This month we gather around the topic of food—a subject everyone loves. Food is the great convenor, the global common denominator, the alchemical substance that pulls parties into the kitchen, makes friends out of strangers, puts flesh on our bones and smiles on our faces.
But all is not well in food land, despite the colorful array of products on U.S. grocery store shelves. One third of Americans are overweight; diet-related diseases are skyrocketing; our food is being designed to addict, rather than nourish; bees are dying; biodiversity is being lost; and modern agriculture is based on massive inputs of petroleum—a finite resource.
“The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a previous ruling that found organic growers had no reason to try to block Monsanto from suing them as the company had pledged it would not take them to court if biotech crops accidentally mix in with organics.”
sure a “pledge” should be fine; why worry?
Organic growers lose decision in suit versus Monsanto over seeds | Reuters.
Well done critique of the food politics that we currently live and die with. Yes instead of encouraging “fencerow to fencerow” agriculture (even for seemingly well meaning reasons), we need to assess our true needs and grow the proper food accordingly and grow it well with less inputs and environmental destruction in every succeeding generation. And instead of running into each other over middling legislative issues, we need a movement of big ideas like food sovereignty and human rights to push fairness for all that allows everyone to chime in as needed and to allow us to move past crisis campaigning. When, for example, will the US food organizers work side by side with the rest of the world’s organizers? When will we embrace true import-replacement strategies? When will all pieces of the food chain be valued?
Farm Bill Fiasco: What is Next for the Food Movement?”, a Food First Spring Backgrounder
By Christopher Cook
Deciding how America will nourish itself and sustain its farms would seem a top policy priority— yet as the US Farm Bill demonstrates, sustainably grown, healthy food and livable incomes for farmers and workers remain an afterthought in a process controlled almost entirely by agribusiness and a handful of farm-state legislators. Despite strong public opinion supporting local food, farmer’s markets, organic agriculture, food workers’ rights and access to fresh produce, agribusiness and commodity interests continue to dominate food and farming policy.
That’s largely due to their prodigious lobbying clout: agribusiness spent $137 million last year muscling Congress to do its bidding and another $46.6 million on federal candidates (about 60 percent Republican) in 2010. This phalanx of power includes commodity producer groups like the American Corn Growers Association; corporate food processors and purveyors such as Kraft and Dean Foods; the Farm Bureau; dairy and meat industry giants; and seed and petrochemical corporations like Monsanto.
On the other side, armed with ideas and passion but little money, stand hundreds of groups from across the US pressing Congress on an array of policies—including commodity subsidy reform, fair prices for farmers, public monies for local foods and small farmers, and conservation and nutrition funding. With a handful of lobbyists and diverse interests, they fight doggedly for small wedges of the Farm Bill pie.
But is the Farm Bill a productive venue for food movements to make meaningful change in food and farming policy?
Food Tank, one of my favorite new think tanks, is highlighting organizations worldwide doing good work. It’s a good list, although a bit of a surprise what is here and what is not…
http://foodtank.org/news/2013/05/forty-organizations-that-are-shaking-up-the-food-system
(this was a post I ran about 7 years ago, but I wanted to highlight it again as I am having more conversations with food system folks about larger outcomes around food and civic system. I find this promising, as it may mean that we are finally maturing our work to become true system changers…)
I ran across this Nicholas Lemann article (linked at the end) about how the 1970s grassroots environmental movement just about sputtered to a standstill by the 1990s. I appreciated this article, since as a 1980s/1990s community organizer I saw that rise and fall and also saw other movements, such as the women’s movement and the peace movement go through it as well.
In retrospect, many of those efforts were designed and based on Alinsky’s organizing methods, seizing on issues such as nearby toxic spills or hulking nuclear power plants being built downstream to gain support from regular folks. Those issues are excellent for devising and winning neighborhood or local campaigns but maybe not the best strategy for achieving national and international long-term social change.
In other words, crisis politics can’t keep the attention of regular people for long, and on the policy level those goals can seem abstract or too controversial for regular folks to be able to support. Anti-nukes, landfills, corporate pollution (protest movements in other words) can just seemed complicated and time-consuming for people to grasp completely or even enough so that they felt they could take a stand when needed.
In their defense, those movements were full of good campaigns, like the early Earth Day events on which the author bases his article. Many may also remember the anti-littering campaign that did a lot of good with a television commercial that ran for a few years with a sorrowful, crying Indian looking at the camera (actually an Italian actor originally from Louisiana); that campaign ran in the early 1970s and is still remembered well. It was successful in educating on a big issue but at the same time, clear as how individuals could make a difference; just don’t litter.
Back then, I did appreciate those movements hard won campaigns and sweeping goals but had a hard time with the lack of diversity in their people and goals. Also, the lack of federated structure mentioned in the article is an important one: most of the NGOs I worked with had local chapters, but all had to drop what they were doing and work on national work (which was almost always legislation with very little chance for passing since we did not have money or enough people organized) whenever the national team decided it was time.
When I joined the community food system movement in 1999/2000, I saw that there was potential for much more effective social change, since a) it struck at the very core of everyone’s lives: what we eat, how we own our own health and how we remain connected to our neighbors and b) it could be effective on many levels. The campaign part of this movement can be seen within the SNAP and incentive work done at markets, with the Real Food Challenge on campuses and guerrilla gardening movements across the world among others. The long-term effect can be seen in the growing awareness of food deserts, as well as fair trade, farmland protection, food sovereignty, worker rights, racial equity, industrial versus alternative agriculture and so on. So, both localized campaigns and important national work happen in this movement which may be one of our greatest assets. (However, we do have to think about how we can better communicate the Farm Bill and other policy needs to our shoppers, neighbors and producers.)
And no question that the community food work is much more decentralized and active at the local and state level than any other movement I’ve ever seen, besides, possibly, the Community Land Trust movement, a movement from which we can learn a lot.
So, while I tip my hat to my fellow enviros from the Billy Bragg days and use daily what I learned from those savvy street organizers, I’m glad that I also get to organize in these food system days…
A quote from Lemann’s article:
To turn concern into action requires politics.
and another:
It defined Earth Day as educational, school-based, widely distributed, locally controlled, and mass-participatory. He draws a contrast with Earth Day 1990, a far better planned, better funded, more elaborately orchestrated anniversary event, which turned out more than a million people in Central Park and two hundred thousand on the Mall in Washington but had far fewer lasting effects. That was because Earth Day 1990 was, Rome says, “more top-down and more directive” than Earth Day 1970, and more attuned to advertising and marketing than to organizing. Earth Day 1990 kept its message simple, because its organizers “sought to ‘enlist’ people in a well-defined movement….
and this, most importantly:
‘The public’ is seen as a kind of background chorus that, hopefully, will sing on key,” as the insiders try to manipulate people with focus-grouped phrases. Instead, she argues, “reformers will have to build organizational networks across the country, and they will need to orchestrate sustained political efforts that stretch far beyond friendly Congressional offices, comfy board rooms, and posh retreats.”
The peasant movement, La Via Campesina is a bright light in the darkness that is spreading with global corporations controlling more and more of the natural resources across the world. This loose confederation of actions and organizations has its feet solidly in the food sovereignty movement, which I think U.S. activists should identify as our chief food system goal, rather than food security. Food security (availability of good food for all) is important, but more important is when it happens where the local community decides how, when and where to feed itself which is what food sovereignty encompasses.
“The international peasants’ movement La Via Campesina has been defending and expanding the practice and policies of food sovereignty around the world for 20 years. To launch another 20 years of struggle, we are calling for a massive mobilisation day on 17 April, the International Day of Peasants’ Struggles, to reclaim our food system which is being increasingly occupied by transnational capital. We invite everyone to organise activities, protests, art exhibitions, direct actions, discussions, film screenings, farmers markets etc., in your village, school, office, neighbourhood, organisation, community…”
Wherever you are, join this collective celebration on 17 April!
At the World Food Summit in 1996, La Via Campesina (LVC) launched a concept that both challenged the corporate dominated, market driven model of globalised food production and distribution, as well as offering a new paradigm to fight hunger and poverty by developing and strengthening local economies. Since then, food sovereignty has captured the imagination of people the world over – including many governments and multilateral institutions – and has become a global rallying cry for those committed to social, environmental, economic and political justice. Food sovereignty is different from food security in both approach and politics. Food security does not distinguish where food comes from, or the conditions under which it is produced and distributed. National food security targets are often met by sourcing food produced under environmentally destructive and exploitative conditions, and supported by subsidies and policies that destroy local food producers but benefit agribusiness corporations. Food sovereignty emphasizes ecologically appropriate production, distribution and consumption, social-economic justice and local food systems as ways to tackle hunger and poverty and guarantee sustainable food security for all peoples. It advocates trade and investment that serve the collective aspirations of society. It promotes community control of productive resources; agrarian reform and tenure security for small-scale producers; agro-ecology; biodiversity; local knowledge; the rights of peasants, women, indigenous peoples and workers; social protection and climate justice.
As farmers market organizers, we get busy with our logistical work and our market aches and pains that come from growing too fast. As important as it is to remember what we have in front of us in the U.S., it is as important for us to remember what the rest of the world struggles with and how they see farmers markets as a solution too.
This piece from the Nyéléni newsletter (the Food Sovereignty newsletter for the international movement) tells an inspiring story about market organizers in Columbia that should be read by all North American organizers too.
www.nyeleni.org/DOWNLOADS/newsletters/Nyeleni_Newsletter_Num_13_EN.pdf.
Once again, this is where I see farmers markets influencing public policy. If this can be understood by the communities that use farmers markets, then we can begin to add supporters to the land rights movement too.
Food Atlas by Darin Jensen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I love maps. When I travel, I study maps online to have some sense of the geography underfoot, as much to understand who the people might be as not to get lost. It’s amazing how people appreciate that bit of homework when you go to their place.
I have maps of my city (New Orleans) and of my river (Mississippi) on the wall of my house and the Slow Food RAFT map (see below) on my business card.
Slow Food RAFT map
When I came across the Kickstarter campaign for this Food Atlas, I jumped at the chance to support it. It arrived last week and I have read it while sipping my morning coffee (while reading about Strong Coffee traditions in the Middle East and “Bird Friendly” coffee origins), referred to it while writing about farmers markets (the one on SNAP and farmers markets) and studied the Texas Seafood Landings map after making flounder tacos just north of Lake Pontchartrain, home of most of the seafood catch for my bioregion. It’s a very new book and so won’t be found everywhere yet, but you can buy it from them now at
http://www.guerrillacartography.net/home
It is a wealth of maps on food production, distribution, security, exploration, identities and to pick out my favorites is to shortchange the breadth of this book.
It’s not just for activists, or “foodies” but for everyone and I think it could affect (and galvanize) people just as M. Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemna” did. I grow tired of long text articles about food (Yes, I do include myself in that finger pointing!) and would hope that this sort of map project could become a new way to educate and illuminate the small world that we live on.
I can’t wait for the editors to follow up on their promise to expand the reach of this series including to add more Asian and African food maps and to get this Atlas in hands everywhere. Its a bit heavy on maps of the West Coast and of the US, so much so that it occurs to me that having a set of food maps that show the lopsided view we have of ourselves in the US versus how others see us or experience us might be a good edition. In any case, hurrah.
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As much as many people like to denigrate the internet as unchecked narcissism, it is certainly one of the keystones of the “open source” future. Our access to information today is quite different from the 20th century version and has changed our world, I think, mostly for the better. The internet is a good example since, as someone states quite well in this video, an open source future is about more than local control of production; it also is about distribution and information sharing.
Those tenets are certainly part of the building blocks of the community food system; however, we could do much more in regards to sharing farming technology and food production secrets in order to make our movement a true open source movement.
A great framework to think about humanity and its potential.
These end of the year pieces can be interesting and yet disheartening too. This one seems to have a social justice lens and as such, it may be slightly more focused on winning policy changes in the industrial ag sector over actual alternative system wins in 2012. However, I agree with most of her top 5.
Erin O'Donnell: The Food Movement in 2012: Our Top 5 Learnings.
Absolutely one of my favorite presentations. I believe in a systems approach to my work so how I decide what I work on has a lot to do with how that project could be replicated or how organizing skills would be furthered with my input. This presentation-a version that I saw at Kellogg F&S meeting 5 years or so ago-was a real eye opener for me as a movement builder. I hope it is the same for you.
Two Loops: How Systems Change from The Berkana Institute on Vimeo.
Helping Farmers Markets Grow 