User:Kalinatodorov/Urban agriculture in West Oakland

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• I'm still discussing in the talk page how to go about potentially renaming this article. Another editor has suggested creating a new article (Urban agriculture in the Bay Area) instead of editing this one.
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Urban agriculture in the Bay Area

Urban agriculture in the Bay Area involves the implementation of Urban agriculture in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Urban agriculture is defined by the United Nations Development Programme as "the growing, processing, and distribution of food and other products through intensive plant cultivation and animal husbandry in and around cities.” A more extensive interpretation, which considers multiple aspects of the practice is described by The Council for Agriculture, Science and Technology as "a complex system encompassing a spectrum of interests, from a traditional core of activities associated with the production, processing, marketing, distribution, and consumption, to a multiplicity of other benefits and services that are less widely acknowledged and documented. These include recreation and leisure; economic vitality and business entrepreneurship, individual health and well-being; community health and well-being; landscape beautification; and environmental restoration and remediation.” Urban agriculture localizes production and distribution of food, often with the larger goal of tackling food insecurity in a way that is environmentally and socially sustainable.

Urban agriculture is part of a larger discussion of the need for alternative agricultural paradigms to address food insecurity, inaccessibility of fresh foods, and unjust practices on multiple levels of the food system; and this discussion has been led by different actors, including food-insecure individuals, farm workers, educators and academics, policymakers, social movements, organizations, and marginalized and allied people globally.

History

Urban agriculture in West Oakland has taken a radical form that can be traced back to community gardening initiatives starting in the 1970s in the cities of Berkeley and Oakland, as well as the city's rich African-American heritage. Oakland's manufacturing industry attracted many new residents during WWII. To reduce racial tension, the Oakland Housing Authority established housing projects for blacks in West Oakland and whites in East Oakland.^{[citation needed]} With the advent of exclusionary covenants as well as redlining practiced by banks, development capital was kept out of West Oakland while the African-American population had limited opportunities to rent or buy housing outside of the West Oakland neighborhood.

Poverty became rampant in West Oakland beginning in the 1960s when Alameda County's manufacturing industries decreased productivity or closed. Unemployment skyrocketed. West Oakland evolved into a place of industrial poverty, isolated from the rest of Oakland. As a result. With a depressed economy, West Oakland failed to attract major retail including supermarkets, further isolating the area as a low-income community of color. According to a study by the American Planning Association, in the year 2000, African-Americans accounted for 77% of the population in West Oakland. Hispanics and Caucasians accounted for 14% and 9% of the population, respectively. However, most recently, West Oakland demographics have been changing as a result of gentrification spurred by a "tsunami of foreclosures" in the 2000s.

With rising urbanization, food resources in urban areas are less accessible than in rural areas. This disproportionately affects the poorest communities, and the lack of food access and increased risk of malnutrition has been linked to socioeconomic inequities. Economic barriers to food access are linked to capitalist market structures and lead to “dose-response socioeconomic inequities in food choices,” “less...healthful foods,” and phenomena such as food deserts. Additionally, racialized systems of governance of urban poor communities facilitates the increasing prominence of issues such as unemployment, poverty, access to health, educational and social resources, including a community’s access to healthy food.

Non-governmental actors

The Black Panther Party (BPP) played an important role in seeding urban agricultural practices in West Oakland. One of the BPP's social programs aimed to improve the access to healthy food for the city's black population by providing breakfast in local schools, churches and community centers. A small amount of this food came from small local gardens planted by BPP members, who drew on their previous generation's agricultural knowledge. According to Prof. Nathan McClintock, "The Panthers used gardening as a coping mechanism and a means of supplementing their diets, as well as a means to strengthen community members engaged in the struggle against oppression."

The creation of the People of Color Greening Network (PCGN) in the 1990s was a pivotal moment for urban agriculture in West Oakland. PCGN served as a vehicle for fusing social justice with urban agriculture. The group planted in empty and vacant lots in order to promote green space and bountiful gardens. Given the majority of abandoned flatlands located in West Oakland, the PCGN movement's activities began to spread most in this area. In addition, a school garden movement began in which schools around Alameda County began teaching basic gardening skills and food education.

Governmental actors

In 1998, the city of Oakland's Mayor's office of Sustainability proposed a Sustainable Community Development Initiative as part of a global initiative towards sustainable development. This initiative called for a sustainable approach to an economic development program with increased education within the community, and the PCGN's expansion of urban agriculture served as a vehicle to achieve this goal. Due to West Oakland's lack of access to nutritious and healthy food, many other organizations including the PCGN demanded the plan include strategies for creating a sustainable impact within the local food system. City Slicker Farms is one of those organizations and was founded in response to the multitude of empty urban lots In West Oakland that could be used to produce nutritious food for the surrounding community. Through land donations from local residents of West Oakland, mainly Willow Rosenthal, a network of urban farmers and farm stands was created and began to flourish. The land donated by Willow Rosenthal was sold by City Slicker Farms. Currently, City Slicker Farms operates one garden, the West Oakland Farm Park, which no longer has a farm stand.

In 2005, Mayor Jerry Brown joined forces with mayors from cities around the world and signed the UN World Environment Day Urban Environmental Accords, pledging to become a more sustainable city by the year 2012. This gave rise to many Oakland City Council Resolutions, such as Resolution No. 76980 and Resolution No. 80332, both of which helped develop a Food Policy Council (FPC) to achieve the city's intended goals. The FPC has teamed up with organizations like the Health for Oakland's People & Environment (HOPE) Collaborative, which works with city leaders and departments as well as local grassroots organizations like City Slicker Farms, in order to improve the health and wellness of Oakland's residents that experience social inequities.

The Oakland Food Policy Council held its first meeting in September 2009 to organize a "Plan for Action" in favor of the proliferation of urban agriculture in Oakland. In January 2011, the council translated their "Plan for Action" into multiple languages in order to reach out to the entire minority population and urban agriculture community so that issues concerning land access were clearly understood and that these minorities were not taken advantage of. On March 15, 2011, the Oakland City Council adopted new residential and commercial zones for the entire city. The new zones allowed "Crop and Animal Raising Agricultural Activities" with approval of a Conditional Use Permit in all residential and commercial areas in the city as an interim measure until the City conducted a comprehensive update to address all aspects of urban agriculture.

At the close of 2011, they helped connect the community with agencies such as the Department of Human Services to harvest a more responsible and local food system, with attempts to help organize a Food Policy Council for the state of California. By the year 2012 they developed a Food Justice Curriculum to be piloted by the HOPE Collaborative, as well as a system of fresh food vendors through helping them to abide by stringent state policies. This helped to increase the availability of, and access to, fresh food within the city of Oakland. Their mission continues today with goals of ensuring food security in Oakland while promoting greater "food literacy" within a "closed-loop" system that promotes the use of renewable resources and food scrap composting.

Food sovereignty movement in the East Bay

The issue of food security is accompanied by the related movements of food justice and food sovereignty. These movements incorporate urban agriculture in how they address hunger (the tangible food-resources) of a community.

Food sovereignty, in addition to promoting food access, also seeks to address the power dynamics and political economy of food; it accounts for the embedded power structures of the food system, ownership of production, and decision-making on multiple levels (i.e. growing, processing, and distribution); under this framework, representative decision-making and responsiveness to the community are core features.

Agroecology

Agroecology is a scientific framework, movement, and applied practice of agricultural management systems that seeks to achieve food sovereignty within food systems and prioritizes sustainability, farmer and consumer well-being, traditional knowledge revival, and democratized learning systems. Transdisciplinarity and diversity of knowledge is a central theme to agroecology, so many urban agroecology initiatives address topics of social justice, gender empowerment, ecological sustainability, indigenous sovereignty, and participation in addition to promoting food access.

Under an agroecological framework, urban agriculture has the potential to play a role as a “public space, as an economic development strategy, and as a community-organizing tool” while alleviating food insecurity.

Participation

Participation within urban agriculture can be a method of “enabling and empowering less powerful groups in society to engage in decision-making and exercise their democratic rights” in order to “achieve more equitable...distribution of resources,” which can affect social and political power within a system. Aggregative social choice, in which decision making stems from “combining the preferences of the individual participants,” is exemplified through voting bodies or other democratic governing processes. Many organizations in the East Bay, such as the Gill Tract, address this issue of marginalized participation by facilitating community outreach and anti-oppression working groups, BIPOC leadership and centered initiatives, and other pragmatic approaches to increasing participation of marginalized groups.

East Bay initiatives

Albany

In Albany, the Gill Tract Community Farm is a community-managed farming project and educational space owned by UC Berkeley. This farm has a focus on agroecological principles, agroecosystem research, food justice, political education, and other farm management activities. This pedagogy is based on economic, social, and political rights, and places a focus on democratic and collaborative management. By providing a pragmatic approach to food systems discourse, the Gill Tract seeks to challenge structures of socioeconomic oppression (including food insecurity) within the Bay Area.

The Gill Tract utilizes democratic and collaborative decision making, utilizing participatory consensus, a Stewardship Council, specialized working groups, consultation with local indigenous-led groups, and other collaborative processes to facilitate community participation. As it relates to democratic rights-based participation, this model of urban agriculture may allow for more equitable access and distribution of food resources.

The farm hosts a sliding-scale farmstand and has partnerships with other organizations in the East Bay; in 2018, the Gill Tract began collaborating with the Sogorea Te' Land Trust in order to address land-use and rematriation (see: repatriation) processes.

West Oakland

In West Oakland, growing food on a small-scale, ecologically sustainable and socially-minded way is an effort to combat the Food Desert in West Oakland^{[citation needed]}.West Oakland's high levels of food insecurity stems from racial, ethnic, and socio-economic disparities- a history of poverty, unfulfilled industrialization, and Environmental racism^{[citation needed]}. As a result, urban agriculture is often connected to the larger movement for Food Justice.

There are a number of organizations involved in the urban agricultural movement in West Oakland. They strive to fight food injustice in West Oakland by improving many parts of West Oakland's food system. Collectively, they focus on distributing locally grown food to West Oakland residents, educating West Oakland residents about urban gardening and the benefits of eating a healthy diet, and changing organizational models that allow the urban agriculture movement to flourish.

Recent legislation

In November 2010, City Slicker Farms, a West Oakland urban agriculture company, was awarded a 4 million dollar grant for which they are using to develop an urban farm and park. They are developing a 1.4 acre lot in West Oakland in which they will have a community garden, chicken coop, fruit orchard, and a vegetable plot. When completed, the space will be completely open to the public. They received this grant because of California's Prop 84 which passed in 2006. Prop 84, titled the "Water Quality, Safety and Supply. Flood Control. Natural Resource Protection. Park Improvements. Bonds. Initiative Statute.", will generate 5.4 billion dollars to fund projects focused on "statewide park development and community revitalization," harvesting clean drinking water and protecting water resources, protecting natural resources, and enhancing public access to natural resources.

On September 28, 2013, California State Assembly Bill 551 was approved. This Bill is known as the "Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones Act" and it provides a framework for local cities and counties to come into contractual agreement with city residents in providing them with "vacant, unimproved, or otherwise blighted lands" to use as small-scale farms. This Bill was enacted at the state level in California and requires California's urban cities and counties to implement it locally. If approved in Oakland, it allows the city to legally reserve unwanted lands to be specifically used for urban farming purposes. The city of Oakland would be able to enter into 10 year contractual agreements with its residents allowing them to use these lands for farming on "[rates] based on the average per-acre value of irrigated cropland in California." Each county and/or city must opt into the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones Act, and as of now the city of Oakland has not enacted it; at the end of 2013 Oakland's city council was considering enacting the bill. If enacted by the city council, it will "improve [the] financial viability" of urban farming in West Oakland and Oakland in general.