By Tim Damos,
Baraboo News Republic (Baraboo, WI) 11/11/08
http://www.wiscnews.com/bnr/news/313789
Americans hoping a new U.S. president can revamp a broken agricultural system shouldn't hold their breath, a Brazilian family farm and local food activist says.
"It's not the nature of governments to spontaneously bring about change," Rodrigo Lopes told a group of about 30 during a conference Monday night at the Garden Party Cafe in Baraboo. "Their nature is to maintain the status quo. Governments are only susceptible to social forces."
Lopes was the guest speaker at the conference, which focused on restoring local food economies. His 25-year-old organization, the Landless Workers Movement, advocates for rational land use and a just global agricultural system. It opposes a corporate model of agriculture.
The group has battled agribusiness throughout Latin America and originated in Brazil, a country where a minority of citizens own the majority of farmable land, Lopes said.
He said the corporate model promotes the spread of toxic chemicals and irrational use of land. For years, corporations and the mainstream media have promoted the model as necessary to end world hunger, Lopes said.
"Despite all of that, with all those negative side effects, it has not succeeded in ending hunger," he said.
Others in attendance said changing the way people view local food would further systemic change.
"We need to dispel the myth that eating local food is elitist," said Jim Goodman, an organic dairy farmer from Wonewoc. "It's the way the world eats, and we need to join the rest of the world. ... Farmers can produce great local food, but if people don't buy it, we're going to go out of business."
Locally grown food can often be sold cheaper, because there are no transportation costs passed on to the consumer, said John Kinsman, president of the Madison-based Family Farm Defenders.
Kinsman said farm subsidies distributed by the federal Farm Bill give an unfair advantage to big agribusiness. And corporate farms' use of migrant labor also gives them a leg up.
"If all the migrants were treated fairly, these big industrial farms would be out of business," Kinsman said.
Though there has been some progress in revamping the federal Farm Bill, it is still deeply flawed, said Sarah Lloyd, President of the Columbia County Farmers Union.
A recent change mandates "country of origin" product labeling, Lloyd said. But the bill contains an exemption for processed food.
"A bag of chopped-up carrots has to be labeled," she said. "And if you have a bag of frozen peas, they have to label where they came from. But if you have a bag of peas and carrots, they don't have to be labeled."
