K. RASHID NURI: YOUR TIME HAS COME … AGAIN!
Blog review by Kwabena “Cubby” Nkromo, Citizen Farmer
SUMMARY
To me, K. Rashid Nuri is the undisputed “Godfather” of the local food movement and urban agriculture industry in the City of Atlanta Georgia, as well as surrounding areas of this metropolitan region. With the launch of his consulting firm The Nuri Group in general and today’s published blog “Atlanta! Your Time Has Come”, Nuri is elevating his leadership to meet the current challenges and most importantly opportunities facing our still nascent sub-sector within the wider resiliency and sustainability challenges of contemporary human civilization.
Excerpt from Atlanta! Your Time Has Come
“The Nuri Group is calling for the City of Atlanta to expand its national leadership in creating local food economies. Atlanta is one of the few cities in the nation that have made urban agriculture an of icially recognized and supported part of City Government. It’s time to go further by instituting overarching, strategic, and systematic organization of resources that have been garnered from many sources.”
My Analysis of Why This Blog Matters
Above and beyond Nuri’s extraordinary career and impact thus far, his clarion call through the voice of blogging for cutting edge food policy and systems innovations and leadership are his next best contribution in my opinion. What he achieved with the establishment of the Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture (TLW) was certainly groundbreaking, figuratively as well as literally. However his greatest and more enduring legacy may well be in the intellectual realm as a holistic complement to the physical and programmatic infrastructure of a successful non-profit enterprise. Nuri’s thought leadership is desperately needed at this moment in time, and with his blog series we have the opportunity and privilege to continue his work by heading his cautionary tales as well as his ultimately optimistic vision of the future.
While he’s always been relevant for numerous reasons, Nuri’s present commentary thrusts in two primary areas situate him once again from “retirement’ back at the center of Atlanta’s local food conversation and urban agriculture strategy.
- A Focus on Local Food “Economies” Most citizens may lack a coherent and relevant concept of what constitutes a city, county, state or nation’s economy. Our education systems do a poor job of explaining something which is of course a contentious matter of debate even by the so-called experts themselves. One simple definition of an economy I propose for the purposes of this review is the sum total of the economic transactions in combination with the infrastructure, institutions, and policies (private or public) for a particular geographic, political, or societal jurisdiction. So as it relates to local food economies, we can see them as all that is involved, or could be involved, with this definition submitted by me above within the “local” jurisdictions of a municipality, county, or even metropolitan region. Baba Rashid is challenging Atlanta’s business, educational, political, and even spiritual leaders to immediately include local food and urban agriculture as an essential sector of the region’s economy. This inclusion would be made manifest through a series of concrete actions that Nuri both prescribes in some detail as well as invites others to imagine themselves. This is the role of a seasoned expert and visionary. Pointing the way.
- An Emphasis on Municipal & Regional Food Public Policy A corollary component to Nuri’s argument for Atlanta’s better food possibilities is his dialectic on U.S. agriculture policy, both macro and micro. With two power punch paragraphs, he offers a tight and thorough history lesson on federal food policy’s incipient motivations as well as digressions for those who are able to cognitively digest his flash classroom avalanche. While a lot to absorb, what he essentially says is that U.S. congressional leadership through legislation passed during the latter half of the 19th century decided to prioritize agriculture as a country-wide essential industry and thereby engendered an economy with low cost/high calorie food for those who could afford it. Nuri’s final paragraph of his blog ends with this summary statement: “Our challenge now is to combine wholesome food with high agricultural productivity”. Even though this admonition might seem to be quite straightforward, there is much to unpack here as well. What is “wholesome food”? How can “agricultural productivity” be “high” but resilient and sustainable as well (even in the context of urban farming). As with most difficult things, any prescription for fixing as big a problem as our current externalized industrial agricultural system inevitably raises more questions than it answers. However, it is inestimably more helpful to have a well crafted prescription as that written by Dr. Nuri.
What now?
If City of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance-Bottoms, Atlanta City Council President Felicia Moore, Dekalb County CEO Michael Thurmond, Fulton County Commission Chair Rob Pitts, or Atlanta Regional Commission Executive Director Doug Hooker were to stumble upon Nuri’s blog, what should they do in response to it? I advise that they hire his firm The Nuri Group to extrapolate Nuri’s abbreviated prescription into a full plan for the Atlanta region. Period. In the era of Black Lives Matter and COVID-19, our leaders are desperately in need of informed and proven solutions to society’s pressing problems. As Nuri says, “Supporting Small Farms and Urban Agriculture is a matter of public health, equity, and economic development.” If you are a leader at any level of society in the Atlanta metropolitan area, embracing Nuri’s advice is low hanging fruit which could lead to a better and more resilient region.
Kwabena “Cubby” Nkromo is the Founder of North America Food & Farm PBC Inc (NAF2), a continent-wide network of social enterprise consulting groups specializing in local food system planning and urban agriculture development. He also currently serves as Chair of the Georgia Food Policy Council and is a national voice for better agriculture and food policies.
