Policy integration is going to be one of the main themes of the upcoming Contemporary Agrifood Studies course promoted by Wageningen School of Social Sciences. With decentralization, the question is not only about how to have horizontal (intersectoral) integration at the national level, but also vertical integration (of governance levels). If you count the benefits of involving civil society and the private sector in policy formulation, public managers at all levels face a tough task when it comes to policy integration, especially when public managers (and the majority of professionals, for that matter) are used to thinking inside boxes. Perhaps compartmentalization of thoughts is the biggest challenge for policy integration.

There are several initiatives in Brazil aimed at policy integration, but there’s one specific programme that I like a lot. It’s called “Territories of Citizenship: Integration of Public Policies to Reduce Inequalities”.  It builds upon a previous effort of the Ministry of Agrarian Development of identifying rural territories – “geographically defined spaces, characterized by multidimensional criteria such as environment, economy, society, culture, politics and institutions; territories have a population formed by relatively distinct social groups that interact through processes characterized by one or more elements that indicate identity, cohesion and sense of belonging”. The purposes of the Territories of Citizenship are “the economic development and the universalization of basic citizenship programmes through a strategy of sustainable territorial development. Social participation and integration of actions among the Federal Government, states, and municipalities are crucial to the development of this strategy”. You can access more information on the programme, including some of its successes, by clicking here.

Brazil is a Federative State with three autonomous levels of government (federal, state and municipal levels). To work at the territory level facilitates public interventions, since it demonstrates more clearly the socioeconomic reality of the area – in fact, many states adopted this level as the focus for the execution of policies. However, the territories, being larger than the municipalities and smaller than the states, demanded another level of governance. The Territorial Joint Committee, composed of government and civil society representatives, is the space for joint discussion and action for matters related to the territory. It works together with the national Management Committee and the state Articulation Committee.

The programme supports 120 territories. Its feature that I like the most is the goal of developing tailor-made solutions for the socioeconomic development of the (rural) locality together with the universalization of basic rights (such as health, social assistance, etc). However, as much as I like the idea of the territorialization of public policies as a very effective way of policy integration, I have to mention a few challenges. Take the policy-making process in the territories, for example. An Action Matrix containing proposals is submitted annually by the Federal Government; a territorial debate is then carried out by the Territorial Joint Committee. Civil servants at the federal level are, more often than not, very qualified. The same is not true for many municipalities. Policy integration is also about horizontal integration at the local level. Can the Territorial Joint Committee effectively push municipal civil servants to improve the quality of (joint) public management? Or is the Territorial Joint Committee just highlighting the asymmetries between the Federal and other levels of governance in the end? What do you think? Any thoughts on other territorial systems around the world? I would love to read them! 

First of all, meet Johnston:

Johnston is the gardener of the compound to where I just moved in. When I arrived, I saw that he had planted some tomatoes in the front garden. We talked and he demonstrated an obvious passion for gardening, and was sad that the rain had spoiled his tomatoes. I asked him if he could help me set up another vegetable garden there.

It has been a while since I decided that I wanted to have a home garden, but the last places where I lived – in Brasília and in Kampala – had no space for one. I tried an herb garden once at my 1m x 1m terrace, but I couldn’t manage to make the herbs grow. Such a bitter failure for someone who grew up in a farm! When I was a child, we had a garden – my parents still do – and it was just great to spend hours there. My cousins, my sister and I would go there everyday – we wanted to make sure that the plants were growing! The favorite one was the carrot. Sometimes we would take one out of the soil to check if it was good – even when we knew it wasn’t – just to, guiltily, put it back in the soil a few seconds later. Now that I think about my childhood, it seems just crazy how the garden was fascinating to children that really resisted eating whatever came from there. I wonder why, since we weren’t exposed to all the processed food marketing we have today. I guess that one factor that contributed to this is that we were never taught how to plant anything – crazy again, I know. Well, to cut a long story short, I now eat healthier foods and I am concerned about the impacts of my food choices. And, since I just got some space, I decided to make the vegetable garden a reality.

Johnston agreed in helping me. He got the seeds – tomato, lettuce, zucchini, carrot, onion and spinach – and softened the soil where the ruined tomatoes used to be (I couldn’t help him with that, because I couldn’t stay at home on the day he decided to do it).

Then we planted:

I didn’t want to plant all the seeds of the same vegetable at the same time, because how am I supposed to eat, let’s say, 10kgs of carrots if I get them? I asked Johnston if we could plant a bit this week, then a bit more next week, in order to have an adequate on-going supply of vegetables. But Johnston told me we would loose the seeds if we didn’t plant everything that came in the can. I guess we’ll later distribute a lot of vegetables among our friends and neighbors.

He also taught me we should make lines on the soil and put a lot of seeds together for onions, carrots, lettuce and spinach – “because the insects of the soil might eat some, but some will be able to grow”. He also warned me not to put too much earth above the seeds, or they won’t grow. For the big seeds of zucchini, we made holes, far from each other, and put just one seed in each. For the tomatoes, we made a “bed” of really soft earth and put the seeds there. In three weeks, we’ll transplant the young tomato bushes to a bigger area.

It was interesting to see how people around us were mobilized by the garden. My neighbors were excited with the perspective of soon having organic vegetables. Angela, the security guard, came to help:

In the end, this is how we distributed the vegetables in the available area:

Last, I asked Johnston if we could have a compost site. He picked a spot in the back garden and I already started composting. But this is subject for another post(s)! And, if you have any suggestion on how to improve my garden, I’d be happy to hear.

Cheers!

Thaís.

I have been giving a lot of thought these days to the issue of fairness of the international food trade. I caught myself thinking – what would happen to developing economies if Europe suddenly decided to be a food autarchy? A big chain of thoughts came out and it all started after I read some information on a box of hibiscus juice!

Researching on the subject, I came across this article by Kevin Morgan: “ Local and green, global and fair: the ethical foodscape and the politics of care” (Morgan – Ethical foodscape and care – 2010). Both local and fair trade food, he argues, are part of the ethical foodscape, “which enshrines values associated with ecological integrity and social justice, the two key features of a sustainable agrifood system”. However, despite being ethical, local food chains are not synonymous with sustainable food chains (and, I dare to say, neither is fair trade). So far, so good for me.

Making a synthesis, the author declares that locally produced and fairly traded food can both be part of a sustainable food system when the latter is framed in cosmopolitan terms. Why is that? Because of climate change and because people care. Climate change is very unjust: those who have done least to cause it are the ones to be most affected. And people care for others “because this is what being sustainable means in an ecologically interdependent world”. The answer is to be an ecological citizen (explaining: “those who occupy ecological space in such a way as to compromise or foreclose the ability of others in present and future generations to pursue options important to them, owe obligations of ecological citizenship”). Is the creator of this concept implying that fair trade should be preferred? I can’t really say I have a problem with that. But how? The example given by Morgan: “paying poor countries to maintain standing forests and helping to develop clean coal technologies like carbon capture and storage”. And then I have a problem.

The problem is that the analysis changed from the private to the public realm, leaving the dilemma of ethical-wanna-be-sustainable consumers in Europe yet to be solved. I can understand States embodying a collectivity of ecological citizens when they decide to pay for environmental services, but how can an ecological citizen be different of an ethical consumer in the personal realm? In a capitalist economy, where exchanges among people are mediated by money, in how many ways can an individual that occupies too much ecological space realize the obligations he/she owns towards people that don’t? Maybe, if environmental costs were internalized, there would be a difference between them, but for that, again, the public sector is needed.

Let’s assume I say it’s OK that my country pays for the maintenance of forests in the developing world, but how about my fair traded product that maybe doesn’t have the same environmental benefits of a local product? Or, like argued in the paper, food miles don’t make any sense and the carbon footprint of product lifecycles is what matters. Let’s say, both imported and local products have the same environmental costs, and I care equally about my neighbour and an African farmer. Which one should I buy?

Perhaps the solution is in this other paper I read, entitled “Does farm worker health vary between localised and globalised food supply systems?” (Cross – Farm worker health – 2009). In its abstract, the authors wrote: “Significant environmental benefits are claimed for local food systems, but these biophysical indicators are increasingly recognised as inadequate descriptors of supply chain ethics. Social factors such as health are also important indicators of good practice, and are recognised … as important to the development of rounded sustainable agricultural practices. This study compared the self-reported health status of farm workers in the UK, Spain, Kenya and Uganda who were supplying distant markets with fresh vegetables. Workers on Kenyan export horticulture farms reported significantly higher levels of physical health than did Kenyan non-export farm workers and workers in the other study countries. Mean health levels for farm workers in the UK were significantly lower than relevant population norms, indicating widespread levels of poor health amongst these workers. These results suggest that globalised supply chains can provide social benefits to workers, while local food systems do not always provide desirable social outcomes. The causal mechanisms of these observations probably relate more to the social conditions of workers than directly to income”.

This last paper briefly mentions that it was theoretically informed by the capability approach, which lies in the heart of the human development paradigm (BTW: human development, sustainable development, economic development… in how many ways can one develop?). Capabilities are defined as “the substantive freedoms one enjoys to lead the kind of life he or she has reason to value” and constitute the informational basis in the assessment of human development. If capabilities are expanding, human development is taking place. In this article the authors looked at one of the basic human capabilities: enjoying good health. Let’s assume that horticultural products of both the Kenyan and the British farmers have the same ecological and economic costs. In this case, shouldn’t we prefer to buy the Kenyan product? Wouldn’t this be a solution to the dilemma of the ethical-wanna-be-sustainable consumer?

So… can the capability approach offer contributions to the informational basis we’ve been looking for in order to assess sustainable development? Gina has already blogged about this. Can you figure out other ways for an individual to be an ecological citizen? It’s interesting to note that both the concept of ecological citizenship and the one of capability talk about freedoms that are important to people. I’d love to hear any thoughts!

Trying to be sustainable when buying food in Africa can be a bit of a problem for an expat (like myself). In Uganda, open markets still dominate agri-food retailing, but the retailers closest to the areas where expats concentrate in Kampala are… supermarkets, of course. Not that they are there only to play the role of a “security blanket” to foreigners. Changes in food preferences and eating habits among urban consumers, among other factors, explain the increasing participation of supermarkets in food retailing in Uganda. Some authors have noted that supermarkets have spread across developing regions in four waves. Uganda belongs to the last wave, which has just started, driven in large part by South African investment*.

Problem for the “trying to be sustainable” person: Ugandan supermarkets import most of their food products. Since I currently fit into that category, I promised myself I would avoid Uchumi and Nakumatt as much as I could. Also, 20,000 UGX (US$ 8 ) for one kg of (imported) tangerines? Never! (OK, I also promised I wouldn’t lie on my posts. I bought three tangerines in the end). What alternative did I have? I see people selling food on the streets close to my house, but unfortunately I can’t eat only bananas, peas and passion fruits. Am I excused if I say that I am not the only one? According to a recent research conducted in Uganda, supermarket consumers rank food variety in supermarkets as higher than in other food retail outlets such as open and roadside markets (they also prefer supermarkets for food quality and safety, and customer service).

I was in the edge of despair when an angel dressed as the typical African entrepreneur came to me. By chance, my landlord knows a taxi driver that also makes some money delivering food from Kampala’s main open air market to people’s houses. You just tell him how much of potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, beans, fruits and so on, you want, and he will pick it up for you. I couldn’t believe it. A perfect box scheme going on in Kampala (OK, maybe not so perfect, since there’s at least one middleman in the game. In any case, local oranges seem more sustainable – and cheaper – to me than imported tangerines, even if I have to pay a little extra to have them home-delivered).

I once read an article about the African entrepreneurial spirit. The author had this view that, if you gave an European a nail, and asked him to use it, he would reply that he didn’t have a hammer. If you did the same to an African, he would take his shoes off and accomplish the task. For me, that’s just the case of this box scheme. With one particular advantage: sustainability.

Do you know of any other innovative schemes like those in developing countries? I’d be glad to hear about them.

*”The Growth of Supermarkets and its Implications for Smallholders in Uganda”, by Gabriel Elepu (2009).