UK: Local food combines health & sustainability

The UK?s Big Lottery Fund has recently announced funding for two major projects which focus local, healthy sustainable food: ?Making Local Food?, a delivery programme led by the Plunkett Foundation, and ?Local Food?, an award programme led by the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts (RSWT).

Both projects focus on the issue of ?food miles? which means the distance between the food?s point of production to the point of sale.

The Making Local Food Work programme aims "to reconnect consumers to the land by increasing access to fresh, healthy local food with good, traceable origins" and it will benefit of £10 million (about 14,415,000 euro) fund, for this reason it is the biggest (in monetary value) that the rural enterprise charity the Plunkett Foundation has managed in its 80 years.

The programme will include:

• Farmer's markets – promoting co-operative management and ownership;
• Community Shops – sourcing and marketing local food;
• Marketing home produced food – expanding the network of Country Markets;
• Community-supported agriculture – creating local consumer-producer partnerships;
• Distribution hubs – increasing access to local seasonal food in inner city areas;
• Food co-operatives – giving low-income consumers more control over the sources of their food.

The Plunkett Foundation has assembled a partnership of interested groups including farming, food, rural, and co-operative organisations. This partnership will use its expertise and specialist knowledge to bring lasting benefits to communities across England – from isolated rural areas where consumers rely on a handful of shops to urban communities where people currently have limited access to fresh, healthy, seasonal food. They will be providing knowledge, expertise and advice.

The RSWT Local Food project has been awarded £50 million (72,000,000 euros) over six years The project will distribute grants to a variety of food-related projects to help make locally grown food accessible and affordable to local communities. The deadline to apply is January 2008. Grants from £2,000 up to £500,000 (from 2,800 euros o 720,000 euros) will be awarded to not-for-profit groups and organisations in England.

So both schemes have the same long term objective of ensuring that good quality locally produced food is made accessible to as many people as possible.

"It is very likely that some local food groups will benefit from both schemes," said James Money-Kyrle, chief executive of the Plunkett Foundation. "From day one we will aim to ensure that there is very good communication between all the partners in both schemes."

"This programme has a remarkably broad economic and social reach and will reconnect consumers with local food, providing a real boost for our local food heritage as well as securing it for future generations," said James Money-Kyrle.

Supermarket power
These campaigns and many others on local food have been developed from the awareness of the huge power of supermarkets in UK to stifle competition and to impose prices and conditions on farmers and consumers. The four biggest supermarkets in the UK marketplace control about 80% of market.

The negative effects of the supermarket's dominance include

• Transporting food over long distances ? bad for the environment, bad for local farmers, and bad for the nutritional quality of the food.
• Sited in out of town locations ? encourages car use and restricts competition
• The relentless focus on price ? there is a strong link between cheap food and unhealthy diet, premium prices are charged for healthy, organic food.

The Making Local Food Work and the Local Food programmes are aiming to counter this power by focusing on reducing food miles, encouraging small local shops and increasing awareness of healthy food.

Food Miles
Food miles campaigns aim to reduce distance between the food?s point of production to the point of sale.

The main reasons are the following:

• transporting food large distances increases transport cost, carbon dioxide emissions and causes more global warming;
• a long travel causes loss of vitamin content and and nutritional value;
• when products came from other parts of the world there is no sense of seasonality and it?s harder to monitor production and welfare standards.

Promoting local shops
In the 1970s and 1980s, planning laws were relaxed and allowed a large amount of out-of-town supermarket development. The small town shops couldn?t compete with prices and varieties of foods and most of them were forced to close.

The supermarket causes some difficulties as well: first of all people without a car can?t reach them easily, that means especially for old people a lack of independence. Moreover any supermarket looks exactly the same all over the world causing a loss in community?s identity.

The main reasons to encourage local shops are the following:

• to get plenty of choice and variety of foods and to represent an alternative to the supermarkets;
• to give people and retailers the possibility to talk to actual food producers and find out more about the production and origin of food;
• to reduce food miles, and packaging and therefore the amount of waste produced from packaged goods;
• to support farmers and farm diversification;
• to contribute to local economic development and an increase in employment, keeping money within own local community;
• provide producers with an income that?s not tied to supermarkets.

Healthy diet
The Food Access network is working to ensure that everyone could have access to healthy, affordable and sustainable food.

The main factors are:

• accessibility (to have shops in the neighbourhood);
• availability (if local shops aren?t properly supported they tend to have fewer healthy foods, such as fruit and vegetables, due to a shorter shelf life, lower profit and a perceived lack of interest);
• affordability (expenditure on food depends on the budget remaining after the bills have been paid, so it tends to be reduced, and many people perceive fruit and vegetables to be more expensive and therefore avoid them);
• awareness (many people don?t have cultural and cooking skills to appreciate the nutritional value of healthy food and they are unfamiliar with it).

Food projects aim to allow people to achieve these criteria and be awareness to their diet.

More info:
www.makinglocalfoodwork.co.uk
www.rswt.org/localfood/