Food Production and Regenerative Solutions – Part 1.

Welcome to our new content series from Stranger Collective.

In a new media partnership, we’re working with our friends at creative content studio Stranger Collective to share stories from their magazine, Strike, exploring ways of fixing our broken food and farming systems.

Our summit themes are unsurprisingly broad, interwoven and universally-significant. Without a sustainable system of anything, we dare to fail as a civilisation. Food and water are as fundamental as it gets and in our current drought predicament in the northern hemisphere, we are getting first hand experience that many other areas on the planet already endure and adapt to.

“I wanted to build supply chains where there was no compromise in the ethics and values of what we were shipping, who we were dealing with, how we were selling it, and making sure people were fairly treated from one end to the other.”

Alex Geldenhuys, founder of sail cargo cooperative New Dawn Traders

Read the full article here on Stranger Collective’s Strike magazine and keep an eye on the weekly content series as we follow their investigative work into this hugely important topic area. Please also read a small excerpt below to whet the appetite:

Tackling our broken food system is a meaty challenge to say the least. From fairer prices for farmers to reducing carbon emissions; minimising the environmental impacts to maximising food security, public health, and worker pay; the heavily industrialised global food system that’s gobbled and churned through the last 50 years has wreaked all kinds of harm on people and planet. Fed by deep-set market forces, mega business and international politics, it’s a true behemoth to even try to understand – let alone unpick and rebuild in a fairer, cleaner, healthier way.

The ‘ethics and values’ of the mainstream food system make for some startling statistics:

• 95% of UK food retail is sold through nine supermarket chains.
• Of all the money spent in British supermarkets, only about 20% goes to the farmer (if they’re lucky).
• Food is sold at tiny margins, often at a loss, and many workers are paid less than living wages.
• Farmers and farm workers are frequently exposed to harmful chemicals and face unfair or unsafe working conditions.
• Humanity has wiped out 68% of global wildlife since 1970. The number one cause? The global food system – it’s the single biggest contributor to biodiversity loss, deforestation, drought, freshwater pollution and the collapse of aquatic wildlife (and the second-biggest contributor to climate change, after the energy industry; responsible for 25-30% of global emissions).
• And for all of this, in the developed world, we throw away 40% of what we’ve bought.