The Struggle
Food Systems Out of Balance
The Age of Local Foodsheds and a Fair Trade State
Dreaming New Mexico, a project of Bioneers, conducted a series of interviews with Native American and Hispano leaders and farmers on heritage crops, traditional farming practices and their dreams for a healthy, local food economy. We add these voices to the tradition of oral history honoring the confluence of cultures and the diversity of New Mexico.
Peter Pino of Zia Pueblo is a farmer and tribal leader whose family has been growing chile from saved seed for many generations.
Arturo Sandoval: Director of the Center of Southwest Culture in Albuquerque, grew up in NM and started his days with blue corn atole for breakfast. Arturo is working to enable young farmers to grow traditional crops organically as an economic opportunity and to re-localize the food-system in the face of global warming and peak oil.
Alvin Warren is the Cabinet Secretary of New Mexico Department of Indian Affairs. Pueblo people have a long tradition of food self-sufficiency. “For us it’s not about collecting a resource, but about a relationship to place”.
Today’s food systems are out of balance. No matter how large or small, local or global, all food systems are under intense pressures to change. Two trends run side by side. One is the hundred-year old trend in which: prices of food continue to fall as technology continues to reduce per unit costs; farmers lose more and more of the final retail dollar to the mid-steps of the food chain; global food trade burgeons with a mass-market system that is capital-intensive, land-intensive, fossil-fuel-intensive and highly mechanized; Americans eat more and more imported food; and mid-size farms disappear into a future divide of only small and giant farms.
The other path--currently a small but rapidly growing niche market segment--warns that fossil fuel-dependent food prices will go up; climate change and increasing population will make it more difficult to prevent hunger; demand is for quality food (not just more calories); mid-size farms can revive within a local food economy; the food supply will increasingly be forced to meet environmental, health and labor standards that the mass-market food industry cannot attain; and a moral economy challenges the monetary economy to be more respectful of customer health, lands, waters, and farmers’ and ranchers’ who deserve higher returns for their role as managers of ecosystems.
“An Age of Local Foodsheds and a Fair Trade State” marries desires with do-able dreams that span the next fifteen or so years. To leverage the food system, the conscience, hearts and minds of citizens must ultimately consider a new moral framework for the food economy. New Mexicans will be called upon to learn new ways to live together and make conscious choices of “how” and "what" to feed ourselves.
Food--good, healthy, fair and enough--connects us from local farms to the whole planet. This Dreaming New Mexico pamphlet maps the bridges and barriers to our food system future.
