Organizing around Food: Setting the Table for Collaboration. Introducing FARE (Food and Agriculture in Regional Engagement)

Communities organize around many things but the most natural focus for collaboration is food.  Food is not only life sustaining but provides seeds for local economic development.  A community-based food-systems approach has the potential to simultaneously address issues of food security, public health, social justice, and ecological health in local communities and regions, as well as economic vitality of agriculture and rural communities. 

I invite a discussion regarding an initiative entitled FARE (Food and Agriculture in Regional Engagement) that uses university expertise to build sustainable economies around local food systems.  There is a growing consensus that sustainable agricultural businesses stimulate economic development, not just in rural communities but within entire regions.  FARE proposes the use of the expertise housed in universities to map out local food systems, focusing on opportunities for new economic enterprise, and leveraging resources and relationships to develop and strengthen those opportunities.   PASCAL would provide the forum for an international discussion related to these activities.

FARE is also the result of the growing concern over community access to healthy food.  Food deserts in both rural and urban areas, the growing use of toxic pesticides in agriculture and the increasing distance food travels diminishing freshness and increasing environmental vulnerability are alarming realities. We can no longer compromise on the development of healthy food systems that provide individuals with “real food”.

FARE is premised on five key assumptions:

• Healthy food should be a right for everyone and not the privilege of a few.
• Environmental health must ground all entrepreneurial initiatives.
• Educational initiatives provide a means of growth.
• Increasing meaningful employment within communities supports dignity for individuals and families.
• Indigenous knowledge is an integral part of the culture and history of a local community.  The challenge in development is to integrate this with appropriate technology and leadership.

A bit of the philosophical background- the title of the project, Food and Agriculture in Regional Engagement (FARE), was chosen for several reasons.  "Fare" equates to its social justice counterpart "fair".  FARE also represents the celebratory connotation related to food and its official definition which is "something consumed in a celebratory manner".  This project is not conceived out of despair but rather opportunity. While housed in an academic institution, setting the table for community needs a language and the development of tools for collaboration.  FARE would provide this.  Finally, FARE suggests an offering communities choose for sustainable development as "fare" on a menu. 

PASCAL provides a place for an international discussion as we set the table for collaboration in this vastly important arena of community and regional food security-food systems that honor and support place.  In his insightful publication, Closing the Food Gap:  Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, food advocate Mark Winne suggests three things necessary to change our industrial food system.  Projects are singular activities that social justice and local food system advocates pursue such as farmers’ markets and community gardens.  Partners are the relationships that develop social capital that we draw upon to pursue our work.  But it is policy that the author believes will “make the right. . .prevalent”.  Hopefully, FARE will cultivate the ground for all three.  How might you engage your regional universities, government agencies and communities in the development of local food systems?  Let’s use this space to imagine possibilities as we make “real food” and sustainable economies a reality for all.

Pat Inman

Senior Research Associate for International Engagement

Center for Governmental Studies

[email protected]