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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities
  • Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:21:29 -0700


The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities
By Frances Moore Lappé
The Nation Friday, Sep 16, 2011
http://organicconnectmag.com/wp/2011/09/the-food-movement-its-power-and-possibilities/#.TtznxNSZHGB

Editor's Note: Frances Moore Lappé's essay below kicks off our forum on the
food movement. Raj Patel, Vandana Shiva, Eric Schlosser, and Michael Pollan
have contributed replies.

For years I’ve been asked, “Since you wrote Diet for a Small Planet in 1971,
have things gotten better or worse?” Hoping I don’t sound glib, my response
is always the same: “Both.”

As food growers, sellers and eaters, we’re moving in two directions at once.

The number of hungry people has soared to nearly 1 billion, despite strong
global harvests. And for even more people, sustenance has become a health
hazard—with the US diet implicated in four out of our top ten deadly
diseases. Power over soil, seeds and food sales is ever more tightly held,
and farmland in the global South is being snatched away from indigenous
people by speculators set to profit on climbing food prices. Just four
companies control at least three-quarters of international grain trade; and
in the United States, by 2000, just ten corporations—with boards totaling
only 138 people—had come to account for half of US food and beverage sales.
Conditions for American farmworkers remain so horrific that seven Florida
growers have been convicted of slavery involving more than 1,000 workers.
Life expectancy of US farmworkers is forty-nine years.

That’s one current. It’s antidemocratic and deadly.

There is, however, another current, which is democratizing power and aligning
farming with nature’s genius. Many call it simply “the global food movement.”
In the United States it’s building on the courage of truth tellers from Upton
Sinclair to Rachel Carson, and worldwide it has been gaining energy and
breadth for at least four decades.

Some Americans see the food movement as “nice” but peripheral—a middle-class
preoccupation with farmers’ markets, community gardens and healthy school
lunches. But no, I’ll argue here. It is at heart revolutionary, with some of
the world’s poorest people in the lead, from Florida farmworkers to Indian
villagers. It has the potential to transform not just the way we eat but the
way we understand our world, including ourselves. And that vast power is just
beginning to erupt.

The Work

In a farmworker camp in Ohio, a young mother sat on her bed. She was dying of
cancer, but with no bitterness she asked me a simple question: “We provide
people food—why don’t they respect our work?” That was 1984. She had no
protection from pesticides, or even the right to safe drinking water in the
field.

Twenty-five years later, in Immokalee, Florida, I walked through a grungy,
sweltering 300-foot trailer, home to eight tomato pickers, but what struck me
most was a sense of possibility in the workers themselves.

They are among the 4,000 mainly Latino, Mayan Indian and Haitian members of
the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, formed in 1993—more than two decades
after Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers’ victorious five-year grape strike
and national boycott. In the 1990s, CIW’s struggle over five years, including
a 230-mile walk and hunger strike, achieved the first industrywide pay
increase in twenty years. Still, it only brought real wages back to pre-1980
levels. So in 2001, CIW launched its Campaign for Fair Food. Dogged
organizing forced four huge fast-food companies—McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Burger
King and Subway—to agree to pay a penny more per pound and adhere to a code
of conduct protecting workers. Four large food-service providers, including
Sodexo, were also brought on board. Beginning this fall, CIW will start
implementing these changes at 90 percent of Florida tomato farms—improving
the lives of 30,000 tomato pickers. Now the campaign is focused on
supermarkets such as Trader Joe’s, Stop & Shop and Giant.

The Land

In Brazil, almost 400,000 farmworker families have not only found their
voices but gained access to land, joining the roughly half-billion small
farms worldwide that produce 70 percent of the world’s food.

Elsewhere, calls for more equitable access to land in recent decades have
generally gone nowhere—despite evidence that smallholders are typically more
productive and better resource guardians than big operators.

So what happened in Brazil?

With the end of dictatorship in 1984 came the birth of arguably the largest
social movement in the hemisphere: the Landless Workers Movement, known by
its Portuguese acronym MST. Less than 4 percent of Brazil’s landowners
control about half the land, often gained illegally. MST’s goal is land
reform, and in 1988 Brazil’s new Constitution gave the movement legal
grounding: Article 5 states that “property shall fulfill its social
function,” and Article 184 affirms the government’s power to “expropriate…for
purposes of agrarian reform, rural property” that fails to meet this
requirement. Well-organized occupations of unused land, under the cover of
night, had been MST’s early tactic; after 1988 the same approach helped
compel the government to uphold the Constitution.

Because of the courage of these landless workers, a million people are
building new lives on roughly 35 million acres, creating several thousand
farming communities with schools serving 150,000 kids, along with hundreds of
cooperative and other enterprises.

Nevertheless, MST co-founder João Pedro Stédile said early this year that the
global financial crisis has led “international capitalists” to try to
“protect their funds” by investing in Brazilian “land and energy
projects”—driving renewed land concentration.

And in the United States? The largest 9 percent of farms produce more than 60
percent of output. But small farmers still control more than half our
farmland, and the growing market for healthy fresh food has helped
smallholders grow: their numbers went up by 18,467 between 2002 and 2007. To
support them, last winter the Community Food Security Coalition held
community “listening sessions,” attended by 700 people, to sharpen citizen
goals for the 2012 farm bill.

The Seed

Just as dramatic is the struggle for the seed. More than 1,000 independent
seed companies were swallowed up by multinationals in the past four decades,
so today just three—Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta—control about half the
proprietary seed market worldwide.

Fueling the consolidation were three Supreme Court rulings since
1980—including one in 2002, with an opinion written by former Monsanto
attorney Clarence Thomas—making it possible to patent life forms, including
seeds. And in 1992 the Food and Drug Administration released its policy on
genetically modified organisms, claiming that “the agency is not aware of any
information showing that [GMO] foods…differ from other foods in any
meaningful or uniform way.”

The government’s green light fueled the rapid spread of GMOs and
monopolies—so now most US corn and soybeans are GMO, with genes patented
largely by one company: Monsanto. The FDA position helped make GMOs’ spread
so invisible that most Americans still don’t believe they’ve ever eaten
them—even though the grocery industry says they could be in 75 percent of
processed food.

Even fewer Americans are aware that in 1999 attorney Steven Druker reported
that in 40,000 pages of FDA files secured via a lawsuit, he found “memorandum
after memorandum contain[ing] warnings about the unique hazards of
genetically engineered food,” including the possibility that they could
contain “unexpected toxins, carcinogens or allergens.”

Yet at the same time, public education campaigns have succeeded in confining
almost 80 percent of GMO planting to just three countries: the United States,
Brazil and Argentina. In more than two dozen countries and in the European
Union they’ve helped pass mandatory GMO labeling. Even China requires it.

In Europe, the anti-GMO tipping point came in 1999. Jeffrey Smith, author of
Seeds of Deception, expects that the same shift will happen here, as more
Americans than ever actively oppose GMOs. This year the “non-GMO” label is
the third-fastest-growing new health claim on food packaging. Smith is also
encouraged that milk products produced with the genetically modified drug
rBGH “have been kicked out of Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Yoplait, Dannon, and most
American dairies.”

Around the world, millions are saying no to seed patenting as well. In homes
and village seed banks, small farmers and gardeners are saving, sharing and
protecting tens of thousands of seed varieties.

In the United States, the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, estimates
that since 1975 members have shared roughly a million samples of rare garden
seeds.

In the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh—known as the pesticide capital of the
world—a women-led village movement, the Deccan Development Society, puts
seed-saving at the heart of its work. After the crushing failure of GMO
cotton and ill health linked to pesticides, the movement has helped 125
villages convert to more nutritious, traditional crop mixes, feeding 50,000
people.

On a larger scale, Vandana Shiva’s organization, Navdanya, has helped to free
500,000 farmers from chemical dependency and to save indigenous seeds—the
group’s learning and research center protects 3,000 varieties of rice, plus
other crops.


Agri-Culture

In all these ways and more, the global food movement challenges a failing
frame: one that defines successful agriculture and the solution to hunger as
better technologies increasing yields of specific crops. This is typically
called “industrial agriculture,” but a better description might be
“productivist,” because it fixates on production, or “reductivist,” because
it narrows our focus to a single element.

Its near obsession with the yield of a monoculture is anti-ecological. It not
only pollutes, diminishes and disrupts nature; it misses ecology’s first
lesson: relationships. Productivism isolates agriculture from its relational
context—from its culture.

In 2008 a singular report helped crack the productivist frame. This report,
“The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and
Technology for Development” (known simply as IAASTD), explained that
solutions to poverty, hunger and the climate crisis require agriculture that
promotes producers’ livelihoods, knowledge, resiliency, health and equitable
gender relations, while enriching the natural environment and helping to
balance the carbon cycle. Painstakingly developed over four years by 400
experts, the report has gained the support of more than fifty-nine
governments, and even productivist strongholds like the World Bank.

IAASTD furthers an emerging understanding that agriculture can serve life
only if it is regarded as a culture of healthy relationships, both in the
field—among soil organisms, insects, animals, plants, water, sun—and in the
human communities it supports: a vision lived by many indigenous people and
captured in 1981 by Wendell Berry in The Gift of Good Land and twenty years
later by Jules Pretty in Agri-Culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature.

Across cultures, the global food movement is furthering agri-culture by
uniting diverse actors and fostering democratic relationships. A leader is La
Via Campesina, founded in 1993 when small farmers and rural laborers gathered
from four continents in Belgium. Its goal is “food sovereignty”—a term
carefully chosen to situate “those who produce, distribute, and consume food
at the heart of food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets
and corporations,” says the declaration closing the group’s 2007 global
gathering in Nyeleni, Mali. La Via Campesina connects 150 local and national
organizations, and 200 million small farmers, in seventy countries. In 2009
it was included among civil society players on the UN Committee on Food
Security.

And in the urban North, how is the food movement enhancing agri-culture?
For sure, more and more Americans are getting their hands in the
dirt—motivated increasingly by a desire to cut “food miles” and greenhouse
gases. Roughly a third of American households (41 million) garden, up 14
percent in 2009 alone. As neighbors join neighbors, community gardens are
blooming. From only a handful in 1970, there are 18,000 community gardens
today. In Britain community gardens are in such demand—with 100,000 Brits on
waiting lists for a plot—that the mayor of London promised 2,012 new ones by
2012.

And in 2009 the Slow Food movement, with 100,000 members in 153 countries,
created 300 “eat-ins”—shared meals in public space—to launch its US “Time for
Lunch” campaign, with a goal of delicious healthy school meals for the 31
million kids eating them every day.

An Economics of Agri-Culture

Agri-culture’s unity of healthy farming ecology and social ecology transforms
the market itself: from the anonymous, amoral selling and buying within a
market structured to concentrate power to a market shaped by shared human
values structured to ensure fairness and co-responsibility.

In 1965 British Oxfam created the first fair-trade organization, called
Helping-by-Selling, in response to calls from poor countries for “trade, not
aid.” Today more than 800 products are fair-trade certified, directly
benefiting 6 million people. Last year the US fair-trade market passed $1.5
billion.

The Real Food Challenge, launched by young people in 2007, is working to
jump-start a US swing to “real food”—defined as that respecting “human
dignity and health, animal welfare, social justice and environmental
sustainability.” Student teams are mobilizing to persuade campus
decision-makers to commit themselves to making a minimum of
20 percent of
their college or university food “real” by 2020. With more than 350 schools
already on board, the Challenge founders have set an ambitious goal: to shift
$1 billion to real food purchases in ten years.

Farmers’ markets, the direct exchange between farmer and eater, are also
creating a fairer agri-culture. So rare before the mid-’90s that the USDA
didn’t even bother to track them, more than 7,000 farmers’ markets dot the
country in 2011, a more than fourfold increase in seventeen years.

Other democratic economic models are also gaining ground:

In 1985 an irrepressible Massachusetts farmer named Robyn Van En helped
create the first US Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, in which
eaters are no longer just purchasers but partners, helping to shoulder the
farmer’s risk by prepaying for a share of the harvest before the planting
season. On weekends, “my” CSA—Waltham Fields, near Boston—is alive as
families pick and chat, and kids learn how to spot the yummiest strawberries.
Now there are 2,500 CSAs across the country, while more than 12,500 farms
informally use this prepay, partnership approach.

The cooperative model is spreading too, replacing one dollar, one vote—the
corporate form—with one person, one vote. In the 1970s, US food cooperatives
took off. Today there are 160 nationwide, and co-op veteran Annie Hoy in
Ashland, Oregon, sees a new upsurge. Thirty-nine have just opened, or are “on
their way right now,” she told me.

Funky storefronts of the 1970s, famous for limp organic carrots, have morphed
into mouthwatering community hubs. Beginning as a food-buying club of fifteen
families in 1953, Seattle’s PCC Natural Markets has nine stores and almost
46,000 members, making it the largest US food cooperative. Its sales more
than doubled in a decade.

Producer co-ops have also made huge gains. In 1988 a handful of worried
farmers, watching profits flow to middlemen, not to them, launched the
Organic Valley Family of Farms. Today Organic Valley’s more than 1,600 farmer
owners span thirty-two states, generating sales of more than $500 million in
2008.

Agri-Culture

In all these ways and more, the global food movement challenges a failing
frame: one that defines successful agriculture and the solution to hunger as
better technologies increasing yields of specific crops. This is typically
called “industrial agriculture,” but a better description might be
“productivist,” because it fixates on production, or “reductivist,” because
it narrows our focus to a single element.

Its near obsession with the yield of a monoculture is anti-ecological. It not
only pollutes, diminishes and disrupts nature; it misses ecology’s first
lesson: relationships. Productivism isolates agriculture from its relational
context—from its culture.

In 2008 a singular report helped crack the productivist frame. This report,
“The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and
Technology for Development” (known simply as IAASTD), explained that
solutions to poverty, hunger and the climate crisis require agriculture that
promotes producers’ livelihoods, knowledge, resiliency, health and equitable
gender relations, while enriching the natural environment and helping to
balance the carbon cycle. Painstakingly developed over four years by 400
experts, the report has gained the support of more than fifty-nine
governments, and even productivist strongholds like the World Bank.

IAASTD furthers an emerging understanding that agriculture can serve life
only if it is regarded as a culture of healthy relationships, both in the
field—among soil organisms, insects, animals, plants, water, sun—and in the
human communities it supports: a vision lived by many indigenous people and
captured in 1981 by Wendell Berry in The Gift of Good Land and twenty years
later by Jules Pretty in Agri-Culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature.

Across cultures, the global food movement is furthering agri-culture by
uniting diverse actors and fostering democratic relationships. A leader is La
Via Campesina, founded in 1993 when small farmers and rural laborers gathered
from four continents in Belgium. Its goal is “food sovereignty”—a term
carefully chosen to situate “those who produce, distribute, and consume food
at the heart of food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets
and corporations,” says the declaration closing the group’s 2007 global
gathering in Nyeleni, Mali. La Via Campesina connects 150 local and national
organizations, and 200 million small farmers, in seventy countries. In 2009
it was included among civil society players on the UN Committee on Food
Security.

And in the urban North, how is the food movement enhancing agri-culture?

For sure, more and more Americans are getting their hands in the
dirt—motivated increasingly by a desire to cut “food miles” and greenhouse
gases. Roughly a third of American households (41 million) garden, up 14
percent in 2009 alone. As neighbors join neighbors, community gardens are
blooming. From only a handful in 1970, there are 18,000 community gardens
today. In Britain community gardens are in such demand—with 100,000 Brits on
waiting lists for a plot—that the mayor of London promised 2,012 new ones by
2012.

And in 2009 the Slow Food movement, with 100,000 members in 153 countries,
created 300 “eat-ins”—shared meals in public space—to launch its US “Time for
Lunch” campaign, with a goal of delicious healthy school meals for the 31
million kids eating them every day.

An Economics of Agri-Culture

Agri-culture’s unity of healthy farming ecology and social ecology transforms
the market itself: from the anonymous, amoral selling and buying within a
market structured to concentrate power to a market shaped by shared human
values structured to ensure fairness and co-responsibility.

In 1965 British Oxfam created the first fair-trade organization, called
Helping-by-Selling, in response to calls from poor countries for “trade, not
aid.” Today more than 800 products are fair-trade certified, directly
benefiting 6 million people. Last year the US fair-trade market passed $1.5
billion.

The Real Food Challenge, launched by young people in 2007, is working to
jump-start a US swing to “real food”—defined as that respecting “human
dignity and health, animal welfare, social justice and environmental
sustainability.” Student teams are mobilizing to persuade campus
decision-makers to commit themselves to making a minimum of
20 percent of
their college or university food “real” by 2020. With more than 350 schools
already on board, the Challenge founders have set an ambitious goal: to shift
$1 billion to real food purchases in ten years.

Farmers’ markets, the direct exchange between farmer and eater, are also
creating a fairer agri-culture. So rare before the mid-’90s that the USDA
didn’t even bother to track them, more than 7,000 farmers’ markets dot the
country in 2011, a more than fourfold increase in seventeen years.

Other democratic economic models are also gaining ground:

In 1985 an irrepressible Massachusetts farmer named Robyn Van En helped
create the first US Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, in which
eaters are no longer just purchasers but partners, helping to shoulder the
farmer’s risk by prepaying for a share of the harvest before the planting
season. On weekends, “my” CSA—Waltham Fields, near Boston—is alive as
families pick and chat, and kids learn how to spot the yummiest strawberries.
Now there are 2,500 CSAs across the country, while more than 12,500 farms
informally use this prepay, partnership approach.

The cooperative model is spreading too, replacing one dollar, one vote—the
corporate form—with one person, one vote. In the 1970s, US food cooperatives
took off. Today there are 160 nationwide, and co-op veteran Annie Hoy in
Ashland, Oregon, sees a new upsurge. Thirty-nine have just opened, or are “on
their way right now,” she told me.

Funky storefronts of the 1970s, famous for limp organic carrots, have morphed
into mouthwatering community hubs. Beginning as a food-buying club of fifteen
families in 1953, Seattle’s PCC Natural Markets has nine stores and almost
46,000 members, making it the largest US food cooperative. Its sales more
than doubled in a decade.

Producer co-ops have also made huge gains. In 1988 a handful of worried
farmers, watching profits flow to middlemen, not to them, launched the
Organic Valley Family of Farms. Today Organic Valley’s more than 1,600 farmer
owners span thirty-two states, generating sales of more than $500 million in
2008.

The Rules

The global food system reflects societies’ rules—often uncodified—that
determine who eats and how our earth fares. In the United States, rules
increasingly reflect our nation’s slide into “privately held government.” But
in rule-setting, too, energy is hardly unidirectional.

In 1999, on the streets of Seattle, 65,000 environmentalists, labor and other
activists made history, blunting the antidemocratic agenda of the World Trade
Organization. In 2008 more citizens than ever engaged in shaping the farm
bill, resulting in rules encouraging organic production. The movement has
also established 100 “food policy councils”—new local-to-state,
multi-stakeholder coordinating bodies. And this year, eighty-three plaintiffs
joined the Public Patent Foundation in suing Monsanto, challenging its GMO
seeds’ “usefulness” (required for patenting) as well as the company’s right
to patent seeds to begin with.

Even small changes in the rules can create huge possibilities. Consider, for
example, the ripples from a 2009 Brazilian law requiring at least 30 percent
of school meals to consist of food from local family farms.

Rules governing rights are the human community’s foundational guarantees to
one another—and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights gave access to
food that status. Since then, nearly two dozen nations have planted the right
to food in their constitutions. If you wonder whether it matters, note that
when Brazil undertook a multifaceted “zero hunger” campaign, framing food as
a right, the country slashed its infant death rate by about a third in seven
years.

Food Power: Only Connect

This rising global food movement taps universal human sensibilities—expressed
in Hindu farmers in India saving seeds, Muslim farmers in Niger turning back
the desert and Christian farmers in the United States practicing biblically
inspired Creation Care. In these movements lies the revolutionary power of
the food movement: its capacity to upend a life-destroying belief system that
has brought us power-concentrating corporatism.

Corporatism, after all, depends on our belief in the fairy tale that market
“magic” (Ronald Reagan’s unforgettable term) works on its own without us.

Food can break that spell. For the food movement’s power is that it can shift
our sense of self: from passive, disconnected consumers in a magical market
to active, richly connected co-producers in societies we are creating—as
share owners in a CSA farm or purchasers of fair-trade products or actors in
public life shaping the next farm bill.

The food movement’s power is connection itself. Corporatism distances us from
one another, from the earth—and even from our own bodies, tricking them to
crave that which destroys them—while the food movement celebrates our
reconnection. Years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, CSA farmer Barb Perkins told
me about her most rewarding moments: “Like in town yesterday,” she said, “I
saw this little kid, wide-eyed, grab his mom’s arm and point at me. ‘Mommy,’
he said. ‘Look. There’s our farmer!’”

At its best, this movement encourages us to “think like an ecosystem,”
enabling us to see a place for ourselves connected to all others, for in
ecological systems “there are no parts, only participants,” German physicist
Hans Peter Duerr reminds us. With an “eco-mind” we can see through the
productivist fixation that inexorably concentrates power, generating scarcity
for some, no matter how much we produce. We’re freed from the premise of lack
and the fear it feeds. Aligning food and farming with nature’s genius, we
realize there’s more than enough for all.

As the food movement stirs, as well as meets, deep human needs for
connection, power and fairness, let’s shed any notion that it’s simply “nice”
and seize its true potential to break the spell of our disempowerment.




  • [Livingontheland] The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities, Tradingpost, 12/05/2011

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