‘Cities are centers of economics, culture, infrastructure, expertise, and they have a strategic role to play on the sustainable food file.’
—Wayne Roberts
Field notes from this week
It’s still not too late in January to squeak in under the deadline on the theme of the major opportunity created last year, and the major challenge facing us this year.
My vote goes to the Milan Food Policy Pact – important in its own right and important by virtue of the 100 + cities that have signed on. My only reservation is that it’s more a checklist than a mannapesto, more a to-do list than a call to action. Not to complain: they had to leave something for us to start this year.
It’s no accident that the policy pact came from a city in Italy. Italy is home to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization – the UN’s first agency, established at a 1944 meeting in Canada to plan the post-war world – and hosts many gatherings of the international food movement. So all the food policy geeks in Italy are fluent in UN-speak – a language of acknowledging, noting, recognizing, recalling and generally evading specific commitments.
In the global world we live in, the first reality of cities becomes glaringly obvious at UN-type conferences in Italy: we are not on the invitation list. I only fully realized how excluded cities were from the international community, and how obsolete the creaking structures of the international community are, when I attended my first UN conference, the World Food Summit of 2002. Because I worked for a city (I managed the Toronto Food Policy Council), I was added to the list of NGOs!
So the first thing to welcome about the Milan Pact is that it starts off by saying that cities are where half the world’s people live, that cities are centers of economics, culture, infrastructure, expertise, and that cities have a strategic role to play on the sustainable food file. Translation: I’m making a place for myself at the table. Bite me!
The check-list of to-do’s is comprehensive. I went over the 6-page pact with a fine tooth comb, and only found three sets of issues glaringly missing – the identification of food’s contribution to mental health and well-being; of urban agriculture as a form of infrastructure, not just food production; and the strategic importance of artisanal jobs in the emerging creative food industry we are growing. I’ll get to these missing topics over the course of this year.
More than 100 cities have signed on. If your city has already endorsed it, start to motivate your favourite action-proposal with a reference to the Pact the city has signed on to. If your city has not signed on, it’s time to bring your city up-to-date. This needs to be signed by thousands, not hundreds, of cities.