The lessons of Cuban peak oil

I interviewed visiting Cuban environmentalist Roberto Perez for Earth Matters.

You can download the podcast from the 3cr website.

With oil hitting $110 a barrel, Cuba provides a powerful example of how an industrialized country can survive a so-called “peak oil” scenario, where oil availability goes into an inevitable decline.

When the soviet union collapsed, Cuba lost a huge percentage of its vital oil imports.

The country also lost important trading partners which provided the country’s food needs and important export revenue.

Cuba was pushed into an immediate food and energy crisis, a situation compounded by long-standing US embargoes.

After responding to the crisis with a more localised economy and organic food production system, Cuba is now being celebrated as a model of self-sufficiency.

It was the only country in the 2007 World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet report that met a set of criteria for sustainable development.

Roberto Perez is a cuban biologist and permaculturist who is currently touring Australia.

He’s been telling audiences about Cuba’s experience and what it means for oil-dependant countries like Australia.

More information about Roberto’s Australian tour is available at http://www.permaculture.com.au

Quandongs for breakfast

This week I attended a fantastic community forum called Think Global: Eat Local in Byron Bay.

After a screening of the film Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, there was a panel discussion featuring Cuban permaculturist Roberto Perez, Robert Pekin from Brisbane-based CSA Food Connect and Russ Greyson from the Australian Community Gardens Network.

It was all very stimulating and exciting for people like me interested in the relocalisation movement.

But it was when the panel opened for questions from the floor that the evening climaxed.

An empassioned woman grabbed the mic with gusto and started to talk about the importance of growing your own food locally.

She talked from her own experience about how she’d planted hundreds of fruit trees in the rental houses she’d lived in over a twenty year period in the area.

“Living in a rented house and think you can’t plant trees? No excuse,” she said.

When she heard that the Government was handing out fines for people planting unregistered banana trees she started planting more and more banana trees than ever before.

On one occasion kids snuck into her front garden to secretly take bananas from a tree she had planted.

When she suddenly arrived back home, the startled youngsters started to apologise profusely for ’stealing’ her fruit.

She said to them, “don’t apologise, I planted it for everyone to enjoy”.

But the clincher was a story about something that had happened to her at the Woodford Folk Festival.

Part of the ticket price for the festival was directed to planting native trees to offset the festival’s environmental impact (and presumably to create a nice glowing feeling for participants).

But the woman said she didn’t want a native tree planted from her money. She wanted a fruit tree.

The guy said it was not possible.

An argument ensued but the festival representative was adament that only native non-food-growing species would be planted.

The woman drove her point home with a classic comment that really challenges us to think about whether planting natives really is the best strategy for reducing our environmental impact and improving the amenity of our public places.

“What did you have for breakfast?” she asked the young man, “Quandongs?!”

For those that don’t know a quandong is an Australian bushfood.

Quandongs have amazing nutritional properties and are being developed for commercial production.

But quandongs, like many bushfoods, are still not a core part of mainstream Australian diet. And you wouldn’t live for very long subsisting on them, even if you could afford going price of ninety dollars a kilo.

So until we have a nourishing and abundant bushfood cuisine, I wholeheartedly agree that we should be planting fruit trees and other edibles in our public place.

In the face of real food security threats from peak oil and climate change, planting fruit trees is a great strategy.

In confining food production in remote rural areas we become alienated from how our food is grown and depend on fossil fuel-based agriculture with its ineffecient transportation model.

This makes it easier for farmers stick with industrial farming and its toxic chemical dependency issues.

Bring the food home I say.

Quandongs anyone? You can get them here.

The joy of moving house (…by bike!)

My boss recently commented that God couldn’t have created a more troublesome thing than moving house.

Well, my boss and God probably hadn’t seen this youtube video featuring a bunch of Melbourne kids moving house by bike.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI-kYdqLniA

Good to see that low-energy transport alternatives like bikes can be so much fun.

Big end of US agriculture don’t like farmers markets

Well, big agro is at it again in the land of the free – once more making it hard for small scale producers to supply the growing demand for local, sustainably produced food.

This recent op-ed piece in the New York times has got a fair bit of traction in the media.

It’s written by a farmer who describes the legislative barriers to being a small-time producer supplying local markets like farmers markets.

US laws reinforce the domination of a large scale producers who truck their industrial produce from one side of the country to the other, with huge energy, social and environmental overheads.

This has been the story of small-time farmers for a long time. It’s becoming a huge issue now because there’s increasing numbers of consumers who want sustainably produced local food.

I wonder what the situation for Australia in this regard. I know that local producers have a hard time getting their stuff into the large supermarket chains.

I know that deregulation, of the dairy industry for example, makes agricultural products so cheap that only those with larger farms are viable. And that this then creates a vicious cycle where the small farms are eaten up by bigger farms which become massive monsters chewing up resouces and spitting out industrial food.

But I don’t know of regulatory impediments to being a local supplier. I’m not a farmer.

I’m sure they exist.