All Together Now: World Food Day 2012
by Jezra Thompson
Published on Tuesday, October 16, 2012 by Civil Eats
Published on Tuesday, October 16, 2012 by Civil Eats
One in seven people
around the world will feel hunger today. The Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations (FAO) brings global awareness to this issue every year
on October 16th, and have done so since 1981. Today, there
are more than 100 countries that will celebrate World
Food Day. Over 450 national and private organizations in the U.S.,
such as Oxfam America and Ending
Hunger, will host events around this year’s theme, “Agricultural
cooperatives–key to feeding the world,” to bring better understanding around
what cooperatives are and how they help relieve food insecurity and improve
community self-sufficiency.
Video:
Video:
Agricultural
cooperatives are enterprises owned and democratically operated by the employees
that work there. They range from farming to retail coops that pool together
resources and share in the costs and benefits of running a business. “There are
many examples of co-ops and they take away the hierarchies that make it
difficult to create a quality of life,” says Madeleine Van Engel, a baker-owner
at Arizmendi, a cooperative bakery in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many examples
of agricultural cooperatives in the U.S. not only feed their community, but
also create economic and social sustainability in places often deemed unlikely.
Mandela
Marketplace, a West Oakland non-profit, worked within their
predominantly African-American and Latino community to identify ways to improve
livelihoods and to create neighborhood investment. Together, they wanted to
address the poor health statistics, where obesity rates are three times higher
than the national average and where forty-eight liquor stores and zero grocery
stores attempt to feed around 25,000 people. As a result, theMandela Foods Cooperative opened
its doors in 2009 as a worker-owned community market selling healthy food at an
affordable price.
Mariela Cedeno, Senior
Manager at Mandela Marketplace, describes the cooperative as community driven.
More than forty percent of the produce sold at the cooperative comes from small
farmers within a 200-mile radius, most of them minority farmers. They also
employ community members, like Leroy
Musgraves, a retired African-American farmer who hosts nutrition
education sessions in front of the cooperative twice a week.
Three years later,
Mandela Foods Cooperative is improving food security and the community
marketplace in West Oakland. Ms. Cedeno says that, “being a cooperative means
that everyone gets value out of the business and everyone is engaged in its
mission to increase access to healthy food and increase the community’s wealth,
they are equally invested in economic development and food.” Since the success
of Mandela Foods Cooperative, the community of West Oakland and Mandela
Marketplace has organized a produce
delivery service that works with community youth to stock the
shelves of corner stores with fresh produce.
The Toolbox for Education and Social Action lists
10 reasons why cooperatives work, starting with democracy and ending with
viability. The FAO estimates that one billion people are members of cooperatives worldwide and they
are generating more than 100 million jobs. The way we think
about agriculture and food businesses is moving away from the trailblazing
farmer tasked with feeding the world and moving closer towards business models
that share resources, ideas, and finances. The National Council of Farmer Cooperatives found that“cooperatives account for nearly $654 billion
in revenue, over two million jobs, $75 billion in wages and benefits paid, and
a total of $133.5 billion in value-added income.”
World Food Day invites
us all to take action and join the conversations. Many community-based
organizations, agricultural cooperatives, and community leaders will host
dinners, organize food packaging events, arrange food drives, plan community
gardening events, and engage schools and institutions. There are also several
national and international conferences and workshops taking place around the
world that you can tune into. This year’s World Food Day conference will be
hosted by Gorta in Dublin and will stream live on today at 9am here. You can find
out more about agricultural cooperatives and how you can get involved in your
community to end world hunger one dinner at a time here.
© 2012 Civil Eats
Jezra Thompson is a food system planner in
California’s Bay Area. She writes about food justice on a national and local
level for Civil Eats. She has spent time talking about food access within
government, non-profit and academia. Her portfolio can be found here. Follow
her on Twitter:@JezraThompson.
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