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Fairs: A politically-charged food fest
By Elisabetta Povoledo International Herald Tribune
Friday, October 22, 2004
TURIN
In the normal scheme of things, it's unlikely that Masai peasants
growing cowpeas in the Arusha region of Tanzania would ever
bump into grass-stock beef producers from the state of Washington,
let alone chat with a group of traditional women farmers from
Palau, the archipelago just north of Australia.
This week they'll get the chance to share their knowledge
and experiences with nearly 5,000 other food producers from
128 countries who have converged here for Terra Madre, which
means Mother Earth, touted as the world's first meeting of
food communities.
Addressing an enthusiastic - if jet-lagged - assembly at
Wednesday's opening plenary, Carlo Petrini, the founder and
president of Slow Food, the environmentalist food movement,
and the mastermind behind this ambitious international project,
set out his agenda: to protect the rights of the small farmer
and promote sustainable agriculture.
It was also a call to unity against the domination of multinationals.
"Alone and divided communities cannot react against violence,"
Petrini told cheering delegates at Turin's Palazzo del Lavoro,
a vast human sea pin-marked by cowboy hats, colorful headscarves
and exotic plumage.
For many, getting here had been exhausting. "A number
of our group had never been on a bus, let alone a plane,"
said Mariam Nour, the Lebanese host of a weekly program about
"food and life" on satellite television (newsat).
For many, coming here was a quest for a sense of belonging.
"We are the food producers of the world but a forgotten
group," said Herman Van Koeveringe, a goat farmer from
Delden, the Netherlands, who came looking for empowerment,
"recognition of what we're trying to do."
Terra Madre preceded by one day the opening of the Salone
del Gusto, the Salon of Taste, an international fair now in
its fifth edition conceived to glorify gastronomy in all its
delectable manifestations, from smoked Tasmanian eels to Sbrinz
cheese from Switzerland to a fine glass of Barolo, one of
Piedmont's premier wines.
Concocted to awake in consumers greater awareness about what
they eat, the Slow Food fair - with hundreds of producers
hawking their wares -has been enormously successful: the 2002
edition of the Salone had 138,000 visitors. This year's Salone
runs to Monday at the fair grounds, next to the Lingotto,
the former Fiat car factory.
Terra Madre, for Petrini, was the natural extension of the
Salone, another step toward breaking down barriers between
producers and consumers. "It's not like one is ethical
and the other is just about pleasure and commercial benefit,"
he said before the conference began. "Gastronomic pleasure
shouldn't be elitist, just for rich people. It's physiological
and we all have the right to experience it."
From several keynote addresses at the opening assembly, it
was clear that politics, not pleasure, would dominate the
two days of workshops conducted in seven languages. Accusing
decision makers of being out of touch with "the earth's
caretakers," as the Indian activist Vandana Shiva called
farmers, speakers lashed out against transgenic crops and
stressed the need to preserve biodiversity, against globalization
and its erosion of rural communities, and against the indiscriminate
use of pesticides and the World Trade Organization's agricultural
accords.
Miguel Altieri, a Chilean man who teaches agroecology at
the University of California at Berkeley, called the gathering
a "historic opportunity" to "put farmers at
the center of the process."
Others wanted to impart knowledge, like Glenn Lines, the
regional director for a USAID project in Madagascar promoting
low-land rice harvesting of the local Andasibe red rice as
a means of protecting Madagascan forests from "slash
and burn" methods.
Alvaro Osvaldo Franchi, from Cuba, wanted to show off a patented
water timer. He brought a silver-painted plastic bottle version
of his invention that he demonstrated, in Spanish, to scores
of curious non-Spanish speaking people. Members of the Tohona
O'dan tribe in Arizona, on the other hand, came to discuss
how they were reintroducing a traditional food, the tepary
bean, to try to reduce obesity and diabetes in the population.
"You may be from Scotland and I from Zimbabwe, but we
benefit from sharing experiences and solutions," said
Kamal Mouzawak, the head of the 40-person strong Lebanese
delegation, and the founder of Beirut's first farmer's market,
Souk el Tayeb.
The theme of this year's Salone del Gusto is the marketplace,
intended in its broadest social and ethical terms, and Terra
Madre's food communities will have pride of place in the exhibition
halls, alongside more than 500 producers from Italy and abroad.
More than just a scale-busting gorge-fest, the Salone is
above all a didactic experience offering dozens of workshops
and encounters with some of the world's finest food producers
and greatest chefs.
Petrini told the delegates to visit the Salone, "not
only to discover its products but to meet other producers
and consumers who, like you, have chosen to make economic,
ecological and socially sustainable choices." |
