At Equal Exchange, we buy from co-operatives of small-scale farmers who love what they do. And they want you to love what they produce. But the system is stacked against them. While corporations strengthen their grip on the food system, consumers and farmers lose. Consumers lose their connection to the land. Farmers lose the land itself. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Our new campaign, “Small Farmers. Big Change: Creating a Green and More Just Food System,” represents a path to bringing justice to the food system and health to the planet. Through our actions, we can take steps to reduce our environmental footprint, help farmers save their local ecosystems, and advocate for agriculture and trade policies that actually benefit small-scale producers and workers instead of corporations. The positive impact of these actions would indeed represent a powerful change.
Why are small farmers and their organizations so important? Quite simply, they provide us with really great, high quality, healthy food. They also take care of the land. Sustainable farming protects the forests, soil and watersheds, and helps cool the planet. Small farmer co-operatives encourage democratic decision-making, provide dignified livelihoods for their members, and give opportunities for producers to feel pride in their accomplishments and hope for the future. These organizations help keep communities healthy and strong, and keep local cultures vibrant. They provide real alternatives to migration, gangs, and the cultivation of coca and other illegal crops.
Today, however, small-scale farmers face tremendous challenges. Many of our agriculture and trade policies are designed to favor large, agricultural corporations. The subsidies, credits, and tax incentives the government awards to agribusiness dramatically undermine the ability of small farmers to compete in the marketplace. Even our energy policies and consumption patterns, which contribute to global warming, affect small farmers disproportionately. Although they farm in ways that steward the land and keep the planet cool, global warming causes changes in weather patterns which affect crops and crop cycles. Unusual storms have become more frequent and severe, causing a loss of lives, homes, crops and livelihoods.
But we can reverse this environmental degradation and take steps to ensure that we leave a greener planet for our children. We can take back the food system to maintain our connection to the land, the food we eat, and the farmers who grow it. We can demand the right to know what’s in our food, and to have real choices over what we eat and from whom we buy. We can continue to support small farmers by purchasing Fair Trade products, buying from co-operatives, and supporting local farmers in our own communities. It’s important to continue to exercise consumer power through our purchases and reduce our environmental footprints through changes in behavior. Today, we would also like to invite you to join with us to take further steps to affect change.
This blog is dedicated to small farmers and consumers, the food system we are part of and building, and the planet we share. We offer these pages as a space to launch our campaign and invite all of you to participate in its development. We welcome your thoughts and ideas on this blog and believe that your input, creativity and actions are necessary to take back our food system and care for our planet.
Our campaign has three components which we’ll write about in this blog:
· Home: Education about the connections between small farmers, our food system, and the environment. On this page, we hope to encourage informed discussion and debate about the vital role small farmers play – as agents of change in their communities, as environmental stewards, and as critical actors in the type of personalized, healthy food system we all crave; we will also engage debate around agriculture and trade policies that support our vision of a green planet and a healthy, vibrant food system.
· Green Partnerships: These pages will present concrete environmental projects that our consumer, interfaith, and food service partners are undertaking in their communities, workplaces, schools and congregations; we will also present some ways in which our farmer partners are making efforts to protect local ecosystems through reforestation, organic conversion, and other farm renovation projects and offer ideas for how you can support them;
· Take Action: On this page, we will identify key legislative areas and other opportunities for political action in which we can influence trade and agricultural policies to benefit producers, consumers, local communities, and our planet.
I love to dance, however, much of the time I feel too self conscious to let myself go with the music. Yet, there is an altered state of mind that I sometimes reach (independent of any substance) where my relation to the crowd and the music shifts. The focus moves away from the people in the crowd to the music in my ears and the performance on stage. I feel the music in a different way and this changes the way my body moves. I no longer feel the oppressive eyes of people in the crowd, but feel and hear what the rest of the crowd must be hearing, and move accordingly.
This weekend, Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips said between songs that music cannot change the world, and he is right. People must make this change by how we all view the world and ourselves. For me this seems to be tied deeply to vanity. I had to look this one up, because vanity many connotations. It can mean futile, worthless, in vain so to speak, but it can also mean excessive pride, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
If people could begin thinking ecologically, holistically, viewing themselves as part of the crowd experiencing music instead of as individuals surrounded by eyes, then I think we can change the meaning of vanity in our society and more importantly how we interact with our world. Wendell Berry writes in The Gift of Good Land how with the gift of land comes responsibility, the two combined as stewardship. Dancing at a concert demands that same sort of stewardship; if it seems that you are not personally enjoying the music, people around you will think that you are probably paying less attention to the music than themselves and will begin feeling more self conscious, which has a similar effect for all the people around them, and so on and so forth. Of course this works both ways, if someone next to you is moving to the music, you cannot help but begin to feel it as well.
This is exactly the same in humanities approach to the earth. If the earth is our music, which it is, then we all must respond to the music on the stage, we cannot let it be drowned out by the machines and blinded by the fumes. We cannot let the individualization and competition of a globalized capitalism tear us apart and put us against each other. We must dance like no one is watching, even though they are, and in fact, they must watch if they are to emulate us, which, again, they must.
Mr. Chan,
Could I please quote your response? Its profound.
I am also equally overjoyed by the efforts of Equal Exchange.
Absolutely remarkable and inspiring.
Dear Friends,
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This issue will include an in-depth analysis on the monopoly of food production by transnational corporations and the need for food sovereignty in Latin America; coverage of the Via Campesina’s Fifth International Conference in Maputo as a response to the crisis; a conversation with the owner of a collectively-supported taqueria in Oaxaca; a stunning photo essay portraying the displacement of farm workers as a consequence of large-scale genetically modified soy production in Paraguay; and much, much more.
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My organization, The American Association for Health Freedom, located in Washington, D.C., is actively forming a coalition of concerned citizens and small farm/food production organizations to stop this law from passing. We believe that:
The Food Safety Enhancement Act:
• gives the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unprecedented scope, authority, and power over small farmers, food producers, and supplement producers, including the power to use vague language to intimidate and threaten;
• imposes unjustifiably harsh criminal and civil penalties for even administrative violations; and
• places undue economic hardship on small and mid-sized farms and food facilities (both organic and conventional), which could easily drive many of them out of business, and lead to monopoly control of food by large corporations.
If you are an organization interested in joining our cause, email us at office@healthfreedom.net. If you are interested in reading more on the bill and our organizations take, and are interested in signing a petition online for your congressman/senator, visit http://tiny.cc/XArxY
Where does one buy seedling in Nicaragua?