August
2003
Dear Colleague,
Agriculture
and our food system offer untapped opportunities for accelerating sustainability.
First,
the sheer size of the food system is underestimated by most. As the
attached paper documents, providing food is the single largest human
activity on the planet, occupying over 40 percent of the planet's bio-capacity,
and slowly degrading this capacity.
Second,
it is a field that deals with all dimensions of sustainability simultaneously:
- Overcoming economic challenges and providing healthy livelihoods;
- Advancing local and global justice, while building stronger communities;
and
- Finding ways to maintain the biosphere's integrity.
Third,
building a sustainable food system will provide the first working model
of an economy that maintains rather than liquidates its natural capital.
Without a transformation to such a steady-state economy, sustainability
is impossible.
To illustrate
these opportunities, the EGA affinity group Sustainable Agriculture
and Food Systems Funders commissioned the enclosed white paper, Eating
up the Earth: How Sustainable Food Systems Shrink our Ecological Footprint
from Mathis Wackernagel, Ph.D., former Director of the Sustainability
Program at Redefining Progress and co-creator of the "Ecological Footprint"
measure.
We hope
this paper strengthens the case for initiatives that promote sustainability.
Please share your comments and ideas with us.
SAFSF is
sponsoring two upcoming meetings on sustainable food systems: a workshop
on the transition of Cuban agriculture to organic production at the
EGA Retreat in Ottawa, September 22-24, 2003; and our annual program
meeting that will focus on the development of public policy to promote
sustainable food systems, December 1-3, 2003, in San Francisco. Please
join us.
Sincerely,
Susan R.
Clark, Columbia Foundation, susan@columbia.org
Margaret O'Dell, The Joyce Foundation, modell@joycefdn.org
Virginia B. Clarke-Laskin, coordinator, Sustainable Agriculture and
Food Systems Funders, vclarke@safsf.org
For more
information on the Footprint analysis, contact sustainability@rprogress.org.
Sustainable
Agriculture and Food Systems Funders
911 W. Pedregosa Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101
T: 805.687.0551/ F: 805.569.2686
www.safsf.org
