Let us not squander that for lack of imagination or lack of a willingness to collaborate in its realization.

Gary P. Nabhan is a former member of the National Park System Advisory Board. Jeffrey A. Creque is a member of the board of the Alliance for Local Sustainable Agriculture. Send your feedback to us through our online form at sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1

Original Post: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/18/INLQ1MCVA1.DTL

Re-Designing Borderland Food Systems for the Health of the Land and the Health of Its Multicultural Communities

By: Gary Paul Nabhan, Kellogg Chair in Food and Water Security for the Southwest Borderlands, University of Arizona

THE CHALLENGE

More than seventy years ago, Aldo Leopold first compared wholeness and health in the human body with those attributes in farmscapes. In a prophetic essay entitled “The Farmer as a Conservationist,” Leopold (1939, 1999) offered this analogy:

“It seems to me that the pattern of the rural landscape, like the configuration of our own bodies, has in it (or should have in it) a certain wholeness.”

“It seems to me that the pattern of the rural landscape, like the configuration of our own bodies, has in it (or should have in it) a certain wholeness.” He spins out this analogy be taking us to an imaginary farmscape where fertile fields, orchards and pastures are situated amidst hedgerows, ponds, woods, and wildflower beds. There, Leopold suggests, “The fields and pastures of this farm, like its sons and daughters, are a mixture of wild and tame attributes, all built on the foundation of good health. The health of the fields is their fertility.”

Leopold then compares “the removal of any natural feature from a rural landscape” to be equivalent to the amputation of someone’s leg, asserting that it cannot be considered good conservation, good taste or good farming. Our collective task as a rural community, in Leopold’s mind, should be the quest for “wholeness in the farm landscape” and by analogy, a quest for health in our community of humans mixed together with the other-than-human world.

As I ponder Leopold’s vision, I take a break from planting wildflowers, winter greens and pollinator-attracting perennials on the edge of a small orchard in the U.S./Mexico borderlands where Leopold and his family had many of their most formative experiences.

I wonder what Leopold think about these two occurrences since his death in 1948: 1) the Southwest Borderlands have suffered the highest rates of farmland loss and rural landscape fragmentation of any region in North America; and 2) over that same period, the Native American and Hispanic inhabitants of this region have suffered steeper rises in adult-onset diabetes and other nutritionally-related diseases than any other ethnic populations on the face of the earth. For our purposes here, I will not dwell on whether these two occurrences can be statistically correlated, or whether cause-and-effect can be discerned. Instead, I hope to use these startling trends to launch our quest for healing solutions by asking a question as large as those which Leopold asked three-quarter of a century ago:

Is it possible to redesign our food systems in the U.S./Mexico borderlands so that they enhance the “caring capacity” of our lands and its communities? Can we increase that capacity so that we will be less apt to impoverish both the health of the land and the health of its multi-cultural communities than they currently do?

Ultimately, the answer we choose depends upon whether we merely wish to increase our carrying capacity in order to feed a world of nine million people (Godfray et al 2010), or whether we wish to truly focus on the caring capacity of the land and its biotic communities so that all will be more fully nourished and sustained.

By the long-term health of the land and its biotic community, I mean the ecological health as Aldo Leopold sensed it” as a diverse, dynamic and resilient community that has “the capacity of self-renewal” in working landscapes, both for the humans and other-than-human beings in its membership.

By the health of the multicultural community, I mean not only the physical, mental and spiritual health of its individual human members, but the diversity and resilience of those multiple cultures in communities in our foodshed on both sides of the border. This might include everything from the reducing the “relative deprivation” experienced by unemployed or underemployed people who formerly worked in the food system, to ensuring the persistence of and access to culturally-appropriate food traditions, to maintaining the diversity and resilience of the microbes within our kitchens and in our guts.

The problem with most current systems of food production, distribution and use in our region is that they were not necessarily designed with both of these goals (land health, human health) in mind. This may simply be because our brains and hearts sometimes seem aversive to simultaneously holding onto two goals such as land health and human health. Perhaps it is easier (and lazier) to think oppositionally, rather than integratively. Nevertheless, it can be done and should be done.

We may already be witnessing massive failure of our regional foodsheds to sustain both the health of our residents and of the land. As former farmer Sergio Robledo Zepeda told journalist Juliana Barbassa (2011) when she visited him in Estación Ortiz, Sonora, “la tierra ya no da.” The land no longer gives and can no longer nourish his family.

This may be because our food systems have been incrementally “formed” by default or by disproportionately shaped by the efforts of a few food corporations and government agencies, rather than being intentionally designed through the processes of a true food democracy. Whatever the causes, our borderland food systems now exhibit certain dysfunctions that have kept them from best serving the health needs of our peoples, and from sustaining the land, water, plant, microbe and animal resources upon which we depend.

THE PROBLEM

Since World War II, urban growth in the Sun Belt of both countries has dramatically changed the availability of water and land for producing food. But within the half-century of the Sun Belt boom, the rural economy of the borderlands had become so dysfunctional that today, borderland counties suffer from a severity of poverty that is twice as high as the U.S. national average.

There are not only dramatic disparities between U.S. and Mexican citizens, but also between indigenous minorities.

Briefly, let us consider just a few of those dysfunctions, setting aside the causes of the various dysfunctions for the moment. There have always been enormous disparities in access to land, water and food in the bi-national region of Southwestern North America, but since World War II, urban growth in the Sun Belt of both countries has dramatically changed the availability of water and land for producing food. Since 1982, the U.S. border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have lost a significant portion of their food-producing capacity, with over 6 million acres of farm and ranch lands being developed and rendered unavailable for crop or livestock production. According to the American Farmland Trust, that constitutes one fourth of all the farmland loss in the United States over the last three decades.  In northern Mexico, there are no equivalent figures available for the same time period, but we do know that 70% of Mexico’s agricultural lands suffers from land degradation, including 30% from salinization. In the last two decades, hundreds of thousands of acres have been taken out of crop production in Baja California and Sonora as a result of groundwater depletion, salinization and urbanization.

The remaining arable lands in the eight border states are now facing unprecedented water shortages, due to both groundwater depletion and surface water overallocation, and climate change. There are already signs that we must reduce our water budget by 40%, for if our population ever doubles again, all our rivers will be sucked dry.  In addition, the rising prices of other inputs—from a tripling of fossil fuel costs in less than a decade to a tripling of hay prices in west Texas in less than year –have dramatically increased production costs and limited crop and livestock yields, putting many farmers and ranchers on both sides of the border at financial risk. These trends are outlined in our recent report, State of Southwestern Foodsheds (Nabhan and Fitzmorris 2011).

The volume of food still produced in states on both sides of the border might be sufficient to hypothetically supply borderland populations with enough calories and protein to fend off hunger. Nevertheless, it is not currently distributed, processed and consumed in a manner that strategically reduces food insecurity and hunger in the very states where it is produced.  There is an increasing frequency of reports of outright hunger and food insecurity within poverty-stricken communities along the border. But there is also a growing evidence of malnutrition and over-nutrition in other sectors of borderlands society.

For instance, a 2007 household survey in Sonora found that 41% of households surveyed experienced severe food insecurity, and another 34% experienced moderate food insecurity (Trinidad 2007). These levels probably worsened since the 2009 economic downturn and return migration from the U.S. Because over 60% of the fresh vegetables eaten in Arizona and the U.S. as a whole come from Sonora and Sinaloa in the winter and spring months, the impaired health of their people is, in a very real sense an indicator of the ill health of our foodshed. Massive (forced) migrations of populations as a result of economic downturns, catastrophes such as Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Ida and Jimena and immigration policies such as Arizona’s Proposition 1070 have put food-insecure children, elders and unemployed at further risk.

Oddly, a tremendous volume of nutritious fruits, vegetables, meats and dairy products moves across the international boundary, primarily through Nogales, but also through Mexicali/Calexico, McAllen/Reynosa and Tijuana/San Diego. However, little of it leaves the NAFTA food superhighways at exit ramps that help nourish the most marginalized peoples in border town communities. As a result, food banks, “food stamp” (SNAP) programs, soup kitchens and other agencies of “band-aid” food relief are being utilized by an unprecedented number of border states residents, and stretching their human and financial resources to the limit.

In short, our current borderlands food system can be considered to be ailing, if not broken, in the sense that land health and human health have been seriously impaired. That may be true of many food systems in North America, but one factor makes the borderlands somewhat unique: the U.S./Mexico border may be the  international boundary with the greatest economic disparities of any border region in the world. There are not only dramatic disparities between U.S. and Mexican citizens, but also between indigenous minorities (O’odham, Cucupa, Papai, Kickapoo, Apache, Yaqui, etc) and the dominant, more Westernized societies which now surround them.

We now understand that these disparities are exacerbated by the marginalized feeling “relatively deprived” by their perceptions of the lavish consumption and unbelievable waste of food and land resources by the more privileged who live in close proximity to them. Many of these people may have a fatalistic attitude, for they have been denied access to even the most basic resources and educational opportunities. (Casasidy 2004)

THE NEED FOR A COLLECTIVE VISION

If we wish to do anything to recover its capacity to feed our bi-national, multi-cultural citizenry, we can no longer assume that a piecemeal approach will suffice. It will do no good to merely tack up new wallboard on a structure with a foundation that is eroding, uprights that are rotting, and support beams that are splintering. We need to collectively redesign and rebuild a structure which can adequately shelter and buffer our citizenry from further displacement, hunger and disease in the face of mounting political, economic and climatic uncertainty.

It may therefore be worth focusing our attention on forming a collective vision of land health and community health that may inspire us to deal with the underlying causes of these dysfunctions. We need to re-design food systems to correct the damage they have done, and redirect our efforts towards engaging a larger constituency of our society in participating in the democratic practices that may ultimately lead to both human healing and land healing on a significant scale.

For the seeds of such a vision to plant for the future, consider the values embedded in this poem by Ranier Maria Rilke (1996):

All will come again into its strength:

The fields undivided, the water undammed,

The trees towering and the walls built low.

And in the valleys, people as strong

And as varied as the land.”

First, let us focus on the power of that initial phrase: all will come again into its strength. This implies that we restore the resilience of our land, water and biodiversity resources in food-producing “working landscapes” so that they may weather climatic uncertainties, economic uncertainties, and the impending scarcities of fossil groundwater fuel and fossil fuels. But we also want to develop and maintain people as strong as varied as the land, who are assured their rights to satisfying livelihoods, education, occupational health, and affordable, nutritious, culturally-appropriate foods that boost rather than impair their immune systems. As a broad brushstroke prescription for the health of the land and its people, Rilke’s five lines may be as good as it gets. They link environmental health to human health, but also hint at the social justice issues which we now know to be plaguing the well-being of people on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border. In other words, we will ultimately all benefit from living in a landscape where “the fields and are undivided” and the “walls can be built low.” In general, they speak to integration, durability or resilience, lowered artificial barriers, and heterogeneity as some of the potential means for achieving resilience.

It has become clear that we need to embrace a vision far more complex paradigm than most soundbyte guidelines for either optimal diets or for agricultural sustainability. It must move us toward providing food for various diets which offer a diversity of species, varieties and nutrients produced and prepared in our communities by a diversity of peoples. Such diets will nearly always more healthful than one based on a few of these items provided by a few agribusinesses with headquarters remote from our region. Such diets are potentially better for land health as well, depending upon how that diversity is situated in a working landscape. And the availability of a diversity of foodstuffs may better accommodate the food security of the diverse cultures of our region—Native American, Hispano-Arabic, African, European and Asian in origin—which should be assured affordable access to foods which are suited to their metabolisms, their culinary traditions and their cultural identities.

THE RATIONALE FOR DIVERSIFYING OUR BORDERLANDS FOOD SYSTEM

We need to design food systems that more fully take into account our current understanding of the relationship between diversity and health. Over the last decade, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has corrected its long-standing assumptions that all apples (of more than 18,000 varieties) are nutritionally the same and that all beef (grass-fed or otherwise) — is essentially from the same beast. In other words, numerous nutritional studies of food biodiversity now suggest that this diversity tangibly and positively benefits human health as much as wild biodiversity and crop biodiversity benefits land health. 5Just as certain components of food diversity boost our immune system function, biodiversity on the land benefits the resilience of its habitats.

In his anthology, The Essential Agrarian Reader, social scientist Norman Wirzba (2003) has aptly summarized this principle:

“The old adage that one should never put all of one’s eggs in one basket is especially true here. A stable food system, much like a stable and resilient habitat, depends upon a diversity of crops grown over diverse landscapes. Food diversity attuned to regional ecological possibilities, rather than the massive monocultures of today, is our best defense against foreign attack, whether it comes from pests or terrorists. History has shown repeatedly that as regions grow and consume their own food and rely as little as possible on food imports, their food supply becomes more secure.”

Once FAO’s food chemists began to look at variations in the nutrient density among the varieties of a single fruit species, they realized that eating seven kinds of apples a week may well keep the doctor away with a higher probability than eating the same apple variety once a day. And once other nutritional chemists began to evaluate the  same livestock breed grown under different conditions—as well as various breeds grazing together in the very same pasture—they realized that these breed-environment-forage interactions offer enormously different contents of nutrients,  flavors and ecological footprints. As the grass-fed beef industry has expanded from $5 million/yr sales in 1988 to $1.5 billion in 2010, many ranchers, chefs, nutritionists and marketers realized (read: “remembered”) that there really is no single flavor or nutritional composition that characterizes all grass-fed beef. Perhaps a half century of dominance by corn-fed feedlot-finished beef had simply masked the degree of variation we’ve always found within and between herds.

We also need to sustain microbial diversity in our soils, in the fermented foods and beverages in our kitchens, and in our gastro-intestinal tracts.

The seldom-stated but inherently obvious reason that food diversity benefits our physical health has more to do with the health benefits of secondary chemical compounds in fruits and vegetables (such as phenols) than with their balance of macronutrients such as protein, fat, carbohydrates and dietary fiber. Ironically, some of these secondary chemicals (such as phenols in red or purple grapes and  prickly pear cactus fruits) play key roles in reducing  metabolic stress in humans as much as they do in the reducing drought and heat stress in the crop plants themselves. In addition, the anti-oxidant-rich essential oils of Mexican oreganos not only reduce the damaging effects of high solar radiation and herbivory in the plants, but also reduce the risk of developing certain kinds of cancerous tumors among their human consumers. Because many of these secondary compounds trigger interactions between co-evolved genes, foods, environments and diseases in certain ethnic populations, access to them may be particularly important in multi-ethnic populations such as the ones situated along the U.S./Mexico border. Today, of 1.8 million “Mexican” people who have recently gravitated there, many are from the diverse indigenous communities of Mexico and Central America, and may not metabolically respond to fast foods in the same manner as Euro-Americans.

Redesigning our food systems for this region, we must go beyond assuming that a diversity of livestock breeds and seeds are the only components of biocultural diversity that we need.

But in redesigning our food systems for this region, we must go beyond assuming that a diversity of crop seeds or livestock breeds is the only component of biocultural diversity that we need to foster. We also need to sustain microbial diversity in our soils, in the fermented foods and beverages in our kitchens, and in our gastro-intestinal tracts. Beneficial components of this microbial biodiversity have been knocked back by the indiscriminate use of biocides in our fields, antibiotics in our livestock and in our own bodies. It may well be that these seldom-seen microbes play a disproportionately important role in sustaining the health of our agricultural soils and our bodies.

Let me highlight two food producers in the borderlands who are already paying attention to such issues: Ivan Aguirre of Rancho Inmaculada of Northern, Sonora Mexico, and Ken Singh of Singh Farms on the Salt River Indian Reservcation near Scottsdale Arizona. Ivan Aguirre has virtually taken a devastated ranch in the arid heart of the Sonoran Desert, and within two decades has transformed it into a lush mesquoite grassland that produces microbially-rich soil, grass-fed beef, huntable wildlife, mesquite flour, mesquite firewood and charcoal, biochar, mesquite parquet floors and other non-timber forestry products. Ken Singh has taken irrigated farmland in the heart of Metro Phoenix and developed extraordinarily deep topsoil from composted materials and microbial cultures that now support a diverse food forest that directly serves the Pima Indian community a variety of nutritious fruits and vegetables. These p[rojects have created land health, jobs and nutritious food in areas where others said it could not be done.

As Ivan and Ken have done, we all need to pay greater attention to the structural diversity of our food-producing landscapes, developing a richer patchwork of orchards, mixed forage pastures, vegetable and grain fields across any particular food-producing landscape. This may not only offer us a more ecological resilience, but economic resilience as a well, especially during an era of volatile food markets.

As Aldo Leopold urged us to do decades ago, we must also restore the wild biodiversity of our farms, orchards and ranches, in particular, through creating better habitat for a diversity of native bees, to assure pollination services during an era in which we have suffered devastating declines of honeybees in the U.S./ Mexico borderlands. Estimates vary, but we may now only have 15 to 40% of the honeybee colonies which we had available for crop pollination prior to 1985. It is important to foster the recovery of honey bees but it may be just as important to invest in nesting habitat and nectar corridors for the diverse set of native honeybees, butterflies and hummingbirds in southern Arizona, which has the potential to be “capitol” for  native pollinator diversity in all of North America.

If we extend our diversity-for-health metaphor to other realms, we need to see farmers and ranchers drawing upon a greater variety of renewable energy sources (solar, wind, etc) and water sources (concentrated rainfall and captured runoff, restored stream flows and treated effluents) than in the recent past. We need to foster a greater variety of size classes or farms and ranchers, as well as greater access of arable land and potable water by a diversity of cultures and classes within our communities. We need a greater variety of outlets for their fresh and value-added products, so that we can employ a larger number of people in direct-marketing them to residents and tourists in our region.  And finally, we need to foster a greater range of community-based support services that aid in food production, processing, distribution and nutritionally-oriented preparation and consumption of locally-produced foods. Some of this infrastructure—such as community-based health services—should be supported by our tax dollars through government programs, but government-subsidies cannot and should not drive the trajectory of these operations. We also need to foster private entrepreneurs and co-ops to invest in strategically-placed meat processing plants, community kitchens, food hubs, farmers markets, alternative health therapies, locally-owned restaurants and groceries.

The same is true with the assessment of access to health-promoting foods in low income communities. We’ve gotten what we measured. This last spring, the USDA released maps of where “food deserts” are located among American counties and cities, but failed to explain that its primary criterion for defining a food desert was the absence of a full service chain grocery store within close proximity of a population of consumers. In essence, if you don’t have a Food City, a Safeway, an Albertson’s or  Super Wal-Mart in your neighborhood, you are categorized as living a food desert even if you have a two-day a week farmer’s market, a CSA, five roadside stands, and a locally-owned bakery.

 When Kelly Watters and I pointed this out in blog in Grist, we were critiqued by those who get funds from the USDA to start farmer’s markets and community food kitchens in these designated food deserts (Nabhan and Watters 2011). But within a month of my op-ed, a consortium of Wal-Mart, Walgreens, SuperValue and other big box grocery chains announced that they would work with Obama’s Feed America program to newly locate 3500 big boxes in food deserts “to help the poor with their food access problems.”

And yet, what I have documented in the Nogales, Arizona area is that the Wal-Mart there currently provides just 43 varieties of fresh produce (none of it local) in any given week, compared to 72 varieties in the Arizona-owned Food City nearby, and 98 varieties in the locally-owned Red Mountain Foods in nearby Patagonia, Arizona. If one were to objectively select allies in the private sector with which to effectively reduce food insecurity, Red Mountain Foods and Food City would make far more rational choices Wal-Mart.

Despite its hype, Wal-Mart is still far from bringing much nutritional density or diversity to low-income neighborhoods and rural counties. As it provides easy access for low-income households to high fructose corn syrups and other foods high on the glycemic index, it turns food deserts into food dead zones, where caloric over-enrichment depletes health. Even though Wal-mart’s executives have pledged to increase access to “cheap” fresh food, they are still deferring the real costs of that cheap food so that they will need to be paid for by society later. Again, Norman Wirzba (2003):                       

“Above all we need to get past the idea that cheaper food is better food, especially when we remember that the cheapness of food is made possible by the externalization of many ecological and cultural (especially health) costs, costs that we will end up paying in some other way.”                                                                                                               

In my mind, we’ve been training nutritionists, dieticians, food justice advocates and even agricultural scientists in the wrong manner. We need to train them in ecological, agricultural, medical and socioeconomic sciences under the paradigm that ecosystems health and human health share many of the same principles and pathways. We need to engage them in inquiries about the nature of health and resilience in whole systems. And they need to become competent in facilitation of collaborative design processes that some architects and community planners have used for over thirty years.

At the same time, they need to do tangible sweat equity work in these systems to feel how they function and know how they don’t function. In short, we need to train a whole cadre of food system design team members that include farmers, ranchers, nurserymen, butchers, bakers, chefs, nutritionists, health educators, restoration ecologists and community-oriented economists to build food supply chains or trophic structures that have smaller ecological footprints and greater social equity built into them.

Further, we’ve been training agricultural scientists (but few urban farmers) and chefs (but few community kitchen managers). Rather than thinking that the number of farmers is going to instantly rise from its dismal 1.5% level to something more substantial within our fleeting lifetimes, we need to build communities of professionals and citizens with many skills that can be positively employed in redesigning our food systems for land health and human health.

But to even begin to achieve that, we need to humble ourselves enough to do what every drunk must do who enters an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: to admit that our current modus operandi is NOT working and that we are not in control… What is needed most in the borderlands region and North America at large is the kind of multi-cultural community-level and landscape-level effort now being fostered again in both rural and urban areas through the likes of David Sloan Wilson’s Neighborhood Project in Binghamton, New York, the Neo Food Web around Cleveland, Ohio, the Intervale Foundation initiatives around Burlington, Vermont,  Transition Boulder in Boulder County, Colorado and Roots of Change in California.

None of our ideas will hold any water or health if they are on the results of a single individual innovator, non-profit, or institution and not the entire community. Our proposed solutions need to emerge from community members, who then need empowered and supported by our institutions, and not the other way around.

Our new initiative in Southwest Borderlands Food and Water Security will move toward these ends by:

1. Restoring the health of the land through regenerating ecosystem services, first by restoring the flows of irrigable streams and secondly, by restoring pollination services to formerly-depleted farm- and ranchlands.
2. Providing training for the unemployed, underemployed and students of several borderlands cultures so that they might become co-designers of future food systems, in addition to farmers, foragers, gleaners, ranchers, farmers market managers, food hub managers, chefs and community cooks.
3. Addressing the health of the most at-risk marginalized peoples through restoring connectivity between emergency food relief organizations and local food-producing farms and ranches to offer both fresh food and employment.
4. Supporting “foodshed community fellows” from non-profits, farmer’s alliances and private businesses to advance micro-enterprises and start-up projects that help redesign our food systems.
5. Engaging students in in-service learning opportunities with these fellows to make tangible projects work on the ground.
6. Co- seed, fruit or grain schools, foodshed cafes, workshops, forums and “food wagon” exhibits to broader the discussion on the future of our food systems to include people who have only been marginally involved in those discussions to date.
7. Changing the current dynamics bi-national foodsheds, by proposing policy reforms and best practices to allow nutritious food from regional producers to reach a wide range of constituencies in our region for affordable prices, while minimizing our foodprints.

Ultimately, we must find tangible ways to implement cohesive vision of carrying capacity that bridges land health with human health in a manner which remembers the lessons of history summarized here by agrarian philosopher Norman Wirzba (2009):

“Agrarianism tests success and failure not by projected income statements or by economic growth, but by the health and vitality of a region’s entire human and non-human neighborhood. Agrarianism, we might say, represents the most complex and far-reaching accounting system ever known, for according to it, success must include a vibrant watershed and soil base; species diversity; human and animal contentment; communal creativity; responsibility; joy; usable waste; social solidarity and sympathy; attention and delight; and the respectful maintenance of all the sources of life.”

Literature in the Order of Citation

Leopold, Aldo. 1999. The farmer as conservationist. Pp. 161-175 in J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle, ed.s For the Health of the Land. (Island Press, Washington, D.C.) Reprinted from a 1939 edition of American Forests.

Godfray, H. Charles J. et al 2010. Food security: The challenges of feeding nine million people. Science 327(5967): 812-818.

Barbassa, Julianna. 2011. Nogales: When the Land No Longer Gives. www.journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/.nogales.html.

Nabhan, Gary Paul and Regina Fitzsimmons. ed.s 2011. State of the Southwestern Foodsheds. (Sabores Sin Fronteras, University of Arizona Southwest Center with Edible Communities, Tucson AZ.)

Trinidad, Quizan Plata, 2007. Inseguridad Alimentaria en Diferentes Regiones del Estado de Sonora: Causas, Estrategias y Consequencias. Secretaria de Salud Publica, Mexico. www.salud.gob.mx/unidades/Investigacion.

Cassidy, John 2004. Relatively deprived. The New Yorker, April 3.

Rilke, Ranier Maria 1996. “‘Alles wird weider gross,” Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy,( Riverhead Books/Penguin Group USA, New York).

Wirzba, Norman. 2002. Introduction: Why Agrarianism Matter—Even to Urbanites. Pp. 1-20 in Norman Wirzba, ed. The Essential Agrarian Reader.University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, Ky.

Nabhan, Gary Paul and Kelly Watters. 2011. Mom-and-pop versus big-box stores in food deserts. www.grist.org. June.

Wilson, David Sloan 2012. The Neighborhood Project (Little, Brown & Co., New York.)

Wirzba, Norman. 2002. Introduction: Why Agrarianism Matter—Even to Urbanites. Pp. 1-20 in Norman Wirzba, ed. The Essential Agrarian Reader.University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, Ky.

So what if you designed a participatory community-based conservation and restoration initiative around pollinators, their habitats, and their benefits to a local economy? It may seem far-fetched, but that is exactly what is happening in the watersheds straddling the Arizona-Sonora border, which is some of the richest real estate for native pollinators in all of the Americas.

Heliconius Sara, just one of the butterfly species in Arizona.

The borderlands of Southeastern Arizona and adjacent Sonora are home to at least 600 native bee species which live in the wilds of southern Arizona, as well as 300 pollinating butterflies and moths, 15 hummingbird species, two bats and several doves. That level of pollinator diversity may qualify this landscape to be heralded as the “pollinator capitol of North America.”  Ironically this semi-arid landscape is also one of the worst hit by the arrival of Africanized bees and parasitic mites which have wrecked havoc upon the honeybee economy. Throw in the effects of the sudden colony collapse, and there may be fewer honeybees out pollinating flowers in this region that at any time since the American Revolution.

And yet, another kind of revolution is now occurring in the borderlands landscape; a deep-seated urge to restore broken relationships—between the citizens of Mexico and those of the U.S., between ranchers and urban environmentalists, between native and immigrants, and of course between humankind and other-than-human species. Restoring plant-pollinator relationships has become a tangible means of bringing people together from diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, ideologies and livelihoods to heal relationships at several levels all at once.

Coming together under the umbrella of the Borderlands Habitat Restoration Initiative,  local citizens—from retired elders to the Girl Scouts—are banding together to restore degraded lands and waters, improve wildlife habitat for pollinators,and strengthen the local economy through celebrating what is most unique about this place.

As BCRI founder and co-facilitator Ron Pulliam reminds us, “The borderland between southern Arizona and northern Sonora is one of the most biologically diverse temperate areas in the world. Its unusually high biological diversity for any ecoregion on the continent is due to the confluence of four great biogeographic domains- the Sonoran desert to the West, the Chihuahuan desert to the East, the Sierra Madre to the South and the Rocky Mountains to the North- and the intermingling of their unique floras and faunas.”

While much of the borderlands working landscapes appear to be intact, and its flora and fauna attract millions of visitors each year, all that has been changing rapidly. In just the past 50 years, human settlements have grown from a few dusty border towns to several sprawling, rapidly growing cities. The large human migration in history has been the post-World War II translocation of Mexicans and Americans to the Sunbelt. Streams, rivers and reservoirs have been gobbled up, and long meandering corridors of habitats fragmented like the breaking-up of a necklace of pearls. And yet—for a brief moment in time—the economic downturn has slowed the momentum of land clearing and habitat fragmentation—and turned people’s attention to the possibility of a “restoration economy.”

Patagonia, Az. - Photo taken by Tim Tracy

What if Patagonia, Arizona—already one of the most popular birding spots in the West—actually proclaimed itself to be the Pollinator Capital of America, and shifted its goals to model what a restoration economy can be? What if its farmers, gardeners and orchard-keepers bolstered their fruit, nut and berry yields by planting hedgerows of pollinator-attracting shrubs and wildflowers around the edges of their crops? What if naturalists and birders were invited to come to the town’s “bird and breakfast” lodges, motels and camp grounds to document the migrations of hummingbirds, bats and butterflies in spring and fall, leaving their “citizen science” data behind to be analyzed by school children and elderly volunteers? What if new nurseries popped up that sold so many pollinator-attracting trees, shrubs and wildflowers that the entire town became prime pollinator habitat once more? Many Patagonians are already set on seeing their community integrate many of the best practices for habitat restoration and pollinator recovery so that birds, bees, butterflies, bats and people all benefit.

Already the Audubon Society, the Nature Conservancy and the Girl Scouts have planted pollinator gardens in public places, including the town square. Mexican biology students have visited and exchanged ideas with American students. A coalition of farmers and orchard keepers have recently banded together to submit an on-farm pollinator habitat project to the USDA, and hundreds of townspeople participated in 2011 events such as a nectar plant propagation workshop, hummingbird banding and monitoring expeditions and “potting parties” for seedlings of hummingbird bushes. A speaker’s series and habitat restoration forum are planned for 2012.

We hope you will visit our community and participate in our restoration projects. You will also be able to make a real contribution to wildlife and to reconnecting people with land and wildlife while healing cultural relationships in the borderlands as well..

And of the idea of “land health”: seems to abstract to you, consider this: The pollination services provided to food crops and rangeland forages by bees and other animals is valued at no less than $15-20 billion a year in the United States. It, like many other things we now find to be scarce, was once provided to us “for free.” But over the last five years, the costs for Western orchardists renting honeybee colonies has tripled, so that the price of renting and managing honeybees to pollinate a crop like almond trees is now 15% of the entire annual cost of producing nuts. This has forced farmers, orchard-keepers and ranchers to look for other pollinators to do the “work” on their lands. Recent events suggest that if borderland dwellers want to keep these valuable services available to us, our many cultures in the region need to  invest in restoring imperiled relationships by providing pollinators with food, sheltered nesting areas and pesticide-free habitat

Gary Paul Nabhan was co-author of The Forgotten Pollinators (with Stephen Buchmann) and founder of the national campaign of the same name. He is editor of the anthology,  Conserving Migratory Pollinators and Nectar Corridors in North America, and author of the memoir of a literary naturalist, Cross Pollinations. He was recently honored by Utne Reader as one of 25 visionaries changing the world for the better in 2011.

The term food hub  has become used more and more frequently as one of several means to build and strengthen regional food systems. The USDA’s working definition of a food hub  is a “centrally located facility with a business management structure facilitating the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution, and/or marketing of locally/regionally produced foods.”

As I hear more and more food activists and their non-profit organizations proposing to situate a food hub in their regional foodshed as a solution to some of their current problems in food access, I wish to ask all of us to consider a few questions to help us refine our reasons for believing that the presence of a food hub will solve many of our problems:

1. First, why are we proposing another intermediary step between food producers and consumers, institutions or chefs, when much of our efforts the last decade have been to shorten the value chain between food production and consumption?
2. How will the presence of a food hub help farmers, ranchers, foragers, gleaners or fishers improve their time and money management so that they can more profitably focus on the tasks that they’ re best at accomplishing, while reducing the carbon foodprint of the production and transport of foodstuffs?
3. How do chefs, cooks and especially low-income consumers benefit from the presence of a food hub, in terms of more affordable access to a greater diversity of fresh and artisanally-processed foods that may improve their family’s health status?
4. Is a non-profit or co-op most capable of financially and socially managing a successful food hub, or is this a domain in which we need to find for-profit entrepreneurs with values similar to our own to raise the capital to build and manage a successful food hub?

Because the answers to these questions might be different in various communities—or in the same community at different stages in its development of a healthy food system—I do not want to presuppose what your answers to these questions may be. But I do want to propose that we can better design all future food hubs to specifically meet social, ecological and economic criteria for sustainability. In other words, our food hubs should be explicitly located, designed, built,  implemented and managed with tangible objectives in mind that will improve food justice, reduce energy consumption and other ecological impacts, and build livelihoods that provide producers, processors, managers and marketers with livable wages, and investors satisfactory “slow money” returns on their investments.

To achieve such objectives, I have a hunch that food hubs need to be more explicitly designed to capture the potential synergies among their multi-dimensional activities or operations. Unless maximizing such synergies is an explicit goal from the start, I believe it will be marginalized as an objective to the point of becoming a mere afterthought.

To take this idea out of the abstract and put it in concrete terms, consider the following ways that such synergies can be (and in some cases, are  being) captured at well-designed food hubs:

1. For starters, imagine a food hub where different producers’ chiles, tomatoes, onions and herbs come out of their fields and are transported then aggregated at a food hub. A sorting process can then shunt this produce into at least three streams: a)the freshest with the best qualities for transportability can be delivered with minimal trimming and repackaging to local institutional food services, restaurants, markets and farm stands; b) the soon-to-perish or blemished can be processed into value-added storable products such as salsas, spaghetti sauces, chutneys and fermented foods, with the trimmed remains composted; and c) the produce with longer shelf life can be directed to food banks, shelters, pantries and soup kitchens.
2. Now, take this concept and apply it to other domains at a food hub. Imagine a food hub that raises the capital from local investors not only to build a) a small scale meat processing facility, but another facility for b) capturing blood meal and bone meal for local sale as organic fertilizers; a butcher shop for c) smoking meats and using organs for sausages and more complex  charcuterie;  d) a tannery for processing hides; and e) a bio- diesel facility where rendered fat is processed into biofuels. Ken Meter of the Crossroads Center has already done a pilot study of how much more money would stay in a community if such micro-enterprises were co-located with a meat processing facility; Allan Nations at Stockman Grass Farmer has suggested that ranchers might gain from $30 to %50 more per head, even when not taking into account the bio- diesel value. Imagine bringing your cattle or sheep to be processed, and riding your vehicle back home on the energy from their rendered fat!
3. Such scenarios are not pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, but pie-on-the=plate practical planning. There are already 27 coordinated food hubs operating or close to operating in the lower 48 states; one, the Intervale Food Hub in Burlington VT has been working to capture such synergies for at least a decade. Will Raap, the founder and driving force behind the Intervale Foundation once quipped that “we like waste,” as long as it presents opportunities for being used as energy or materials in a co-located micro-enterprise. The Intervale Compost Products processing facility began in 1988 and handles 20,000 tons of material in ways that generate revenue for the Food Hub’s other activities. The compost is sold in bags for domestic garden use, in small containers with seeds for urban window gardens, and is spread on adjacent land used for a Young Farmer Incubator Program, a Conservation Nursery,  a Community-Supported Agriculture project, and wholesale marketing and distribution of produce. Other microenterprises use the heat generated from the compost and from a scrapwood-fired energy generating station to heat enclosed food production and processing facilities ranging from fermented foods, fungi and artisanally-fermented brews.

In the Southwest Borderlands, a hub could be designed to co-locate a heritage grain milling with micro-breweries and bakeries which use the freshly-milled grain; and with livestock-finishing or composting that utilizes the spent (post-fermentation) grain remnants. A mesquite plantation could surround the facility as a windbreak or shelterbelt to mitigate airborne contaminants could provide mesquite pods to the mill to grind into a sweet but diabetes-preventing flour, with the bagasse fed to poultry; the leafy branchlets could be fed to goats and cattle; and the pruned or coppiced wood could fire bread and pizza ovens.

Because yields from each crop or variety grown in the semi-arid Southwest are so variable from year to year, a community kitchen could “even out” this production variability by producing value-added canned or frozen products that blend the yields of several different fruits or vegetables: salsas, chutneys, kimchees, or sauces. These fruit and vegetable products would be equivalent to the wine blends that all but replace true varietals in hotter, drier climates.

The ultimate synergy would be to design a perennial polyculture for arid lands that could be grown in a permaculture design in orchard-gardens immediately surrounding the food hub. The polyculture would consist of overstory plantings of olive trees and pine trees that yield edible pinyon nuts; in their understory, garlic and basil could be harvested in accordance with their seasons. In short, the Southwest Borderlands could produce the first Pesto Polyculture,  where all the ingredients for a good pesto paste could be harvested out of the same system, and processed in an adjacent community kitchen!

All kidding aside, my hypothesis is this: wherever we can find synergies among the multi-dimensional activities and operations of a food hub, more jobs and more affordable, health-enhancing foods will be generated. Now it’s time for us to go out into our food-producing landscapes and communities to field-test this hypothesis!

The cultivation and harvest of domesticated foods began in the Rio Santa Cruz watershed began more than 4100 years ago, making it one of the oldest continuously-farmed cultural landscapes in North America. Surprisingly, some of the same crop varieties that were prehistorically cultivated in the watershed continue to be raised nearby. In addition, Avalon Gardens and Tumacacori National Monument as well as Tubac Presidio State Historic Park may be among the oldest sites where the Spanish introduced crops from the Old World to lands now found within the present-day borders of the U.S.

But just what is a heritage crop variety or livestock breed? It is one that has historically been linked to the identity and livelihoods of families and communities in a particular landscape such as the Santa Cruz Valley.  Its seeds or blood line may have been kept within the community for multiple generations, and passed on from one family to the next, or from grandparents to grandchildren. It is not merely the genetic stock which confers heritage status; it is also the oral history about its production, harvest and uses, and the persistence of traditional methods of raising, processing and preparing it for the table. It may have been held within a single clan or culture for decades, or it may have been shared among the many cultures of the landscape without any proprietary ownership conferred upon it. Of course, wild foods may also be considered heritage foods.

Mission figs, as the ones still found at Tumacacori National Monument

Well then, what are some of the heritage foods of the Santa Cruz? They include Mission figs and pomegranates, such as the ones still found at Tumacacori National Monument.  They may also include the Mission grapes once vining around Mexican-American  homesteads on the Sonoita Plains, and then reintroduced by Gordon Dutt to the Sonoita Vineyards near Elgin. They include the Criollo Corriente and possibly the Texas Longhorn breeds of cattle found in the headwaters of Sonoita Creek. The white Sonora tepary beans, chapalote corn and White Sonora wheat being grown at Amado Farms certainly qualify.

For wild foods, we might consider the chiltepin, elderberry blossoms and fruit, mesquite pods, the wild greens known as verdolagas and quelites, and the Emory Oak acorns known as bellotas. The mescal known as lechuguilla might qualify, for it was bootlegged on the edge of the valley through the Prohibition Era. Saguaro and prickly pear cactus fruits are harvested in the Santa Cruz watershed to this day. As are Gambel’s, Mearn’s and Scaled quail.

Well, why should we care about what people here have eaten in the past? First off, many of these food plants and animals are still adapted to the land and water resources here, and grow well without pampering. Next, many are delicious, nutritious and esteemed by the region’s finest chefs and home-style cooks.  Finally, they remain part of our identity, for there are stories, songs, jokes and recipes for them that still circulate among our friends and neighbors.

Unlike many other regions of the United States where the culinary treasures of the prehistoric and historic eras have been ethnically-cleansed from the landscape, the Rio Santa Cruz still carries the flavors and fragrances enjoyed here centuries ago. Some of these foods may play special roles in our future by combating climate change, water scarcity, heart disease and diabetes; others may simply taste so good that we cannot let them disappear from our memories.

Whatever the case, an increasing number of these foods are being returned to our kitchen tables and community feasts. We can vote for their persistence with our wallets, roasting pits, gardens and pocket books, or we can vote for a placeless and tasteless set of foods to land in pour mouths and memories. Which will you choose?

Now, with less that 1.5% of Americans self-identifying as farmers or ranchers, not only has the value of their poetic expressions been marginalized, but their overall contributions to American culture have also been marginalized as “nostalgic, romantic or retro.” Nothing could be further from the truth; in fact, as we enter an era of agricultural uncertainty and aggravated food insecurity, the values, struggles and visions of food-producing peoples have never been more necessary for the American public to hear.

I will draw upon Biblical, historical and contemporary voices to argue that food producers and prophets come from the same cloth; that spoken as well as written agrarian poetry is one of our most important moral compasses; and that the beauty of their imagery cannot and should not be painted over by cutesy graphics and soundbytes.

It is time that we return to listening to the land and those tenacious enough to apprentice with it: ranchers, farmers, foragers, hunters and orchardkeepers.

This pond in Texas dried out by late June. - Photo: agrilifetoday

Very few urban dwellers have paid attention to the catastrophic drought in the Southwest that began nearly a year ago. But last month, as farmers and ranchers assessed the year’s harvest, it became clear it had knocked back their yields and sales, while driving their costs higher than they have ever been. As the drought continues to drive both meat and vegetable food prices up over the next year, urbanites in the region and beyond will likely notice the change in prices; but whether they will make the connection between drought, climate change, and food security is another question.

Very few urban dwellers have paid attention to the catastrophic drought in the Southwest that began nearly a year ago. But last month, as farmers and ranchers assessed the year’s harvest, it became clear it had knocked back their yields and sales, while driving their costs higher than they have ever been. As the drought continues to drive both meat and vegetable food prices up over the next year, urbanites in the region and beyond will likely notice the change in prices; but whether they will make the connection between drought, climate change, and food security is another question.

Since April, the mainstream media has offered occasional sound bites about how the drought in Texas was affecting food production. Ironically, these early alerts occurred even as that state’s presidential hopeful, Rick Perry, insisted that climate change was no more than a hypothesis. But most reporters failed to notice that the Rio Grande and its tributaries had gone dry from southern New Mexico, through west Texas, clear down to the Sierra Madre. By early fall, so many of Perry’s home state farmers and ranchers were in peril that their governor requested federal aid for disaster relief, as if drought and climate change were always two separate issues, and federal relief were not a federal intervention in state affairs.

Summer 2011.

But what mainstream media has failed to cover is the drought’s more pervasive, international effects. For starters, many subsistence farmers in northern Mexico have had barely enough maize left to feed their families this year, let alone enough surplus corn to sell. While this single but pervasive drought cannot be firmly linked to longer-term global climate change, it may nevertheless be a harbinger of what is to come in terms of the disruption of food security. To be sure, there are many factors that affect the prices of staple foods, including irresponsible speculation in the agricultural commodities markets, and the shunting of 38 percent of the American corn crop into the subsidized production of ethanol. But when I interviewed farmers and livestock producers in New Mexico and Texas near the Mexico border recently, it was clear that nearly a year of unquenchable drought was wreaking havoc on both the economic and ecological stability of the borderlands food system.

After 40 years of living in the borderlands, I was stunned to see, for the first time ever, a completely dry riverbed where the Rio Grande usually flows. Chile, pecan, and alfalfa growers who normally receive five to seven deliveries of diverted river water for irrigation purposes received just one this summer. Near Las Cruces and El Paso, so many farmers had to rely on pumping groundwater to save their crops that groundwater levels dropped to half their normal depth after just one year of additional extraction. Both the states of Texas and New Mexico received an unprecedented number of requests for permits to drill more wells and pump from already-vulnerable aquifers. And just having to pump water from wells rather than receive gravity-fed deliveries cost vegetable and hay farmers an average of 30 percent more.

Small and midsize ranchers and sheepherders may have lost even more; as their rangelands dried out, they could simply not sustain their herds and flocks. One well-known New Mexican sheepherder had to sell off his entire flock and went out of business. Texas and Oklahoma ranchers prematurely sold off more than 600,000 head of cattle because they could not maintain them — neither on the range nor by feeding them supplemental hay. And, to top it off, alfalfa hay prices have risen from $100 to $400 a ton since last October, placing most of the quality hay out of reach for all but the wealthiest dairymen and stockmen.

When pasture is too dry to provide nourishment, ranchers resort to alternative feed, like these protein cubes -- an expensive option. Photo: agrilifetoday

As one rancher explained to me, “You can’t really save the value of your herd during a drought by purchasing emergency feed … it will never pencil out for you to make a profit.”

Ironically, if the drought had not occurred this year, ranchers on both sides of the border could have sold beef at higher prices than they have for decades, since there is less meat being produced in North America than there has been at any time since World War II. This shortage will keep beef prices high for at least the next three to five years. But on the Mexican side of the border, the opportunity to benefit from this bubble has already been lost. Tens of thousands of cattle have died of hunger since March, because there is no supplemental feed to be had.

With a modicum of black humor, Mexican-American alfalfa growers have put handmade signs up on their gates that simply say “No hay” (meaning “There is none” in Spanish).

The effects of just one year’s worth of aberrant weather in the U.S./Mexico borderlands — both severe freezes and prolonged drought — may again remind us how vulnerable our own food security is.

Since 70 percent of the fresh vegetables eaten in the U.S. during the winter months comes from northern Mexico, and our beef and corn markets are highly dependent on one another, American consumers will surely face higher food prices over the next year.

And while many consumers don’t feel like they can afford to pay more for food, perhaps it’s up to those who have that capacity to pledge to farmers and ranchers that they will pay for the true costs of producing our food. It is, of course, farmers and ranchers who bear most of the brunt of the vagaries in our food system. Helping urban residents gain affordable access to healthy food may be only one part of the food justice picture; rural food producers will increasingly need to spread the risks they currently shoulder across the entire food supply chain. From now on, land health and human health at both ends of the chain need to be more strongly linked. That may ultimately be the only way we heal the urban/rural divide that has made so many of America’s food systems dysfunctional over the last half century.

Gary Paul Nabhan was chosen as an Utne Reader visionary in 2011. Each year Utne Reader puts forward its selection of world visionaries—people who don’t just concoct great ideas but also act on them.

Local and sustainable are on the tips of many tongues as more and more people try to eat food that’s good for them and the planet. If you’re a part of this important conversation, you can thank Gary Paul Nabhan for helping to get it started.

Picture of Gary Nabhan by: Zina Saunders / www.zinasaunders.com

A Lebanese American living in the Southwestern United States, Nabhan has for more than three decades been writing books, directing research projects, forming farming alliances, and speaking often and passionately about the importance of “place-based” foods. For his prescience and persistence in this realm, Mother Earth News has called Nabhan “the father of the local food movement.”

Nabhan first got interested in food topics when he went away to college and discovered that he sorely missed the fresh, delicious Lebanese foods his grandfather had served and to which he’d grown accustomed. Nabhan followed his passions to an agriculture degree, focusing on crop diversity and desert agriculture in the classroom while organizing community gardens outside it.

In 1982 Nabhan helped found the organization Native Seeds/SEARCH to prevent regionally adapted crop varie­ties from being lost to history. The same year, he organized the first national conference on community seed banks. In 1997 he was one of the first observers to call attention to the decline of bees and other pollinators by coauthoring the book Forgotten Pollinators. And in numerous other books, speeches, and projects, he has explored groundbreaking ideas about the links between genetics and nutrition, between peace and place, between the desert-dwelling cultures on opposite sides of the globe.

Nabhan’s latest pursuit is a position as the endowed chair of the University of Arizona’s Sustainable Food Systems Program in Southwest Borderlands Food and Water Security, where, he says, he’s “putting together the pieces . . . for a whole food system that’s healthy and just and equitable, and biologically as well as culturally diverse.”

Nabhan’s holistic outlook extends to his own life, in which daily work and daily spiritual practice provide balance.

“I decided that I couldn’t really write about food and farming anymore unless I practiced it on a daily and weekly level,” he says, so he lives on 6 acres that he’s developing as a permaculture orchard. He also partners with a rancher friend on another 10 acres nearby, “and my wife and I share the cooking of food. That’s what grounds me—those nonverbal experiences and daily activities where, frankly, the eggplant or the tepary bean or the soil microbe doesn’t care about my ideology.”

Nabhan is also an ecumenical Franciscan brother whose spirituality is a driving force. “I can’t imagine working toward sustainable agriculture,” he says, “unless I truly had faith that the earth is sacred and what we do with it matters.”

He’s gratified to see that what started as whispers in the kitchen corner now has the whole room talking. “We wanted the discussion of local and sustainable foods to go beyond the same choir, and it has now, and that creates complexities and opportunities,” he says.

We need to redesign our foodsheds “not as if everyone is going to become a farmer again,” he says, “but realizing that there are many niches that need to be taken care of. We need people to be chefs, farmers, market managers, community-supported agriculture interns, transportation route designers, sustainable vehicle designers. Everyone can have a role to play in this.”

Gary Paul Nabhan Online Extras | 2011 Visionaries Home Page