Conference Report (Continued)
Workshops Session 2
After enjoying a lunch of local, seasonal food, delegates were divided into six further workshops as follows:
Local Food: getting the right message across Julie Thorpe, The Co-operative College
The workshop aim was to generate discussion and thinking about responsible and objective promotion. Delegates discussed what were myths and misleading stories around local food, and what were good, debatable and false reasons for buying local food. They then discussed in smaller groups the positive and negative points of certain food items put before them. Altogether, this highlighted the difficulty faced by local food practitioners in making accurate claims about food products.
Local Food in the community: economic, environmental and social benefits Gareth Jones, FARMA
Gareth gave a presentation reviewing the status of farmers’ markets in England today. The proportion of the population buying from farmers’ markets has remained static since 2004 and urban markets are less successful than those in market towns. Advice to farmers’ markets is that they should see themselves as retail outlets and adopt a more professional attitude with better organisation, better layouts and improved presentation, ensuring that the key selling points of producers themselves selling local, quality products are always promoted. Delegates were asked to think about why, when 90% of consumers say that they would like to buy ‘local’ produce, only 30% actually do. The group was also tasked with thinking of ways to support farmers’ markets and small farmers, including through community enterprise.
Community access to land - Jennifer Aird, Salford University and Dan Keech, Soil Association
The group learnt about the current situation with regards to land access for food production: demand is outstripping supply and this is exacerbated by issues of cost, planning, availability, ownership versus simple access, and conflicts over use. Community Land Trusts were originally devised to obtain land for affordable housing, but the principal has been applied to land ownership for food production too, such as on Fordhall Farm. The group discussed other examples of land access schemes and their own experiences in accessing land, the opportunities out there and the needs they could identify for other schemes. Actions from this discussion were to make more information available and to work with local authorities to increase their interest in food production and to advise them about groups’ needs.View the presentation here.
Community Shares: promoting enterprise, equity and engagement -- Jim Brown, Baker Brown Associates
Jim Brown talked about his work to promote the use of community investment to raise funds for community enterprises from local people. Rather than donating or becoming dependent on external grant funding, the community shares models permits schemes to raise capital and for investors then to benefit from a financial return on investment, in addition to the social return on investment that is the primary goal of the enterprise. Click here for Jim’s presentation or go to http://www.bakerbrown.co.uk/index_files/Page1309.htm for further information.
Opportunities for funding: the Local Food programme – Mark Wheddon, RSWT
Mark Wheddon and his colleagues from the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts updated their group on the Local Food grants programme. Analysing the distribution of funding and support by region and by ‘theme’, they found that the most applications had come from the South West and North West regions for projects relating to food growing and health. They gave case studies from some of the projects already in receipt of funding, which reflected the diversity of the activities being supported, before giving advice and guidance for individuals or groups looking to apply for the next stream of funding.
Local policy engagement on food - Suzanne Natelson, Sustain
The delegates discussed how a sustainable food policy and action plan could be achieved in their own areas. They came away with two key action points for each individual:
1. To persuade local authorities to embrace “Food”
2. To work in a cross-cutting fashion in order to overcome local authorities’ traditional compartmentalising of issues
