June 2018 – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Food Connections

Posted on June 20, 2018April 4, 2023 by janet.crompton

Last week the Bristol Food Connections festival explored “all that is GREAT about food in Bristol (and beyond)” [1]. This made me realise that what I am exploring are the separations in our global food system. While so much of food in Bristol is ‘GREAT’ there is still much work to do about what is NOT SO GREAT. In the global food system, the separations between those who produce and those who consume what is transported around the world are many: income, origin, lifestyle, language, history, opportunities, culture, diet, microbiome – you name it there are separations in the way we eat and live.

This weekend I co-facilitated an event, Philosophy Breakfast: The ethics of global food production, with Julian Baggini, philosopher and author of the book, Virtues of the table: How to eat and think, [2]. Julian focused our thoughts on ethics and justice, and I grounded us with a case study, on tomatoes produced in Morocco, based on my recent fieldwork. We were treated, literally, to food for thought, in the form of a breakfast bap and coffee from the Boston Tea Party as well as a full house of attendees ready and willing to reflect on their role in the food systems. I was determined that this group, who had been motivated enough to get up for a 10 am Sunday start, also be given space to tell us what we should be considering in relation to the ethics of food. So, we invited each table to choose a breakfast food element to reflect upon, bread, coffee, tea, bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms, as they slowly digested its nutrients and food dilemmas.

Framing the session Julian considered our role as consumers by drawing on the thoughts of some classical philosophers from Plato to Sen: we should not, he suggested, be afraid of always getting everything right, but we should at least do our best to avoid contributing to what we find clearly morally wrong. How to go about this? I asked our participants to think of questions which might help us reflect on each of the breakfast items to help us consider these dilemmas. Furthermore, perhaps we might have questions for others; for the supermarkets, for the governments, and for the companies involved. My favourite question from this savvy group was, for meat: “was it worth an animal dying for me to eat this?” something that connects to my blog on the great value of seeing meat as sacrifice: ‘L hawli‘.

My talk related more to the question about coffee, “What labour standards (how bad would they be) would stop you buying coffee?”. What a question. International labour standards usually boil down to a mutual agreement that the countries involved in trade will apply their national labour laws. They may also be required to ensure that these national laws meet international standards, but what are these international standards? Since the 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (ILO, 1998) [3], international labour law has been focused, or in practice narrowed, depending on your perspective, to just eight core conventions covering four areas (collective bargaining, forced labour, child labour, non-discrimination at work), out of a possible 189 conventions covering many other very important areas [4]. So this is a relatively weak starting point, which in most cases simply attempts to ensure already existing minimum standards (laws) are implemented.

What happens also, when national laws do not meet the needs of workers? Too often agricultural work is excluded from normal labour standards, or minimum wages are lower in this sector. This is not just the case in poorer countries. In the USA, the world’s richest state, many agricultural workers are exempted from minimum wage and overtime entitlements of the main national labour legislation, the Fair Labour Standards Act [5]. This is discrimination sanctioned by law.

Such discrimination between agriculture and other sectors is also the case in Morocco, where I carried out fieldwork. Whilst the legal minimum wage in other sectors is £8.29, the minimum day wage for agricultural workers is significantly lower at £5.37. OK, you may think, but life is cheaper there. Not that much cheaper. We can convert that minimum agricultural wage to a UK equivalent via the Purchasing Power Parity formula, (or PPP) this tells you what the equivalent wage would be in the UK. That equivalent of that minimum agricultural wage in a UK context with UK housing, food and other costs would be £13.51. This is not enough to live comfortably, barely enough to survive.

This is why then, the first findings chapter of my thesis is entitled “No Money”. If a major supply chain, feeding us year round with produce that we increasingly depend upon, rests on a starting point of an unreasonably low minimum wage, we cannot consider this a socially sustainable global food connection. And it is a connection. Although we are separated by distance, language, culture and long food chains, it was not difficult to find tomatoes just on our doorstep. Even last week when the ‘counter-season’ was officially over (as we now produce more in the UK so there is less market for non-EU producers) I could easily identify tomatoes in Bristol from a major company in business just outside of Agadir, Morocco (where my research is focused). I know workers from this company’s greenhouses and packhouses and spent months in daily conversations with them about what needs to change. They are calling for increases in wages and working conditions, better childcare and better social infrastructure. The separations then, are there to be bridged.

Transparency came up a lot on the morning of our event. How is there so much information about the attributes of food itself, and so little about those that produce it? We can only find out about food if actors involved in the sector are willing to be open (governments, retailers, employers). This showed at the Bristol Fruit Market, which I also visited as part of the Food Connections festival. The openness of the owners to discuss their business and show us around their distribution centre was in very clear contrast to the supermarket distribution centres which are shrouded in secrecy. Yet this is not the case at every stage of the process and it is only by asking questions, and showing that we care, that we can have any leverage at all to shift the harshest dynamics of global food systems.

Why are wages so low in the food sector? How can we revalue food? How can we keep alternative routes to market going (such as through wholesale)? How do we know if workers are treated fairly? What does that mean? How can we improve social and labour conditions in global production? These some of the questions that I am working on at the moment.

Groups feed back from their discussions at the Philosophy Breakfast event 17 June 2018

[1] Bristol Food Connections Festival website

[2] BAGGINI, J. 2014. The virtues of the table: How to eat and think, Granta Books.

[3] ILO 1998. ILO Declaration on fundamental principles and rights at work. International Labour Conference. Geneva: International Labour Office.

[4] A list of the 189 ILO conventions

[5] See, Guide to the Fair Labor Standards Act

[6] This is known locally as the difference of the SMIG, the minimum legal industrial wage, and the SMAG, the minimum legal agricultural wage. The SMIG is set by the hour (13.46 Moroccan Dirhams). An 8-hour equivalent of the SMIG comes to the GBP of £8.29. This can then be compared to the minimum agricultural wage, set by the day at 69.73 Moroccan Dirhams, equivalent to £5.37 per day.
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Lydia Medland and has been reposted with kind permission from her original blog. Lydia is from the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

Lydia Medland

Find out more about the Cabot Institute’s Food Security research theme.

Pollination and International Development: How bees can help us fight poverty and feed the world

Posted on June 19, 2018April 5, 2023 by janet.crompton

Animal pollinators are the industrious workers in the factory of life – transporting pollen from one flower to another to ensure successful fertilisation. 75% of our crop plants benefit from this free service which can increase the yield, quality and even shelf-life of their products. This translates to a US$235-577bn value to global agriculture each year. Many of our favourite foods – strawberries, coffee and cocoa – can end up shrivelled and tasteless without pollination. This ecosystem service is under increasing threat however, as pollinators face the potent cocktail of pressures we have laid upon them, declining in numbers across various parts of the world.

But what has all this got to do with international development? From what we can tell, communities in developing countries [1] are more reliant on pollinators than almost anyone, standing to lose important income, livelihoods, nutrition and cultural traditions if pollinators decline. And yet, although a number of researchers across the developing world have made substantial and important contributions to this field, limited resources and capacity have meant that only a small proportion of pollination research has focused on these regions. In fact, there isn’t even enough data to know what is happening to pollinators in the developing world, let alone how we can best conserve them and their values to human wellbeing.

Over two billion people in developing countries are reliant on smallholder farming and therefore indirectly reliant on pollinators, without necessarily knowing it. Many valuable cash crops, for example coffee, cocoa and cashews, are highly pollinator dependent and almost exclusively grown in the developing world, providing income for millions of people. In fact the reliance on pollinator-dependent crops has increased faster in the developing world than anywhere else. Reliance on beekeeping for income and livelihoods has also increased and is becoming a common component of sustainable development projects worldwide.

Worryingly, declines in pollination will have deeper consequences than just the loss of crop yields and income. Because many of the most nutritionally important food groups such as fruits, nuts and vegetables are also the most pollinator-dependent, pollinator declines are likely to shift the balance of people’s diets away from these foods. As a result, many millions of people around the world, particularly in developing countries, are expected to become deficient in important micronutrients such as vitamin A, vitamin C, iron and folate, resulting in millions of years of healthy life lost.

So what is being done about all this? In recognition of the importance of pollinators to human welfare and the threats facing them, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) commissioned a global assessment of Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production, published in 2016. This triggered a great wave of political and media attention and has resulted in the incorporation of the report’s key findings into the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Many governments are now in the process of developing national pollinator strategies, including the developing nations of Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, South Africa and India. On this wave of momentum, the CBD has also requested the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to update their International Pollinator Initiative (IPI) which aims to build greater understanding, management and conservation of pollinators around the world. This international attention won’t last forever though, so it is important that the current momentum is sustained and built upon as soon as possible, ensuring as many countries as possible – particularly in the developing world – are involved.

The UK has a valuable opportunity to contribute to these efforts. As a centre of excellence for pollination science, it is the second largest funder and producer of pollination research after the US. But only c.6% of the £95M we have contributed to pollination research in the last 10 years has any link or collaboration with a developing country (ÜberResearch 2018). As more of the UK’s Official Development Assistance budget is made available for research, there is a shift in emphasis towards research that directly contributes towards international development. New funding programmes are encouraging the UK research community to engage in collaborative projects with researchers in developing countries, building valuable research capacity. With the relevance of pollination and agro-ecology to addressing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, these topics may fit into this new funding landscape. However, to be effective and ethical, partners and institutions in developing countries must be involved in the design of, and stand to benefit from these collaborations. See here for a UKCDS report outlining the ways in which academics and funders can help ensure fair partnerships.

As populations in the developing world expand, along with per-capita food demands, these issues become all the more pressing. Food production will need to increase by 70% come 2050 and this cannot be achieved by simply expanding agricultural land or fertilizer input. To ensure people are well-fed, in a way that is sustainable and ethical, we will have to intensify our farming in new ways. Understanding and managing pollination may be an important part of this and is something that researchers, politicians, agriculturalists and development workers will need to engage with sooner rather than later.

[1] For simplicity, we use the term ‘developing countries’ to refer to all countries listed in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Development Assistant Committee (DAC) list of Official Development Assistance (ODA) recipients. This includes countries from a range of economic classifications, from ‘Least Developed’ to ‘Upper Middle Income’ which includes the nations of China and Brazil. Whilst we group all these nations under the broad term of ‘developing country’, we acknowledge the great heterogeneity between them in terms of wealth, development and research capacity.

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This blog has been kindly reposted from the UK CDS website. It is written by Cabot Institute member Thomas Timberlake, a pollination ecology PhD researcher from the University of Bristol who undertook a three month project with the UKCDS looking at the relevance of pollination to international development.

Thomas Timberlake

To find out more about this project you can view the full report, or watch a recording of the UKCDS Pollination and International Development Webinar.

You can also listen to Tom speaking on Nature Xposed, a University of Bristol nature radio station, about the importance of pollinators in developing countries.

If you have any comments about this blog do tweet us @cabotinstitute @UKCDS.

Water City Bristol!

Posted on June 12, 2018April 13, 2023 by janet.crompton

Foot selfie at secret swimming spot

If you don’t fix things in words, they might float away. So, briefly, a skeletal accounting —

3 open-water swims
2 workshops in maritime writing
1 public lecture
1 trip up the canal locks to Saltford
2 days at #MT2018 (Marine Transgressions Conference)
2 keynotes
~ 12 panels
1 Blue Humanities roundtable
2 receptions
[a poetry reading that I missed]
And many half-garbled memories, starting in the middle —

The Llandoger Trow, where Daniel Defoe met Alexander Selkirk

Toxicity, the Ocean, and Urban Space (Wednesday)

I was trying some new things for this public lecture, knowing that the audience would swirl together academics with non-academics, be mostly composed of city-dwellers, and further include mostly those with a particular interest in the sea. Unpicking the knots of writing and thinking I’ve been chasing down in the wake of Oceanic New York, my talk splashed through some recent watery adventures, included images of Thanos the purple God of demonic Malthusianism, strayed into verse in three of my own poems, and — maybe? — crossed wild water to make landfall with hopeful gestures toward Ocean citizenship. How can our Cities and our bodies prepare themselves for and live with rising waters? I’d like to speak that as a not-only tragic story.

Public lecture at the University of Bristol

The Henleaze Swimming Club (Monday)

On Monday afternoon, jet-lagged and still-missing my baggage from the overnight flight in via Dublin, I bought a replacement suit & goggles from the hotel & Uber’d up to Henleaze, a former quarry that’s been a private swimming club since 1919. This gorgeous, narrow, fresh-watered lake now overflows with people, half with swimmers and half fisherfolk. What better anti-jet lag tonic can be?

Underwater Bristol (Tuesday)

Building on the perpetual inspiration of underwaternewyork.com, I hatched a plot with members of the U of Bristol English faculty to incubate some to-emerge-later responses to Bristol’s waterways. So many glorious things! A sailboat named Svendgar that I spotted a few days later for sale in the harbor. Brown mudflats. The kayaks that were paddled around the Bay by the Inuits kidnapped in Frobisher’s Second Voyage to Newfoundland in 1577. A football pitch next to a Cadbury Chocolate Factory that I’d seen earlier that morning while riding a canal boat up five locks to Saltford. Plastic. Breeding eels. What will they all become?

Brunel’s suspension bridge over the Avon

A secret monastic pool (Wednesday)

Having been promised a bit of true English wild swimming on the condition that I not mention the name or location of the waters in which I would plunge, I suppose I was a bit surprised to come around the corner of the quiet country lane to discover maybe sixty students lining the pool’s far bank, sunning themselves in post-exam freedom. The secluded pool, built “in the Middle Ages” to store fish for the Abbey of St. Augustine (founded 1140), now hosts lily pads, a gorgeous 15-foot tall purple rhododendron, supposedly a few tench, and — alas! — some horseflies that enjoyed landing on my bald head. It’s an excellent place for an afternoon’s swim. Thanks to my hosts for taking me there!

Bristol Harbour on the last night

Sea-themed creative writing workshop (Wednesday)

I was deeply impressed by the almost-dozen enthusiastic Bristol undergrads who submitted maritime poetry and prose works for an post-term bonus workshop. I was joined also by Shakespearean Laurence Publicover and poet David Punter, and we spent a thrilling two hours wrestling with the joys and frustrations of writing with and into oceanic spaces. The student writing was gorgeous and wonderfully ambitious, from a narrative built from fragments of a diary from the S.S. Great Britain to a brilliantly post-Agatha Christie cruise montage, a boat-launching story, several quite lovely lyrics about blue spaces, and a hashing of Pip’s dream of drowning from Moby-Dick that spoke to my Melvillean core.

Clevedon Marine Lake (Fri)

Diving into Clevedon Marine Lake

Located as far upstream as big boats could travel the tidal Avon, Bristol today is water-filled but brackish rather than salt. Much of my time there was semi-marine, from the walks along the harbour to the floating bar the Marine Transgressions Conference decamped to after our final keynote. But though the Avon is tidal for a long distance and boasts (I am reliably assured by tide-guru Owain Jones from the Environmental Humanities department at Bath Spa) the second-highest tides in the world, there’s not a lot of open salt water in the city. I wanted to swim in the Bristol Channel (still known in Wales as the Severn Sea), so the morning of the conference’s last day I met swimographer Vanessa at an early hour that precluded other swimming companions, and we Uber’d out to the Clevedon Marine Lake. I’ve seldom or never seen a more starkly ideal swimscape. The pool is built, framed in by concrete and stone, but at high tide the swell tops the wall and fills the pool with ocean water. The tide was near the ebb when we arrived that morning, and over 100 yards of brown mudflat extended below the “lake,” reflecting the gray sky up toward us. The water was perfect — cool but not cold, salty but not bitter, manageable even though I’d forgotten my goggles in the hotel, and a generous 250m per lake-length. One of the few other swimmers who was also there on a grey misty morning was a man training for 70km in Lake Geneva. He churned in slow circles around the lake and planned to swim through dinner time. We had panels to rush back to in Bristol, but I was tempted just to keep swimming.

#MT2018 Marine Transgressions Conference (Thursday & Friday)

In front of Nancy Farmer tiles with Vanessa Daws at Clevedon

My visit to Bristol was fortuitously timed with an interdisciplinary conference on Marine Transgressions — a geologic term of art for moments in which the sea invades the land. Packed in to the last two days of my stay, the conference’s turbulent energy kept me going even when my own energy flagged. From Helen Rozwadowski’s amazing opening keynote on Jacques Cousteau and utopian fantasies of homo aquaticus in the 1950s and ’60s all the way through Tim Dee’s gorgeously lyrical evocation of the human and avian intertwinings of gulls and landfills, #MT2018 was an stirring mixture. I can’t do justice to all the great panels and papers that I heard over the two days, but I was struck by the variety of disciplinary perspectives — lots of poetics, history, and environmental humanities, but also marine law, policy, science, technological remediation, and other things. All these were joined together by a shared passion for the oceanic “blue” — though of course we all know, and we repeated as a kind of refrain over two days, that the ocean is also and meaningfully green, gray, purple, and many other colors — including gold, in the memorable image of the geochemist Kate Hendry describing the glimmer of microscopic diatoms on the salt flats of the Severn estuary at low tide.

Blue Humanities Round Table (Friday)

The best parts of a small conference come from listening to new things, and also from catching an extension of someone’s work over a beer at the floating bar after the day’s sessions. But in addition to many great discoveries, I’ve seldom had more fun at an academic presentation than I did chairing a Blue Humanities Round Table near the end of the second day. The amazing panel of disparate thinkers and makers included Owain Jones, whose hydrocitizenship project connects Bristol’s to its people and its past; Vanessa Daws, swimographer and immersive artist; Kate Hendry, a biogeochemist whose fields work takes her to both the Arctic and Antarctic ice fields; and my friend from the CT Shoreline Helen Rozwadowski, historian of science and founder of the Maritime Studies Program at UConn Avery Point. I started us out with a general question — “What can you do because of your focus on the sea that you could not do otherwise?” — and our conversation waterfalled down through several memorable twists and turns into a fantastic question period. With thanks to Alexandra Campbell and her twitter-agility, here’s a partial reconstruction of the ship we built as we sailed along:

The sea is not a metaphor (quoting Hester Blum) — except that sometimes it is, and sometimes its metaphors rub against and into the real salt water.
The sea is history (not-quite-remembering to quote Derek Walcott) — and given a few generations of blue humanities historical scholarship it should hopefully become more richly historicized.
The sea disorients and distorts, always and relentlessly, even as humans respond partially to that disorientation.
Is water alien? Does it come from outer space or from inside the earth’s core? Why might it matter? (in dialogue with Lindy Elkins-Tanton)
The sea’s lack of visibility redoubles its its moral challenge, informs the cultural history of its monstrous depths, and increases the force of its alien elements. (I rambled here about the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” poster art on the walls of Catch-22, the fish & chips place where I ate my first Bristol meal.)
Does the weakness of human eyesight underwater attenuate our moral connection with sea creatures? (A Levinas-ian question, though we didn’t mention his name)
Can science “illuminate” (Kate’s word) the sea in ways that increase its ethical claims on human subjects?
What are the politics of the interdisciplinary ocean? How can the sea speak to social justice, especially remembering the twin horrors of the slave trade and transoceanic capitalism (which two things might actually be parts of the same thing)?
Can the sea be a space of hope? (Last question, I think? We said yes. But I’m not sure that we’re sure.)

Selfie with mermaid and Vanessa Daws in Clevedon

“Under the sea everything is moral”

The hardest and most evocative phrase of the conference came when Helen quoted Cousteau or one of his fellow sea-utopians in her opening keynote. What might it mean for “everything” to be “moral” beneath the waves? “It’s all subtle and submarine,” says Walcott, thinking about Atlantic slavery and Caribbean beauty. Owain quite rightly objected that the underwater industriousness for which Cousteau was a booster has fouled our waters. The panel speculated together about the morality that emerges from the shared vulnerability of terrestrial human bodies in deep waters. I thought about, but did not share, a terrifying vision of drowning and struggle from Macbeth —

Doubtful it stood / As two spent swimmers that do cling together / And choke their art (1.2)

There’s another way, it occurs to me now as my big green metal bird arcs past the southern tip of Greenland, in which the undersea might be “moral.” It’s not that all undersea activities are permitted or approved, but that the questions we face — what we talk about when we talk about oceans — become starkly and painfully ethical. As mer-scholars, academic selkies, blue humanists, we swim into hard questions about disorientation, about buoyancy, about living-with alien lives. We face questions of social justice and tragic history, of oceanic dislocation and ongoing violence. Moral urgencies splash into marine lakes in the West Country and haunt overcrowded refugee boats in the Eastern Med.

The sea supports and threatens human life. What moral dilemmas fix us from the cold glaze of a fish’s eyes?

Floating bar

Thanks to all who were there this week, and in particular to my hosts at the University of Bristol, the Perspectives on the Sea cluster run by Laurence Publicover, the Brigstow and Cabot Institutes, and all the people who made Marine Transgressions possible! I’m looking forward to my next visit to Bristol already.

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This blog has been written by Professor Steve Mentz, St John’s University, New York. The blog has been reposted with kind permission from Steve’s original blog.