URBAN AGRICULTURE: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities - 51% of Russia's Total Food Production is Home Grown

Last week Tuesday India suffered a power grid failure that left six hundred million people – half the total population – without electricity.

Fortunately, they got it back up by Thursday and so kept their distribution systems intact and supermarkets didn’t run out of food… which, as you know,  takes about three days.

Most Russians grow their own food. 72 percent of all urban households produce over half of the country’s total agricultural production – on about 7% of the land!

Many concerned middle class Americans – concerned at no jobs and millions of foreclosures – are waking up to the necessity for food sovereignty while the rest of the ‘developing’ world, from Tanzania’s urban agriculture farmers producing 80% of its food to the city of Berlin with over 80 000 urban farmers!

It’s a natural, global human response to food insecurity in the face of what is clearly a drawn-out collapse of consumer capitalism.

Federal attacks on American home gardeners proves that growing your own food makes you free, not laws.

WORKING MODELS

One of the best examples of ‘Transition Town’ thinking, Todmorden is an extraordinary village of 17,000 inhabitants in Yorkshire, United Kingdom with a very successful urban agriculture model. Todmorden’s “Incredible Edible” project began in 2008 with food planted at forty locations throughout the village. The produce is all free, the work is done by volunteers, and passers-by and visitors are invited to pick and eat the food.

There are Incredible Edible food plots in the street, in the health centre car park, at the rail station, in the police station, in the cemetery, and in all the schools.

The gardens are a municipal effort urging locals to grow local, eat seasonal, consider the provenance of their food, and to enjoy fresh.

I am sure you have had multiple ‘outages’ in the last few years.

how long it would take to restore if it went down for more than three day?

What if your supermarket ran out of food?

Are you prepared?

A return to Urban Agriculture might be our best response to the insecurities this country is facing.

I think we’d better start thinking about it

tomdennen