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GLOBAL NEWS COMMUNAL FOOD-GROWING MAKES TOWN SELF-SUFFICIENT Canets in the car park. Radishes on the roundabout. This is the deliciously eccentric story of the town growing all of its own vegetables. Outside the police station in the small Victorian mill town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire, UK, there are three large raised flower beds. If you'd visited a few months ago, you'd have found them overflowing with curly ale, carrot plants, lettuces, spring onions—all manner of vegetables and salad leaves. Today the beds are bare. Why? Because people have been wandering up o the police station forecourt in broad daylight and digging up the vegetables. But the vegetable-swipers are not thieves. The police station carrots, and housands of vegetables in 70 large beds around the town, are there for the aking. Free. So there are (or were) raspberries, apricots and apples on the canal owpath; blackcurrants, redcurrants and strawberries beside the doctor's surgery; beans and peas outside the college; cherries in the supermarket car park; and mint, rosemary, thyme and fennel by the health centre. The vegetable plots are the most visible sign of an amazing plan: to make Todmorden the first town in the country that is self-sufficient in food. "This is a revolution," says Mary Clear, 56, a grandmother of 10 and co- founder of Incredible Edible, as the scheme is called. "But we are gentle revolutionaries. Everything we do is underpinned by kindness." Incredible Edible is about more than plots of vegetables. It's about educating people about food and stimulating the local economy. The idea came about in 2008, after Mary and co-founder Pam Warhurst, the former owner of the town's Bear Café, began fretting about the state of the world and wondered what they could do. They reasoned that all they could do is start locally, so they got a group of people, mostly women, together in the café. "Wars come about by men having drinks in bars; good things come about when women drink coffee together," says Mary. "Our thinking was: there's so much blame in the world—blame local government, blame politicians, blame bankers, blame technology...let's just do something positive instead.” Today, hundreds of townspeople who began by helping themselves to the communal vegetables are now well on the way to self-sufficiency. Crucially, the scheme is also about helping local businesses. The Bear, a wonderful shop and café with a magnificent original Victorian frontage, sources all its ingredients from farmers within a 30-mile [~48-kilometre] radius. There's a brilliant daily market. People here can eat well on local produce, and thousands now do. So what sort of place is Todmorden (known locally, without exception, as "Tod")? If you're assuming it's largely peopled by middle-class grandmothers, think again. Nor is this place a mecca for the gin-and-Jag golf club set. Located in a Pennine valley—once, the road through the own served as the border between Yorkshire and Lancashire—it is a vibrant mix of age, class and ethnicity. A third of households does not own a car; a fifth does not have central heating. You can snap up a terrace ouse for £50,000, or spend close to £1 million on a handsome stone villa with seven bedrooms. Similar schemes are being piloted in 21 other towns in the United ingdom, and there's been interest shown from as far afield as Spain, Germany, Hong Kong and Canada. Source: Daily Mail, UK, 10 December 2on, http://tinyurl.com/6sdnkod) ATMOSPHERIC RIVERS Amospnsric rivers (ARs) are giant ribbons of moist air, at east 2,000 kilometres long and several hundred kilometres across, which move water across the middle latitudes. They flow in the ower troposphere, where winds with speeds in excess of 12.5 metres per second can carry as much water as the Amazon River. At any given ime, four or five ARs carry nearly 90 per cent of the moisture that is moving towards the poles. University of Reading researchers have linked ARs to the 10 most extreme winter floods recorded in he UK since the 1970s. (Source: NewScientist.com, 11 November 2on1, http://tinyurl.com/6tg62Ix) NIGERIA: THE NEXT FRONT FOR AFRICOM t an AFRICOM conference held at Fort McNair on 18 February 2008, US Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller openly declared that a guiding principle of AFRICOM is to protect "the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market", before citing China's increasing presence in the region as challenging to American interests. After the unwarranted snatch- and-grab regime change conducted in Libya, nurturing economic destabilisation, civil unrest and sectarian conflict in Nigeria is an ultimately tangible effort to secure Africa's second-largest oil reserves. Libya's sovereign wealth fund accounts, worth over US$1.2 billion, were frozen during the pillage and essentially absorbed by Franco- Anglo-American powers. It would be realistic to assume that much the same would occur if Nigeria failed to comply with western interests. While agents of foreign capital have already infiltrated its government, there is little doubt that Nigeria will be next. (Source: BlackListedNews.com, 6 January 2012, http://tinyurl.com/6pgltfk) NEXUS ¢ 9 FEBRUARY - MARCH 2012 www.nexusmagazine.com