Fighting food loss and waste. The magic power of mayors and citizens is food diplomacy.
From the very beginning, important decisions have always been made around the table. Aristotle too, in one of his most important books, stressed the importance of commensality to strengthen solidarity and commonality within the society, creating bonds like those within a family.
Although things were not perfect at the time, we continue to benefit from many insights that date back hundreds of years: the basis of our current legal system, which is modeled on that of Roman law; aqueducts, which are by far the symbol of absolute efficiency and respect for the territory; and sustainable methods of agricultural production, such as those characterizing the Mediterranean Diet.
This was possible because food is one of the most powerful tools of intercultural understanding. It fosters idea exchange and mutual cooperation and provides strong diplomatic leverage.
Today we have lost much of the meaning behind meal sharing, both in our daily lives and in our decision-making, with massive repercussions.
Our current detachment from food has led us to totally debase its value.
Sharing has been violently substituted by disposing, caring by inattention, making the issue of food loss and waste a serious, global challenge.
46% of Italian families waste food because of forgetfulness, reveals the 2021 Waste Watcher Report.
Just as we have lost our natural connection with food, so, consequently, we have lost the ability to make effective, powerful decisions for the collective good. With food being considered more the result of market fluctuations than a common asset that can unite people with the natural environment and their communities, also decisions have been increasingly relegated to international contexts, disassociated from the problems of local circumstances.
It comes with no surprise, then, if nowadays policymakers and government representatives gather around meeting tables, rather than dinner tables. This when meetings are not virtual.
Especially this year, food has entered into every political and diplomatic discussion, from the G20 to the UN Food System Summit, from the Dubai Expo to the ongoing COP26. International representatives have shared their will to rethink food systems, to halt food loss and waste, just as it happened with the Carta di Firenze, approved after the G20 Agriculture in Florence.
But these are tough decisions, dissociated from real life, from people’s lives. The fact that, apart from intentions and declarations, governments are late in meeting their duties outlined in the Paris Agreement on climate, in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and in the Aichi Targets on Biodiversity, is a miserable state of affairs.
We urge the world to return to decentralized decisions, like the heritage we learned from the past, to complement international decisions.
REDESIGNING CITIES: A COMMITMENT THAT STARTS FROM THE CITY….
Food shall return a central element of city policy, as it has the potential for becoming a key part in the local governance.
Traditionally, cities have been shaped around formal mandates and rigid schemes, which hinders both citizens’ trust and equal representation of the local community’s interests.
However, with new methods and new thinking, cities have the potential to become undisputed examples of food diplomacy in all its three dimensions: securing the essential human needs (food access), ensuring trust and transparency (securing safety) and guaranteeing food sovereignty, by building strategic relationships with all the stakeholders. And this can be done because cities are the most natural places to understand local problems.
Mayors, as profound connoisseurs of their own territories, can play a central role in this. They represent the cornerstone around which a new form of diplomacy develops, the one that comes from below, from the streets, from the proximity of human relationships.
Food Councils, for example, are increasingly gaining traction as structures able to create new forms of collaboration between public organisms and citizens, improving all stakeholder participation: health professionals, farmers, restaurants, schools, universities, to convert local initiatives into efficient local programs and policies.
Cities can be considered as living laboratories for supporting local value creation and counteracting inefficient approaches, just as those at the basis of food loss and waste.
The Pollica Living Lab — Paideia Campus, for example, in the heart of the Mediterranean (Italy) has started from the need to provide solutions to challenges within the specific social and economic contexts in Pollica: combating the depopulation of villages and inland areas, enhancing its cultural, historical, artistic, and environmental heritage, creating new businesses and supporting the existing ones. Working in a threefold direction (education, innovation and community), the lab works to generate more services, more work, more efficiency, better education, employment and prosperity for the local population by encouraging the development of new entrepreneurship capable of enhancing the knowledge and values of the territory. In two words, it tries to restore the ancient form of integral ecology characterizing the past, by weaving together the economic, political, environmental, human, social, and cultural dimensions.
… FOR THE CITY, ITS CITIZENS AND THE ENVIRONMENT
The diplomacy of cities can open the door to the ethics of citizen service, of the common good, because they can foster open engagement, open innovation, open exchange of perspectives and visions.
Having a closer look at Pollica, the recent Urban Regeneration Plan, called Foodscape, developed by the current administration of Pollica this year, is a clear confirmation of this new mindset. Aimed at increasing resilience and flexibility of the territory, recovering former agricultural areas, supporting commercial activities, promoting the conservation of peri-urban agricultural activities, and also drastically touching the issue of food loss and waste, from its roots.
This approach further materializes in a plurality of local food heroes: ordinary people that gather, support each other, share, and promote sustainable food policies. One of them is Antonio Cera, owner of the Sammarco Bakery, who spreads the tradition of bread between sustainability, the fight against waste, and the protection of biodiversity.
Now more than ever decentralization needs to become the new governance.
It is also for this reason that we could not be more proud of being part of the CITIES 2030, the EU-project involving more than 40 pan-European organizations, almost 70 urban food systems and ecosystems actors, and 15 living labs to empower cities as agents of food system transformation. With the aim of reimagining and restructuring the way systems produce, transport and supply, recycle and reuse food in the 21st century, it fosters citizens’ active engagement and exchange of best practices between short food supply chains, cities and regions, consumers, civil society, and Living Labs.
“Cities have the potential to become ecosystems of innovation facilitating experimentation and multi-stakeholder engagement to contribute to long-term evidence-based food policies, strategies that will ultimately ensure safe, healthy, sustainable, and nutritious food to their inhabitants and surrounding communities.” — Food 2030, Pathways for Action
All hands in to make it happen!
