Which non-profit organisations will survive the comprehensive spending review?

As we wait to see what the comprehensive spending review brings us, I’ve been struck by the different responses to the funding cuts among the various government departments, quangos, non-profits and others we meet and work alongside.

Some have a touch of fatalism. “There’s no money in food,” sighed one experienced campaigner in the sector this month. Supermarket profit figures flickered through my mind, but I knew he was talking about funding for food security research.

Major supermarket chains may grow more interested in this as their supplies become unaffordable, but it’s currently the domain of campaigners and environmental researchers and it’s certainly true that government investment is hard to come by.

Others seem to be quietly getting on with things, remaining committed to their objectives and hoping they can still be delivered through shrunken enterprises or other organisations altogether.

Now, I can’t comment on the management bloat or otherwise at the top of the Audit Commission, but the research teams we worked with in this particular quango slated for closure were efficient, knew what they wanted, handled procurement carefully and economically, and applied a great deal of knowledge and insight to the findings. Based on my own experience, I find it hard to believe that taxpayers are being well served by losing all this expertise to the ether.

Then there are organisations previously funded by government now being forced to seek alternative sources of income. Many have information, expertise and services which have commercial potential, but the change of culture can be an uncomfortable ride.

As a bog-standard commercial company with salaries to pay and shareholders to please, we’ve occasionally encountered suspicion from those who’ve been working to a charitable, academic or government agenda, as if any company with a profit motive must be unethical by design.

I’ve never believed this, and I hope one benefit of government, commercial and third-sector bodies being thrown together in Big Society-style partnerships is that boundaries will be blurred and cultures will rub off on one another.

Whether it happens quickly enough to save the non-profits for whom profit has suddenly entered the vocabulary remains to be seen: my money’s on those staffed by people who understand the value of their own knowledge and how they can help others benefit from it.

Then there are the armies of local community organisations who never had much money in the first place. Somerset Community Food are a good example of a group which has pursued funding from appropriate sources and is enabling other participants to contribute information to their FoodMapper project quickly and easily. You don’t have to be grubby and commercial to realise that investing wisely in your information assets will deliver returns to your cause.

And of course that’s the common theme, the ultimate differentiator which will separate those organisations and individuals who will sink and those who will swim. There’s money in food, and there’s money in every other sphere of sustainability research. We just need to channel it to the organisations who are building vital insight, working to make sure it reaches the decision makers, and taking the best from government, commerce and third sector cultures to keep the important work going.

Mark Thurstain-Goodwin

As expected, the recent paper ‘Can Totnes and district feed itself?’ (see earlier posts) has started stirring things up. An intriguing response comes from Colin Tudge, a director of LandShare CIC (co-funders of the research) and leader of the Campaign for Real Farming.

Colin’s thesis is that the food security issue is a simple matter of feeding the population as far as practical from local sources, recognising that some trade between specialist production areas will always be necessary. He argues that we simply need macronutrients (energy foods and protein), mainly in the shape of grains, and micronutrients – vitamins and minerals – and that by growing lots of wheat and encouraging more urban horticulture we can feed ourselves. I’m brutally over-summarising, of course, but he is keen to keep things simple.

This desire for simplicity makes him question the value of analyses like the land use mapping Geofutures did for this piece of research: “Elaborate models analyzing overall ecological footprints of particular communities in fine detail are not necessary. So long as we do the best we can within the guidelines we can’t really go wrong,” he writes.

However, at the end of his commentary he includes a postscript in a different mood. “This and all the other questions raised in this essay could and should have been addressed decades ago, and would have been addressed by any government that was truly alert to world trends. There are many other questions, too – scientific, economic, sociological, moral, practical. Since the government is unlikely to act this side of food riots (which it will treat at “terrorism” and call out the riot police) people who give a damn need to ask the questions for ourselves.”

I believe in these sentences Colin contradicts his own conclusion that research – even elaborate models – are unnecessary. The Transition movement has been successful because it responds positively to this fear. People who have never been engaged in environmental questions are getting involved and feeling empowered to help plan their communities’ futures.

And government (here I include many local authorities, which have embraced Transition planning in local strategic plans) is witnessing this community feeling and slowly starting to respond. To encourage this and make energy-descent planning truly meaningful, major resources and policy shifts are needed. My experience of this kind of government is that is moves slowly and demands evidence before committing taxpayer’s money. The farming community needs evidence before it will change any current practices too.

Food security is not a stand-alone issue, of course. The land use analysis and mapping undertaken for this study was not as detailed as we would like – it needs local data from across the country to move to next level – but even so it revealed absolutely fundamental issues which will impact food relocalisation and our life experience after Peak Oil.

There is not enough woodfuel for space heating. If we need to relocalise food production, people will need to live in rural areas, including building houses on protected rural land. And major conurbations overwhelm the foodsheds of surrounding communities. Even if we could be steadfastly common-sense in our approach to planning future food supply, I’d say joined-up planning encompassing these kinds of issue is going to need a wee bit more research to get it right.

Colin describes his own analysis of food security as ‘radical’, and his faith that common sense will prevail without major shifts in political and economic priority is certainly that. In using phrases starting “What all cities can do is…” he is not acknowledging the gap between technical possibility (yes, we can all plant tomatoes on our balconies) and reality (but we won’t while we can still get them dirt cheap at Lidl, and by the time we realise we’re really in an energy crisis it will be too late).

The Transition movement is precisely about how we move from here to a more attractive version of the future, and for me that’s where there’s plenty more meaningful research still to be done.

Mark Thurstain-Goodwin

Read Colin’s full commentary here.

Mark Thurstain-Goodwin welcomes publication of a landmark food security study

This week sees the publication of an important paper about future food security. It seeks answers to fundamental questions about how our communities will feed themselves when most food imports from around the world are no longer affordable. Geofutures contributed GIS research and mapping to the project paper, and we’re hoping to move the model onto a national scale.

I first heard Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition movement, speak to an audience in Bristol in 2007.

He isn’t a big ego, and it wasn’t a glitzy occasion, but the message of the Transition communities is so obviously right. This is where it begins, I thought.

We need to make a transition away from a global economy which is dependent on cheap fossil fuels, because we have reached the peak of their extraction. Indeed, we will make that transition whether we like it or not, because fuel prices will inexorably rise, putting oil and gas beyond our reach well before they run out altogether.

The only question is whether we can effectively plan for it now, understanding what we need to do to make our communities resilient against the changes to come. Alternatively, we’ll experience this transformation through utter chaos – topped up with the impacts of climate change.

Cue the Transition Network, a charity supporting grassroots groups in cities, towns and villages, researching how they can plan and implement their energy descent, calling on expertise from established campaigners, older generations, farmers, craftspeople and other experts to help re-localise some or all of their supply of food, fuel, medicines, building materials, textiles, skills and more.

It’s a strong personal interest for me, but it’s also a professional one. As anyone worth their GIS salt could tell you, this kind of planning is crying out for spatial analysis. We have populations, we have topography, climate and agricultural land types, we have transport networks. To understand what’s happening now and plan for energy descent in future, we need maps.

A map of Totnes and district showing where foodshed analysis suggests re-localised food production could best be located

So on many levels I’m delighted to have the opportunity to work with Rob and his team, putting GIS techniques and mapping to work in a test project for Transition Totnes (the first Transition Town and home to the Network). This builds on our earlier analysis of community food footprints, of which more and a mashup here.

Can we feed ourselves?

The aims of this pilot analysis were first to answer the question ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’, and second to create the basis for an online model which any community could readily use to answer the same question for its own population.

The answer to the first – plus of course the many other questions which answering it raises – can be found in the project paper. But I thought I’d highlight here a few of the analysis issues which we dealt with, and how we hope the next phase of the project can help.

Data issues

Data availability was a challenge. This isn’t unusual in any study, but the particular issue here is fine-scale information on soil types and land use. In the absence of anything better, we used Defra agricultural land type data to classify where different kinds of food might best be produced around Totnes.

When Cuba encountered its ‘Special Period’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union cut its fuel imports by 80% and local production of food increased many times over, significant within this was micro-production in gardens and balconies, and bringing new space into cultivation such as airfields. Cuba is an extreme example, but it illustrates that our model is only a work in progress, needing much more fine-scale knowledge on potentially productive land, especially urban and woodland, than we now have.

Not out of the woods

Woodland creates its own special questions. This analysis shows that as a source of managed coppice fuel for space heating, the woodland currently available is far too small to meet the needs of every household in the district. Woodland is included in the model as a source of wild meat and biodiversity; the fuel question is not yet adequately answered, and the even more interesting productive potential for woods in the shape of agroforestry also remains to be fully explored.

The fairly coarse categorisation of land types created the potential anomaly within these results that sheep grazing (using the poorest quality land) would take place many miles from Totnes on the edge of Dartmoor. Again, it’s more than likely that pockets of suitable land exist much closer to the town, and we need fine-scale local knowledge to identify them.

Competing foodsheds

The results of the model also highlight the importance of interplay between the foodsheds of neighbouring communities, especially larger centres of population. It will be vital for resources to be shared equitably between cities, towns and villages while production takes place in the most efficient possible locations. In the paper we also point up the need for radical changes in the planning system allowing re-occupation of rural land by local workers.

All of these questions and more will move towards answers if individual Transition communities can get their hands on the Totnes model. This is a network rammed with local, expert knowledge and we need to provide a systematic means to gather, store and share it, while putting the best available technology to work in planning their own communities’ future food production.

Those are the key aims of the next phase of the project: a national roll-out of a refined version of the model, with the means for people to upload land use, productive capacity, soil, microclimate and other data for inclusion in the analysis. I can’t think of a better use of our technology or a more timely call on funding resources.

Transition is well named; we know where we are, and we can start to envisage where we need to get to, but the bit in between is the real problem. Local food networks which will make money for producers in 20-30 years will struggle to compete with supermarkets now. They are not designed for the here and now, but if we don’t bring them into being now it will be too late.

Tools which can help every kind of stakeholder visualise the markets and systems we’ll very soon need will help them come into existence now.

See our mashup of the Totnes foodshed

See Rob Hopkins’ blog, Transition Culture