DeFood is short for the Decentralized Food Security Network (DFSN), which explores ways to decentralize food security both in the physical realm, by expanding localized food production, processing and distribution, and also in the virtual realm, using Blockchain technology as the basis for improved revenue streams to farmers, dMRV of of carbon sequestration from regnenerative agriculture, and support localized trade and digital currencies.
Our mission if to make sure that the 11,600 people on our island have enough food to eat in a crisis. Because we're an island, our supply lines (ferries and trucks) are more visible and also more vulnerable, but any small rural community could end up cut off from its just-in-time food supply due to any number of crises, or more likely from a polycrisis. So our larger mission is to build a replicable model that uses Blockchain and community-building, in combination, to create relocalized food production, regional self-reliance and general resilience in the face of the everything from failed local supply chains to global collapse.
Because the earth (and every ecosystem within it, including our island) is a complex system, it's necessary to solve multiple interconnected problems at once to create any effective and lasting change. In our case, we're fundamentally building a model of how to improve local food security in small communities all over the world, while simultaneously improving carbon drawdown to mitigate climate change, which in turn has had a severe impact on food production.
But climate change itself is only a symptom of the larger problem of overshoot, meaning human impact on the planet, driven primarily by overpopulation and consumption in the developed world, amplified (and only rarely mitigated) by technology. (Other familiar symptoms include loss of biodiversity, pandemics, hitting the limits of non-renewable resources, war, etc.) Similarly, food security is one of a group of interconnected problems at the local level, including housing, water, energy, transportation, health, community cohesion and lack of Indigenous collaboration and engagement.
To address these systemic, interconnected problems, we must therefore take systemic action, which can best be identified by the way it solves multiple problems at the same time.
So, because it's only one of many symptoms of overshoot, any real and lasting impact on climate change must address the real drivers of overshoot -- in our case, right-sizing population for our local ecosystem, and reducing consumption by relocalizing food production.
At the local level, the deFood project necessarily has to address all of the interconnected local problems listed above to build meaningful and lasting food security, which is why we've largely focused on the latter 2 items -- building relationships with those on our island, and with Indigenous folks and settlers in our surrounding region -- as an initial foundation for the work that will come later.
Canada