VCC Featured Leader- Saleh Azizi

Who are you? (Beyond the job title!)

I’m a different kind of agricultural worker – I think of myself as a community food systems activist – utilizing food and agriculture as a method to improve people’s lives. Food security becomes possible when people on the ground benefit from agriculture, especially when marginalized producers gain market power through access and other forms of market readiness.

My personal story is that I was uprooted from my place, community, language, and culture as a six year old boy who fled war in the Middle East. I first came to Hawaii to study in 2006 but decided to stay more permanently after I felt loved and accepted by Hawaii’s People. For me, to work with the land and farmers via food hubs in Hawaii has been healing.

What does value chain coordination (VCC) mean to you? What does it look like in practice for you? 

VCC is something I used to do without knowing the term for it. For me it is about connecting the dots between local production and consumption every step of the way. It’s a creative task that requires you to apply both conventional and non- conventional techniques. 

We had to start supply chains from scratch. We did it to benefit our farmers and communities – abundance was already here, we just created a new way of sharing it from producers who lacked access to markets to consumers who lacked access to local foods. We found that it was a hard task because systems had been built for industrialized agriculture that prioritized exporting. For an entire new system has to be build, HFHH has played an integral part in promoting and furthering the ecosystem that supports local food via food hubs throughout the state by raising food hub capacity systemically via fundraising, coordinating market opportunity, advocating for policy and legislative change, and providing technical assistance to food hubs.

What’s your greatest VCC challenge now, and where are you looking for support? Something fellow members could help with.

Our vision is to scale the local supply chain in Hawaii and it is not something food hubs can do on their own. Anyone who has launched a hub knows that there can be no hub operations without a strong base of food production. Over 90% of farmers in Hawaii are small family farmers who operate in less than 50 acres. The opportunity now is to increase the scale of production simultaneously as growing the processing, aggregate, and distribution services of food hubs. 

In 2021, the Hawai’i Good Food Alliance (HGFA) established the HFHH as one of its strategic food systems working groups. HGFA?s support of the Hui has amplified services for Hawai?i’s food hubs to increase fundraising, hub-to-hub collaborations, reduce duplication and competition, and share best practices and data. 

We are the nation’s only food hub group that has proven success building regional supply chains that fuel demand for local food in an isolated island setting. In 2021, the HFHH distributed $14MM in Hawai’i-grown produce. In the last 3 years, we have worked with the food hubs and farmers on a detailed needs assessment. We estimate that $50 million is needed over the next five years to scale the hubs and also increase food production. That is significantly lower than the original estimate, about 30%, because of strategic collaborations and efficiencies that minimize redundancy through shared resources. A portion of the funds would be used to increase the capacity of food infrastructure for each food hub to store, process and deliver more local food to more wholesale markets and to develop value-added products for business and institutional buyers. The remainder is needed for the food hubs to help farmers double their production.

There’s so much more demand than supply of local food but I realize that capacity building comes first. While I love to make local products and sell them, now is the time to build the capacity of the supply system so that we can, in turn, support much more local products and much larger sales via our hubs.

When we think about Value Chain Coordination, a lot of it comes down to relationships. How do relationships and networks play a role in your VCC work? 

In my experience, facilitating relationships among practitioners allows them to:

• Learn from each other – many leaders in this space are passionate about the same things, and for the same reasons, but use different ways to advance the food system. Relationships let them learn from each other
• Not recreate the wheel – relationship with other practitioners lets you know who is doing this type of work in proximity to one another and allows for conversations on how to cooperate and collaborate better. New food hubs can learn from experiences ones to not make reinvent the wheel on lessons learned
• Strength in number: the collective allows us to dream about a larger vision and attract larger pool of resources to our field rather than completing for the limited resources at hand  

During the pandemic, many people lost their jobs, food insecurity increased by 50% & farmers faced closures as stores and restaurants shut down. The imported food supply to Hawaii was seriously damaged by panic buying, hoarding, & many people were forced to lineup to keep their families fed for the first time ever.

Hawaii was left on its own as States on the continent faced the same problem.  

Covid transformed food hubs to expand from serving their own island to forming a connected inter-island supply chain. Nonprofit Food Hubs who had specialized in food access and distribution partnered with for-profit hubs that excelled at aggregation and storage. Local food transformed from a specialty at high-end hotels to a necessity in all homes. Food hubs supported more farmers, hired more people, and generated record sales. All in all, they filled gaps in the supply chain.

Now, we are working on resourcing the momentum that took place during the pandemic.

• Capacity building for food hubs and hoping that food hubs can seek support not only for themselves but also for the farmers and food producers that they work with 
• Networking the ultra small producers: connecting household producers to markets
• Supplying large complex buyers like schools and hospitals  
• What’s exciting now is that our state-wide food hub network and the Hawaii Good Food Alliance has built ties with other food hubs in Southern Alaska Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands. 
• We call our project the Isolated Islands Supporting Indigenous, Black, Immigrant, and Local Communities.

Burn out. It’s a thing, and social change is a long game. Have you found ways to balance taking care of yourself with your commitment to creating more equitable food and social systems through value chain coordination?

It’s even harder the closer you are to the ground, many organizations are suffering from Covid fatigue and many people feel alone and lack support in their work. We have to build strong relationships and family for food system’s practitioners so we all feel supported and heard.

What is one change would you like to see that might encourage more folks to enter and stay in value chain coordination work for the long haul?

This is how I approach my responsibility in VCC work: to transform food systems from the current focus on promoting industrial, export-oriented and ultimately depleting and fragmented  food and agricultural systems to one that encourages local and regional food production by the community and for the community. 

On a systems level we have to find ways to move from a system that disables local and regional developments to one that enables and ultimately empowers our communities to grow the food we consume. 

Sometimes I feel that we are seeking food systems solutions narrowly from within the food and agricultural movement. I believe that our work learns from other progressive movements in other industries that have or are in progress to make transformative changes and we can find strength for our movements from a convergence of movements that are rethinking the delivery of healthcare, education, and social services and not least rethinking the role of business in society and the fundamental purpose of the economy.

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