Slow Food Australia leads a project to confederate national communities bisected by latitude 23º 26´ south – the Tropic of Capricorn – to build ’slow food nations’. Following the arc of latitude from east to west, these communities include Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Pitcairn Islands (United Kingdom dependency), French Polynesia (Iles de la Société, a French autonomous dependency), Cook Islands (in free association with New Zealand), Niue (in free association with New Zealand), Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand (through its relationships with Niue and the Cook Islands), New Caledonia (French autonomous dependency), Australia, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Africa, Botswana and Namibia.
We have much in common: the world’s lowest population densities, large – and in some cases politically dominant – indigenous populations, European colonial heritage – either French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch or German, and a reliance – except for Botswana – on the four great southern oceans and healthy marine fisheries as sources of food and economic viability. We share the southern temperate zone, in which western-derived agriculture has significantly influenced the development of each community economically, socially and culturally. Our communities are home to 12 – or 35 per cent – of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity ‘hotspots’: the agreed international measure of ecological diversity endangered by, or threatened with, destruction .