John E. Peck, executive director, Family Farm Defenders
I have a button that says: If You Are What You Eat, Then I'm Fast, Cheap, and Easy. While this quip is somewhat sarcastic, for many people it is all too true. Whether due to marketing hype, or out of sheer convenience, lots of normally "smart" folks fall down when it comes to choosing what they put in their mouths. The personal is political and this is reflected each time someone votes for "business as usual" by giving their money to a fastfood chain or bigbox retailer. The result is a broken food/farm system that is now abusing animals, exploiting workers, perverting biodiversity, undermining democracy, jeopardizing health, and destroying the planet. If we believe another world is possible, then we need to radically transform our own daily behavior, and this means including food sovereignty as part of our thinking, organizing, and eating.
I grew up in Lake Wobegone Country - on a small farm in central Minnesota surrounded by grazing dairy cows and century old farms populated by third and fourth generation immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. Sadly, I'm no longer looking forward to my high school reunions since so many of my neighbors have now disappeared, victims of runaway urban sprawl, chemical induced cancer, and a "cheap" federal farm policy. The unsettling of America, which Wendell Berry described so well, has actually been the order of the day for ruling elites for many centuries. Whether it was the conquistadors outlawing quinoa and forcing the Inca to grow barley instead so they could have beer, the pioneers extirpating bison as a form of biowarfare against the Lakota, or the death squads in Colombia now liquidating peasants who stand in the way of palm oil plantations, these policies end up benefiting global cartels and the current empire they sustain.
Since so few people are now physically connected with the land, it might be worth sharing some rude rural realities. The U.S. now has more prisoners than farmers - in fact, some of the prisoners are former farmers! While the U.S. may be among the wealthiest nations, it also suffers from one of the highest levels of economic inequality. This is even worse in rural areas where half of U.S. farmers no longer own the land they cultivate. Despite their best efforts to be productive and efficient, the majority of U.S. farmers can not get a parity price (i.e. cost of production, plus a living wage) for what they produce; in turn they must send someone off farm to earn enough extra income to keep the household afloat and, if they are lucky, leverage some healthcare. This exploitative scenario is not just limited to the farmer - it goes all the way up the food chain, from the undocumented farm worker, to the non-unionized meatpacker, to the part-time minimum wage cashier. For e
very dollar spent on an apple at Walmart, only 4 cents goes to the apple picker and 7 cents to the apple farmer, compared to 68 cents for the mega retailer.
It was not always like this. Many of the European settlers who first came to the U.S. were landless peasants, fleeing persecution by wealthy landlords. In their hope for a better life in the New World, they often found solidarity with indigenous hunters, gathers, and farmers who were already here. This is why the farsighted democratic principles of the Iroquois Confederacy resonated so well and found reflection in the drafting of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Like the Diggers defending the Commons from Enclosure in 17th century England, in early colonial America the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness also meant access to land, the capacity to grow food, and to sustain a community without interference. If the state violated this agreement, then it was the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and institute a new government that would truly promote the general welfare.
Thus, one finds numerous episodes of popular rural resistance throughout U.S. history: the Whiskey Rebellion of the late 18th century in New England; the post Civil War Grange Movement followed by the Populists which took on the robber barons and the railroad monopolies in the later half of the 19th century; the Agricultural Workers Organization (AWO) agitating amongst harvest stiffs across the Great Plains in the early 20th century; the founding of the United Farm Workers (UFW) under the leadership of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to fight slavery in the farm fields in California; and the creation of the Federation of Southern Cooperative to defend African American farmers in the South. These last two struggles were integral parts of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. More recently, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has joined students, family farmers, and churches to win fair wages and human rights for Florida tomato pickers from fast food giants like Burger King
. And then there is the massive grassroots resistance to "Big Brother in the Barnyard" as millions of farmers refuse to register their premises for state surveillance and corporate control under the National Animal Identification System (NAIS).
Growing up in the Midwest during the 1970s farm crisis, I watched many a tractorcade depart for farm protests in St. Paul and Washington DC. Even more inspirational were the "Bolt Weevils," an underground direct action formation that mobilized hundreds of family farmers against the energy giants who were seizing their land and threatening their health for high voltage power lines. When the petitions and lawsuits proved useless, the midnight toppling of power lines and millions of dollars of other sabotage ensued (for more on this intriguing episode of rural revolt read Powerline, coathored by late Sen. Paul Wellstone and Barry Casper). Despite dozens of arrests and one of the largest FBI operations of the decade, no one ever went to jail. On one occasion when a couple of farmers were scapegoated and hauled in for prosecution, the judge had to let them go since the courthouse was literally surrounded by hundreds of angry neighbors.
Eventually I left my folk's farm for the "big city" to study agricultural economics at one of the land grant colleges originally established under the 1862 Morrill Act "in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes." Sadly, this mandate is now largely forgotten as corporate agribusiness has corrupted university curriculum and hijacked the public research agenda. I recall sitting in one seminar where a dean from the Office of University and Industry Relations bluntly told us that the college was no longer interested in the scientific value of our work, merely its commercial value. It was while protesting the peddling of experimental rBGH-induced milk to unsuspecting student guinea pigs by UW's Babcock Hall that I first met some real farmers on campus. The joke among many rural folks back then - and still largely true today - was that the university only promotes the type of agriculture that forces farmers to buy stuff. Long gone are th
e days when university researchers gave out free improved seeds and elected officials promoted Victory Gardens in the interest of patriotic food independence.
Unfortunately, this debilitating mercenary attitude has permeated many farmer co-ops and so-called "farm" groups, as well, who serve as just another front for agribusiness giants and commodity interests, to the detriment of their own members. Thankfully, there are more legitimate grassroots alternatives. The mission of Family Farm Defenders, for example, is to work towards a food/farm system based upon sustainable agriculture, farm worker rights, animal welfare, consumer safety, fair trade, and food sovereignty. This more inclusive view aligns well with that of Via Campesina, the largest umbrella organization for farmers, farmworkers, gatherers, hunters, fishers, herders, and foresters in the world with millions of members. Such solidarity relationships enable one to discern that the real enemy is not another country's workers or landless immigrants, but the wealthy corporate executives who profit off such globalized exploitation.
Contrary to popular stereotypes, the U.S. is not feeding the world, and the typical farmer is not some old white guy on a tractor in the Dakotas. Three times as much food is grown in cities worldwide then ever crosses an international border, and the vast majority of the world's farmers are actually women of color. The U.S. has been a food deficit nation for many years - we now import 13% of what we eat - that's 260 pounds of food per U.S. consumer per year. Half of U.S. cropland is now devoted to just two crops - corn and soybeans - mostly to feed factory farm animals, make processed junk foods, and supply agrofuel refineries. The deaths of more than 20,000 dogs and cats in the U.S. from chronic liver failure last spring —a result of imported Chinese pet food that contained toxic melamine-- was just the tip of the iceberg.. The recalled pet food was simply diverted into livestock feed for chickens, pigs, and fish, and the results ended up on consumers' plates anyway.
Even in a farm rich state like Wisconsin, over 95% of the food we eat is now imported from elsewhere. Each morning I bike by gas guzzling tanker trucks hauling milk from as far away as TX and FL to be made into "Wisconsin" cheese at taxpayer expense. U.S. food travels 1500 miles on average.
When a South Korean farmer, Lee Kyung-Hae, stabbed himself to death on September 10th, 2003 on the barricade outside the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Cancun, in protest against U.S. rice dumping, he was hardly the first victim of the corporate takeover of the world's food/farm system. Indeed, many other names come to mind: Chico Mendes, Judi Bari, Ken Saro-Wiwa; the list goes on. On October 21, 2007 Valmir Mota de Oliveira was shot to death by security guards hired by Syngenta in the western Brazilian state of Paraná state. Hundreds of activists with the Movimiento de los Trabajadores Rurales Sin Tierra (MST) had been occupying Sygenta's research facility since March 2006 to block illegal cultivation of biotech crops. In India thousands of farmers have now taken their own lives out of desperation when Monsanto's promised bonanza from adopting biotech cotton proved false. Other farmers, from France to the Philippines, have burned and uprooted these noxious
biotech weeds instead. Here in the U.S. such an action would be deemed a federal felony (as well as an act of ecoterrorism post 9/11), and Monsanto has a vast warchest and army of patent lawyers devoted to suing contaminated farmers for "theft" of their biotechnologies (for more on this, watch the new World According to Monsanto film or the 2004 documentary Future of Food).
Many activists in the U.S., even those who are combating hunger and homelessness or defending the human rights of undocumented immigrants, are unfamiliar with the concept of food sovereignty. Food security is a much more common term, but it has also become a “Trojan Horse” for more business as usual. According to the USDA, there are actually no longer any hungry people in the U.S., just those who are "food insecure" (estimated at 36 million in 2007 and growing). As a simplistic technical problem of how to get food to those who need it, food security evades the deeper debate about why hunger exists at all in a world that has plenty of food; just not for the impoverished, landless, and powerless. Here in the U.S. we bear much responsibility for hunger in the world, since we allow a small handful of traders to manipulate world commodities prices in Chicago at the Board of Trade with no real government oversight or democratic accountability. But, as corporate globalization
apologist, Thomas Friedman, argues, you can’t have McDonalds without McDonnell Douglas. It is not really "free" trade, but forced trade.
While one might find food security invoked in reports from mainstream journalists, academic researchers, and disaster relief managers, most people in the world are more likely to talk about (and act upon) their local vision for food sovereignty. That is because they still believe food is a basic human right, not just another market commodity, and they treat farmers with respect and dignity, rather than dismissing them as backward and anachronistic. First elaborated back in 1996 by Via Campesina, food sovereignty valorizes common sense principles of community autonomy, cultural integrity, and environmental stewardship – ie. people determining for themselves just what seeds they plant, what animals they raise, what type of farming occurs, and what they will ultimately eat for dinner.
Food sovereignty is even more relevant today in light of food rioting in the global south and food rationing in the global north. The grain it takes to fill a SUV tank could feed a person for an entire year, but those are not the priorities under capitalism. Thanks to the insatiable U.S. demand for ethanol, egg prices rose 36% in the U.S. last year while tortilla prices jumped 60% in Mexico. Meanwhile, ADM posted a 42% profit hike, Cargill a 86% profit hike. Predictably enough, the cheerleaders of "free trade" and the "green revolution" are ready to peddle their snake oil again, but many of us have already learned our lesson. Between 1996 and 2006 there were over 146 incidents of genetic food contamination in 42 countries. The Starlink disaster in 2000 cost U.S. corn farmers over $600 million, while the 2006 Liberty Link disaster cost U.S. rice farmers an estimated $520 million. If Monsanto will not even serve biotech food to its own employees in its corporate cafeteri
as, then why should the rest of us have to stomach it either?
Adopting the internationally recognized principles of food sovereignty would have sweeping implications in a setting such as the U.S., which is probably why corporate agribusiness and their political supporters have so fiercely resisted the idea. For instance, preemption legislation that takes away local control over the regulation of factory farms (as now exists in WI) grossly undermines food sovereignty, as does continued federal foot dragging on implementing country of origin labeling (COOL) as mandated in the last Farm Bill, that would allow consumers to actually know where their food comes from. This even applies to the organic industry, as corporate agribusiness scours the planet for the cheapest suppliers. Similarly, the corporate patenting of life forms, expropriation of indigenous knowledge, and subsidized dumping of commodity crops are all flagrant violations of food sovereignty. On the other hand, food security has nothing to say about the fact that those disp
laced by Hurricane Katrina were left to eat "donated" irradiated foods rejected by U.S. trading partners or that toxic FEMA trailers now remain parked atop former community gardens.
There are inspirational examples of food sovereignty in action all around us, but since they seldom make the headlines they are often unrecognized, even though they reflect the best aspects of intentional community, mutual aid, reciprocity, and solidarity that we would like to espouse. To give but a few U.S. examples: there are now more than 3,700 farmers markets having doubled in number since 1994; over 9 million acres are protected from development through 1,500 landtrusts; there are over 1000 community supported agriculture (CSA) operations, directly providing fresh food from farmers to eaters each week throughout the growing season; there are over 400 farm to school projects, getting healthy local food back into cafeterias, as well as over 30 local food policy councils that are reasserting democratic control over agriculture.
The Great Lakes bioregion has become a hotbed of such activity. For instance, the Oneida Tsyunhekwa Project near Green Bay, WI is reasserting indigenous food sovereignty through "Three Sisters" (squash, corn, beans) gardens, and a community processing kitchen open to everyone. Similarly, the White Earth Land Recovery Project in northern Minnesota is defending the cultural integrity of "manoomin" (wild rice) from corporate biopirates and promoting other traditional foods as a form of preventative medicine. Dane County boasts the largest farmers market in the U.S., with over 10,000 people converging each Saturday during the growing season around the State Capitol in Madison, WI to support hundreds of vendors and keep millions of dollars in the local economy. Over a third of U.S. organic dairy products now come from WI where the fastest growing farm sector is small-scale and grass-based. Millions of U.S. consumers are also engaged in their own form of agricultural civil di
sobedience by purchasing fresh raw milk direct from family farmers or raising chickens in their backyards without a license. In Chicago, where there are ten times as many vacant lots as food banks, Growing Power is working to stem the tide of gentrification and spread the joy of agriculture in one's own backyard. Closer to home, Drumlin Community Garden on Madison's southside is engaged in a classic David vs Goliath struggle with the Alexander Company, defending the right of everyone to experience agriculture in an urban setting. Growing healthy affordable organic food for one's family and friends is a much better way to foster community than pouring more asphalt for another luxury hotel.
Food sovereignty work should be part of the standard toolkit for any activist. If we wish to build a new world from the ashes of the old, as the slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) suggests, then we cannot be trapped in purely reactive mode. No one needs to suffer from chronic hunger in a food desert. We have the right and the capacity to reclaim the land, the seed, our health, our culture, and our food as a common treasury for all. To paraphrase Anishinabe activist, Winona LaDuke, we don't want a bigger slice, we want a whole new pie! Creating this reality is easier than most people realize, and - better yet - the process itself can be fun. Next time you would normally have a meeting, why not invite everyone to a local food potluck? You will quickly see just how much your community can flourish and grow once you rediscover the power behind putting culture back into agri-culture.
