Cinzia Scaffidi
Slow Food Study Center

A Think Tank of Good Ideas

The third Terra Madre event in Turin, from October 23 to 27, will take place in the middle of a very ‘hot autumn’. The so-called ‘food crisis’, a term that on its own seems to sum up all the other crises—energy, economy, environment, climate—is rapidly permeating our way of thinking about food, food production and the future of the planet. No way can it stay out of the debates that will be staged at Terra Madre and the Salone del Gusto.
We have to consider Terra Madre as a giant think tank. The only thing is that think tanks are usually made up of a few people who concentrate on one subject and devote a few days of sometimes creative reflection to it to see if it’s possible to move forward a pace or two.
This is what happens at Terra Madre, but the people involved number seven thousand or thereabouts and the subjects touched upon are many and various. And that’s just the official program. It would be impossible in fact to make a precise count of the myriad of meetings, get-togethers, impromptu planning talks, ex-tempore reflections and project ideas that come to life over the days of the event.
It’s as if the event progressively defines itself, while at once multiplying constantly. The multiplication is spatial insofar as more and more nations, regions even, are organizing their own Terra Madres in the interval between one international edition and the next. Terra Madre Ireland was held in September and Terra Madre Tuscany is scheduled to be held straight after the event in Turin.
The interest groups involved have also multiplied. If the first Terra Madre in 2004 spoke vaguely of ‘food communities’, the second in 2006 had already somehow moved its lens closer up to the subject and differentiated the categories most directly tied to production (farmers, breeders, fisherfolk, gatherers), people dedicated to processing produce into dishes (cooks) and researchers and teachers.
Since 2004 ‘sub-networks’ have grown up and gradually defined themselves within the great Terra Madre network. Producers have joined either by category or by affinity (not just cheesemakers, for example, but also livestock breeders). Cooks have realized how widespread awareness of the centrality of their role as guarantors for local quality producers and spreaders of the word to discerning consumers is still a long way away.
The Terra Madre university network has taken shape. It has its own protocol to which about 150 universities have adhered to date, but like any self-respecting network, it also has individual members, lecturers whose universities have not established an institutional relationship with the network, and who have thus opted to join on a personal basis. Summing together institutions and individuals, we are speaking in terms of a network that, in one way or another, involves more than 350 universities and research centers worldwide. Terra Madre has also multiplied the subjects it feels entitled to address. As we have been saying ever since the event was organized for the first time, to speak of food is to speak of many things simply because eating has to do with life itself. Who can say which discipline or subject area food should refer to? The only rule is in the plural.
It is precisely from this angle—the need for plurality—that the role of universities and the other research and educational institutions in the Terra Madre system acquire importance.
This is especially true in an era such as the contemporary one in which agricultural production is at the center of manifold interests, prevalent among which are economic ones that largely tend to consider science as a service, as a functional element, that has in any case to accept priorities dictated, obviously, by other ambits.
One of the few certainties of anyone involved with eating and agrifood production is that independent and public research do not receive enough support. Many so-called ‘decision-makers’ apparently intend to favor a type of future different from the one pursued to date. But, between words and action, there has to be a moment of analysis and study totally detached from the predetermined formulas. In other words, it is impossible to call science a process with a clear idea of the result it intends to achieve—it cannot be a onesided assessment. Science and research set out from a question or a need and it is to this that they seek to respond.
Research needs brains, dedicated time and facilities, which is why it needs money. But the money is in the hands of the decision-makers, and if they do not decide to fund public research in a way that makes it clear what direction the future is to move in, the only research that will continue to be produced will be funded by people after an economic return in that future, and this in itself will direct the research.
What has Terra Madre got to do with all this? The answer is that, as we have said, Terra Madre does not only multiply itself and its competences, it also multiplies its forces and the voices of the people who take part in it. The many education, training and research projects that have come to life in the last few years among members of the university network and between this network and producers and cooks go to show that if you can’t achieve something on your own, you can achieve it by allying with others. True, Terra Madre can only be a part of what the agrifood world needs, but it is an active part, a part that releases potent spores in many countries and in many sectors.
Speaking about the world food crisis in a conference recently, Osvaldo Martínez, president of the Cuban government’s Economic Commission, said that ‘Never has such a serious food crisis been experienced in peace time’.
It is true, though, that wars have always been a source of great earning for some sectors, and today the system seems to have been found to enable those sectors to enjoy all the ‘benefits’ they would have from a war, without obviously having to address collateral problems, mostly (for them) political and image-related.
On the contrary, today while the business of these actors—the multinationals, first and foremost—goes on flourishing precisely thanks to the food crisis, they show themselves off to the world as saviors, as the ones who will solve the situation with their industrial agriculture—which has amply demonstrated that it is the root cause of many evils—and all its scientific and technological apparata. Yet they are the only ones today to receive sufficient funding.
Industrial agriculture, the growing economic importance of agricultural produce, chemicals, transgenic technologies, patents on life—each is a pillar of a system whose spores, alas, are taking root, more firmly, more invasively and more pervasively than Terra Madre’s. Proof of the fact is that, in an Italian television interview a few months ago on the eve of a major summit in Rome, Jacques Diouf, director general of FAO, the United Nations agency whose statutory task is to address food crisis situations, said that ‘We need a green revolution for Africa, with improved fertilizers and seeds’.
Looking at the long-term results (long-term results being the only ones to look at when dealing with living things!) of the green revolution elsewhere in the world, you wouldn’t wish them on your worst enemy. Inequality, injustice, poverty, death by starvation or by diseases caused by bad eating habits, and, evidently enough, by the wars fought as a result from these conditions.
Is this the gift box we want to give to Africa?
Codified over forty years ago, the ‘right to eat’ has a long, complicated history and a few distinctive features. It is, for example, one of the ‘economic, cultural and social’ rights, whereas another, the right to life, which sounds very important, is a civil right. Living is in one chapter, eating in another? Isn’t that odd?
I believe it’s worth studying the oblivion (come on, researchers, you should be working on this!) into which agriculture and small farmers—precisely the people who produce for life and for food—have always been buried. Whereas industrial agriculture produces for the market, for money and for finance—none of which are edible.
This diversity of final objectives translates into different methodologies, processes and needs, the most important difference being that small-scale agriculture increments and requires biodiversity, whereas, insofar as it is not functional to the market, industrial agriculture eliminates and refutes it.
So the key question in the great network of Terra Madre is: what do we think of and what do we imagine when we dream about our future? Most of all, how do the world’s rulers imagine the future? (Though it should be said that most of them measure it as the four or five years that pass between one election and the next.)
Colin Tudge in Feeding People is Easy (2007) writes that:

Overall, not much more than one per cent of Britain’s workforce now works full time on the land (...). The US is very like Britain: Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the greatest of its founding fathers, envisaged the USA as ‘a nation of small farmers’ but now there are more people in US jails than are working full-time on the land.

In 2005, in an article in the Mexican daily La Jornada, the Coordinación contra los peligros de BAYER wrote:

It is false that the globalized economy is eliminating agriculture. It is eliminating farmers. Agriculture as a multifunctional activity and generator of public goods, of satisfactions, of life, of production of communities and culture, is fighting against giants. It is flourishing instead as a generator of goods and earnings. And this is largely due to the fact that the actors of agriculture are changing: the majority, the small and the poor, are getting weaker and the strong few—the agricultural multinationals—are getting stronger.

So what future are we talking about exactly?
The elimination of farmers is a luxury the world can’t afford. It wouldn’t be a luxury, it would be a punishment. There is only one way of not eliminating farmers, and that is to make sure that young people stay in or go back to the fields.
This is why an alliance is necessary—an alliance whose cement is in Terra Madre. And as many people as possible will have to join because, as we have said, the plural is de rigueur.
- Universities have to join to come closer to the reality of agriculture and farmers. The problem is: who guides who? Is it the market that guides scholars who, in turn, guide farmers by telling them what they have to produce and how? Or, finally, can farmers have science on their side to solve their real problems? If young people are aware and certain that studying agriculture, food and gastronomy means helping to build the future and not being left out of progress, then they will start attending agriculture faculties again, even in developing countries where youngsters who manage to go to universities show a net preference for faculties of law, medicine, economics and so on …
- The cooks who materially feed us every day have to join. They have to act as centers of development and progress in their own local areas, as guarantors of quality produce, as guardians of the knowledge of their people. Enabling old producers to involve their children in their activities and to retire without fear of losing everything they have ever done in their lives—this is the way to bolster the future of many micro-economies.
- The producers themselves have to join under the banner of quality and nothing else. This quality can’t be measured with the tools of the free market, namely in terms of yield per hectare or nutrition content. It is measured in the beauty of landscapes, in flavor, in health—of the person who cultivates the land, of the person who eats, of the animals and the environment— in social justice, in natural resource saving and much else besides. When production is carried out in this way, young people find a place for themselves: a space of fatigue, it’s true, but also of creativity. To survive, young people have to think about the future: they are made up largely of the future just as the elderly are made up largely of the past and memory. This is why the young need to be the builders of their own future.
- Society as a whole and all its component parts should be members. Because children don’t only belong to their mothers, they belong to everybody. One of the component parts is particularly important: the communicators.
Journalists have responsibilities in the development of society, but they often forget the fact and, consciously or unconsciously, end up defending the strongest interests.

If this alliance continues to be strengthened, we can hope that in the future an increasingly high number of young people dream of will come as close as possible to Jefferson’s vision, moving away from urbanization projects that too often in poor countries—though not only in poor countries—translate into a present of poverty, dissatisfaction, hunger, marginalization, alienation, lack of money, dignity, land, and, last but not least, of a future.
Theirs and ours.

Reference

Tudge, C., Feeding People is Easy, Pari Publishing, Pari (Grosseto, Italy) 2007.

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