Exploring the Food-Waste-Politics Nexus in Urban Farming

The question of whether food waste compost qualifies as 'organic' fertilizer has sparked a longstanding debate within Hong Kong's organic farming community. Current Organic Standards for fertility management, which prohibit using organic fertilizers containing GMOs and their derivatives, allow only organic-certified farms to use organic manure imported from Europe, thereby avoiding potential soil contamination. In contrast, a number of farmers practicing permaculture are striving to repurpose food waste as a resource, rather than viewing it as a pollutant or wastage. This approach is based on principles of catching, storing, and recycling energy, and leveraging the value of marginal spaces. This paper explores these emerging practices which respond to a metabolic challenge. Such a challenge occurs when the metabolic interaction between society and nature is interrupted or repaired in a contextual, place-based, situated, and historically specific manner. The paper looks closely at socio-technological practices that propose community-driven methods of addressing the environmental crisis of biodegradable waste. For instance, it examines initiatives where consumers or volunteers are organized to return kitchen scrap to the producers, and on-site compost experiments are conducted to process different types of waste. Ultimately, this paper argues that the metabolic interaction can be facilitated by aligning local farming and waste disposal practices in highly urbanized settings. By doing so, it highlights the possibility of integrating waste management into sustainable agricultural practices, thereby addressing both environmental and agricultural challenges in an integrated approach.