Global Urban Farming in the Documentary Voices of Transition

Most urban farming documentaries showcase sustainable practices that respond to this history, offering alternatives to toxic agri-business approaches. As a proposal argument, Voices of Transition establishes and provides evidence for problems associated with agribusiness and offers three viable “transition town” solutions in three countries that address each problem. With narration from experts such as environmental activist Dr. Vandana Shiva, the documentary highlights an agricultural history that promotes a mixed farming approach, with horses and oxen pulling plows and fertilizing soil simultaneously. The change from such self-sufficiency to a reliance on tractors and toxic chemical pesticides and fertilizers in the twentieth century is condemned as the cause of ruined lifeless soil and erosion. The introduction of GMO seeds that require pesticides and fertilizers further sickened crops and the people they feed. These problems are exacerbated by a lack of governmental oversight of the farming industry and its toxic emissions, since the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts do not apply to agricultural runoff or air pollution caused by chemical fertilizers and pesticides and fuel hungry tractors, cultivators, and other farm equipment. 

Individual examples from France, the UK, and Cuba address these problems. In France, farmers fight back against industrial agricultural practices that ignore environmental damage and discourage crop diversity. These farmers seek to sever the connection between food and oil and reinvigorate a farming system that encourages monoculture crops to attract European subsidies and produces astronomical amounts of water and air pollution. Because of pesticides, bees are dying and small animal populations are decreasing. Soil microbiology researchers Claude and Lydia Bourguignon assert, “By falling into the vicious circle of chemical fertilizers, we have killed our soils, made the plants ill, and taken the first steps on a straight course towards famine.” Farmers Bernard Forey and his son Oswaldo offer another way, a better way to farm that includes moving their three-hundred-acre farm toward organic, sustainable techniques encouraging biodiversity with varied crops and collective ownership, reintroducing soil-enriching plants and trees, and marketing their own produce.

The focus on agro-forestry—the planting of trees to replenish soil and fertilize plants—in this section of the documentary connects rural farming in France with inner-city agriculture. Scientists in both France and the UK suggest that twenty percent of land should be planted in trees to heal the earth and enrich the economy. A transition movement is offered up as a solution to toxic agri-business practices. With roots in the South of England, the movement supports local resilience, fair economics, and a better life for both humans and the natural world. Urban farming in the city of Totnes, in Devon, UK, provides an apt example of the movement’s goals where community members build and cultivate raised gardens, secure alternative energy supplies, and promote public housing and health services. The goal is to encourage people to work where they live, produce energy locally, secure funding in local banks, grow and share food, and highlight public transportation instead of cars. In transition town Bristol, white East African Mike Feingold raises bees, chickens, and apple trees to produce honey, vegetables, and cider for himself and his neighbors. Urban gardener Sally Jenkins inspires others to produce food in their own gardens, and community activist Chris Loughlin shares vegetable boxes cooperatively throughout the community. These new programs build on the values represented by the Bristol Community Gardens that encouraged poor industrial workers to grow their own food in the nineteenth century. By aligning with other communities, citizens of Bristol can lead interdependently self-sufficient lives. 

                               

The last segment of Voices of Transition reveals a city that transitioned from oil-based agribusiness to environmentally-friendly mixed farming systems: Havana, Cuba. The closed community of Havana produces seventy percent of the vegetables it needs, and many Cubans participate in urban organic and sustainable farming. In Havana, 150 workers provide food to the city’s residents by farming twenty-eight acres organically and co-operatively. These urban farmers stress biodiversity to stop pests and ensure that forty percent of the land lays fallow each year to enrich the soil and encourage a thriving biotic community. All three of these segments provide an optimistic view of farming by emphasizing viable solutions available through these “transition” approaches.