How are East Anglia Food Link making a difference?
EAFL are at the cutting edge of trying to bring about food systems that reflect the principles outlined in this website. We do not generally trade in food ourselves; rather we will seek to influence existing businesses and community organisations to change the way they do business. On occasion, where there is a clear gap in the market and we can not find an existing business that wants to fill it, we may need to help to create a new business.
EAFL works in partnership with a wide range of colleagues including other organisations in the sustainable food movement (we have a particularly close relationship with Sustain and the Soil Association), food businesses, community food projects, local authorities, and the wider community of NGOs.
Funding currently comes from two main sources:
- The Lottery-funded Making Local Food Work programme. We deliver a project within that programme focussing on supply-chain brokerage.
- EEDA and DEFRA/Government Office for the East of England, who jointly engage EAFL to act as the regional facilitator of the Public Sector Food Procurement Initiative (PSFPI).
Through our PSFPI work we are available to support any school, hospital, local education authority, university etc that wants to provide more sustainable food. In the past we have been particularly successful at helping LEAs to find more local or regional food for school meals, and brokering the supply chains to deliver that food to schools. We are still working on this agenda, particularly now with a university. We have also broadened our agenda within the PSFPI to work on reducing the greenhouse gas footprint of public sector catering organisations.
Through our supply-chain work we continue to be in a position to support retailers (independent or multiple), restaurants, wholesalers, community food buying groups etc who would like to buy more local food - particularly where those ambitions are consistent with the principles outlined on this site. Areas that are particularly active include developing structures for supplying East Anglian produce into the London wholesale markets (subject to verifying that the demand for that produce really exists).
We are more actively developing our supply-chain work by supporting groups in the East of England and London who are interested in community supported agriculture, organic food buying groups, pig clubs, micro-bakeries etc. We see these groups as particularly able to effect change because they are based on consumers who are actively willing to support the development of more resilient food supply chains. We will be extremely happy to hear from you if you would like our help with developing those kinds of proposals. (Sustain and the Soil Association also have projects in this area and we will always seek to co-ordinate our work with theirs in the most productive way.)
We see Transition Initiatives as a very powerful route to establishing this kind of food project, as well as having a powerful positive effect in developing other aspects of resilient economies. For that reason we are very actively engaged with Transition Norwich and also in close conversation with colleagues at Sustainable Bungay and Transition Diss. We aim to develop this network over time to include other East Anglian Transition initiatives.