Njari, Tanzania, 2006. A meeting held by the Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union

As the year 2008 comes to a close, the world must cope with a recent assertion made by the Food and Agriculture Organization that “one billion people will go hungry around the globe next year for the first time in human history…”

This shameful scenario was presented in the December 28th issue of The Independent: “The shocking landmark will be passed – despite a second record worldwide harvest in a row – because people are becoming too destitute to buy the food that is produced….the growth in hunger is not occurring, as in the past, because of shortage of food – but because people cannot afford to buy it even when it is plentiful.”

Theories abound as to why the world is in this predicament and what should be done to regain control of the global food economy. Meantime, consumers in developed countries are learning more about the sometimes vast and unsustainable supply chains that bring them their food, and are questioning the enormous resources consumed to maintain this system.    One movement, which gained national attention in the US with the publication of Michael Pollan’s bestseller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, focuses on changing our eating patterns to be less global.  ”Locavores” recommend turning to urban gardens, supporting farmers’ markets, and even keeping a few chickens in the back yard.  In short:  Buy Local.

But growing one’s own food, buying local and adhering to 100-mile food diets only offer partial solutions to the growing food crisis. As valid and important as these strategies are, we must also pursue other paths if we are going to restore balance to the food system and exonerate ourselves from such an unforgiveable crime as having allowed one billion people to go hungry.

If the primary problem is not a food shortage, but rather the gap between what food costs and what hungry people can afford to pay, then we must analyze the economic and political institutional failures which have created this situation. We need to redraft our trade agreements to keep workers in sustainable jobs in the U.S. and farmers productive on their fields in the Global South. For small farmers in this country, as well as consumers, one way forward is to organize now to radically change the next Farm Bill.  It’s great to see these movements gathering momentum to make dramatic changes in our agriculture and trade policies.

Where does Fair Trade Fit In?

But through all the news and the commentary about the food crisis, the problems and solutions, where is the mention of Fair Trade?  Why is the voice of Fair Trade so absent within the food sovereignty movement?

It’s as if Fair Trade has fallen off the social justice map. Is Fair Trade just a fad – a naive notion that “all a consumer has to do” is “look for the seal” and the world will be a better place? Can it really be that the achievements gained and lessons learned through Fair Trade have nothing to offer the current discourse about local farmers, sustainable agriculture, and the food crisis?

The Fair Trade movement has helped millions of farmers worldwide, assisted farmer organizations, and educated consumers in the North about the injustices of our trade system. After all, it was developed in response to the huge systemic injustices facing producers in the Global South. Small farmers simply can’t compete with large landowners, plantations, and family estates. The landowners have all the connections to the same oligarchies that acquired wealth and power by enslaving generations of farmers after appropriating their land. Many of these same landowners now run the countries, make the laws, own the banks, run the exporting companies, and pocket the profits.

Fair Trade was very successful in raising awareness of this situation. Alternative traders and other activists found innovative and creative ways to “introduce” producers and consumers to each other, to build bridges between cultures. The movement educated consumers, inspired many to learn, engage and take action. Fair Trade offers market access, credit and fairer prices to millions of farmers, enabling peasant farmers to become co-operative business owners with increasing political and economic power.

Of course, if Fair Trade is barely mentioned amongst those concerned with food security and food sovereignty, try searching through the conversations about Fair Trade within the movement itself. Inspired? I don’t mean to offend, but the dialogue can get tiring. “Fair Trade,” “Whole Trade,” “Direct Trade”,  “Beyond Fair Trade” — does the Fair Trade movement have nothing more to offer consumers and activists than rivalries between roasters; who makes more trips to source; who knows their farmer partners better?

Fair Trade must join in discussions about our industrial food system, the plight facing small farmers in the US, and the governmental policies that created the industrialized food economy in which we all are forced to participate.  We need a rich debate within the movement about these larger issues that affect small farmers and consumers.

Bringing it All Together

Some of us are thirsting for a deeper level of conversation. Personally, I want to see Fair Trade raised alongside the “buy local” and agriculture and trade policy reform strategies. Gains have been achieved and lessons learned. Why isn’t the Fair Trade movement influencing – and being influenced by – the food sovereignty movement?

Fair Traders need to get back into the ring or we will lose the advances the movement has made. It’s time to tone down the marketing rhetoric and return to the educational goals of our mission; find new ways to talk with consumers – and each other – about our work and why we’re doing it. Most importantly, we need to continue creating innovative new strategies, and joining others, to fix the huge injustices in our food system and large scale destruction of the planet.

I also think that “locavores”, who talk about the need to support small farmers, community development and sustainable agriculture, should consider expanding their lens to include mention of small farmers in the Global South. As long as consumers continue to drink coffee and tea, and eat chocolate and other foods not grown in our country, let’s remember that the struggles of these small farmers are as challenging and as critical as those in the U.S. And while small farmers participating in Fair Trade are not in our own backyards, they are trying to maintain, and strengthen their own local communities. Their food security depends on their ability to remain organized in co-operatives; to receive the higher, “fairer” prices they deserve; and ultimately, on the agriculture and trade policies we enact here in Washington.

By the same token, when we talk about the role agri-business has played in dictating agriculture, economic, and trade policies, it would be powerful to highlight alternatives. If the large-scale mechanized farming favored by agribusiness – with its reliance on fossil fuel, pesticides, genetically modified organisms, government subsidies, and factory farms – is the problem, which businesses within the food system are offering solutions?

Certainly small farmers are central to our vision of a greener and more just food system.  But it is important also to recognize the significance of the food co-operatives, locally-owned natural food markets, independent restaurants and cafes, which shine as visible examples of those who are building an alternative day after day. 

Why is there so little mention of these independent and co-operative businesses in food security circles?   Many alternative trade organizations, and worker-owned co-operatives are demonstrating that businesses can have a social mission; reasonable profits can be made and shared more equitably amongst workers and farmers; business can be conducted through strong relationships based on mutuality, transparency and integrity; and of course that healthy food can be produced sustainably.

These organizations – producing, manufacturing, distributing and selling us our food – are walking the walk. They are demonstrating through action that alternatives do exist. Positive models are out there. And the more we can highlight, replicate and create additional independent, local and co-operative businesses, the more success we will have building the type of food system that the food sovereignty movement and all the locavores, fair trade and agriculture policy activists are promoting: a food system based on the principles of solidarity, sustainability and co-operation.

Our movements for a greener and more just food system could benefit by engaging more with each other. Ultimately, the more we challenge, learn from, influence and highlight the contributions each movement is making, the stronger and more successful we will be in our ultimate goal of fixing a broken food system. Let’s unite, deepen and strengthen our movements. With the threat of one billion people facing hunger and food security in 2009, it’s a change we can’t afford not to make.

Battles are heating up to protest unfair trade agreements, subsidies for agribusiness in our Farm Bill, and now… Tom Vilsack, Obama’s pick for Secretary of Agriculture. Consumers, environmentalists, labor organizations, Interfaith groups, and small farmer organizations – folks are feeling angry and fed up. As well they should be.

The good news is that while these larger policy debates are raging on, consumers are increasingly demanding action on a playing field closer to home – our food markets and our grocery shelves.

If you are what you eat, and money talks, then it is time we took back our food stores. We must know whose pockets our consumer dollars are lining, what ingredients (pesticides, hormones, gmos) are filling our bodies, and the conditions of those that are toiling in the fields to feed not only ourselves, but their own families.

Fortunately, we have some strong allies. Your local food co-operative should be one of them.

And now, Equal Exchange and a group of food co-operatives in the Twin Cities areas have launched a new web-site to help us navigate our way through the policy debates as well as the concrete, “bread-and-butter” dilemmas we face when walking down the food market aisles.

Fair Food Fight. You have to check this out!

Here’s what their “Why we fight” page says:

How does it make you feel when you find out that that Whaddayasay? You ready to get in the ring?
Monsanto is suing the pants off family farmers for saving seeds? That Procter and Gamble can be certified as a “fair trade” company?

Did you know that Dagoba organic chocolate is owned by Hershey’s now? That Kellogg’s owns Gardenburger, and that Cascadian Farm is really General Mills? You do know that organic companies are getting gobbled up like bar snacks, don’t you?

Did you know that Big Organic food manufacturers worked a back room deal in Congress so that non-organic ingredients can be used in USDA certified organic foods under “emergency situations”?

How about this? Did you know that millionaire corn farmers get subsidized by tax dollars? Or that American farmers are planting more corn than ever and Americans are consuming four times as much corn sweetener as they did a generation ago?

Did you know that the cost of soda and crappy fast food has been plummeting in real dollars while the cost of fruits and veggies has been skyrocketing? Did you know the US Farm Bill promotes that?

We think this all stinks to high heaven. Not only do these corporations have all the money, but then they deliberately trick consumers by playing a shell game about who they are, or pick fights with small farmers and citizens who’re roughly a thousandth their own size, or game the federal government like its a referee in a pro wrestling match.

Doesn’t that just piss you off to no end?

Well, we’re pissed. There’s a vicious food fight going on in this country and it’s not going well, so we’re ready put on our masks, lace up the stomping boots, and jump in the ring. We’re bored with lofty discussions about alternative food systems. We want to shout. We want to cajole. We want to take some action — how about you? 

If so, it’s a simple choice about whose side we should be on. Ready for the options?

A) David

B) Goliath

In this corner, we have the champ. Huge. Megalithic. Arms the size of a national trucking network, shoulders wide as a thousand-acre factory style farm, and stomach muscles rippling with vast credit and buying power.

And in this corner, we have the challenger. All he’s got is a used pick-up, fifty acres, and a steely gaze.

We like a spirited fight against long odds, so we side with the challenger, the small food grower and creator in her long shot match against giant food companies who are literally working to buy her up or put her out of business.

If we don’t fight this fight alongside the challenger, look what we have: A handful of companies that create the vast majority of your food, with fewer, less interesting choices every year. These companies demolish rural America by bringing in feedlots for cattle and pig towns with their lovely manure lagoons, drive out small farmers, and drive down wages until whole communities screwed. That, and the health of America as a whole is threatened by centralizing the food system so that just one nasty germ in the national meat bucket or the national tomato packing plant can sicken thousands upon thousands of people.

Most insulting of all, the Food Goliaths lie through their teeth to us, showing us slick marketing initiatives starring themselves as small farmers. When they do this, they take from the small farmer the one advantage he has: His identity as the challenger.

Well, we’re here to unmask that marauder. We’re here to sort through the lying, cheating and stealing, because we think more small farmers with better access to market and fewer corporate shell-games is exactly what this country needs. More small farmers would bring: 

1. better choices to shoppers,
   
2. safer, healthier food
   
3. a thriving, independent rural class, worldwide
   

So this site is dedicated to the good fight, the fair fight, the food fight, and we need fighters to join us – food fighters – and we need lots of them, numbers, with noisy voices. If you’ve ever read the paper and said to yourself, “But what can I do?” Then you’ve found a place to vent energy and force some changes on the world. We need:

*  irrationally enthusiastic activists who are willing to be called to action at a moment’s notice 

*  food fighters who will stay informed, attend rallies, write letters, spread the word and show up for real action on behalf of small farmers and fair food

* bloggers and videographers who will create a little corner of Fair Food Fight for yourself with your own blog and your own fights and tell stories of what’s happening in your region of the country

* testimonials of great food, recipes, victories, profiles of courageous small farmers, or fights that the rest of us may need to join.

In the coming weeks, Fair Food Fight will call on you to join us in taking specific action, but, until then, just meet and greet your fellow food fighters who’re hanging around the site. Start a blog. Spar with El Dragon in the comments of the main blog. Have fun.

 We all understand information overload and label fatigue – and far too well. Still, I’d like to believe that there could be a balance between offering consumers salient points to help them make choices; finding opportunities to educate and raise public awareness about issues relating to agriculture, trade and the environment; and patronizing or misleading people by “dumbing-down” complex and difficult issues into simple solutions, formulas, and seals. Worse yet, is when we get stuck in “single-issue thinking” that flattens out the nuances underlying these issues and that has the potential to pit committed activists and community members against one another.

In the Feb. 25^th New Yorker article, “Big Foot,” Michael Specter writes about carbon emissions. He comments on some of the efforts different individuals and organizations are grappling with to address the revolutionary changes in behaviors, policies, and laws that need to occur if we are to reverse the dangerous path we’ve been walking with regards to climate change. I really recommend this article to everyone who is trying to alter their behaviors, advocate for changes in governmental laws and push for corporate actions. I won’t try to summarize the article in which he presents a number of interesting new ideas, but suffice it to say, he also discusses half-a-dozen notable examples where due to “…land use, the type of transportation, the weather, or even the season,” buying a locally grown or produced product is not necessarily inherently better for the environment. In fact, in the examples he cites, buying a particular product from another country and transporting it actually turned out to be more environmentally friendly than the option to purchase the product from a local source.

 Eric Blair wrote an excellent article in the Charleston City Paper on April 30, 2008, entitled, “The friction between the fair-trade and local-first movements,” in which he presents the views of William Moseley, a geography professor at Macalester College in Minnesota, and Gawain Kripke, the policy director at Oxfam America. They are concerned about what seems to be a growing divide between locavores and Fair Trade enthusiasts. Blair writes:

“Moseley believes fair trade presents a way for small organic farmers and food cooperatives to become economically viable in the face of competition from large-scale plantation farms. He’s seen this while studying a cooperative wine vineyard in South Africa run by about 60 black farmers. The cooperative provides its members with better health care and working conditions than the large-scale owner-operated vineyards and relies on wine exports to break even.”

“In November, Moseley wrote an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle criticizing the local food movement for being too insular. He did not reject the idea of eating local, but argued that conscientious consumers had to balance localism with an international perspective, one that included understanding our connections to the developing world. The response he received on some websites was openly hostile…”

Gawain Kripke expressed similar views: “It’s important to parse out what the motivations are, and I think there is a worry that the local movement might turn into protectionism or a me-first-ism about our economic relationships, and that could be devastating for poor people in other countries who are really looking for a first step on the economic ladder and trading the things they produce, like agricultural goods, is one of the ways they can improve their livelihoods…”

 I’ll leave it to you all to read the two articles in full. 

Fair Trade and Buy Local advocates share many important concerns about the ways we can take back our food system so that it works best for small farmers and consumers, as well as care for our planet. Let’s be careful not to create unnecessary wedges between the two movements who at their hearts and souls are trying to achieve the same goals. We need to work together, build one movement, and come up with creative and effective strategies. If not, it will be agribusiness – with their GMO seeds, harmful pesticides, and huge profits, that will continue to dictate how and what we grow, buy, eat… and live.

 
FAMILY FARMERS PRAISE INTRODUCTION OF TRADE BILL THAT HELPS ADDRESS GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS: U.S. and United Nations Continue to Promote Catastrophic Free Trade Agenda

Washington D.C., June 4, 2008

The National Family Farm Coalition today praised the introduction of the TRADE Act in the House and Senate which offers urgent and necessary reforms to our deeply flawed trade agreements. Much of the world is grappling with a growing global food crisis. Much of the crisis has been precipitated by free trade policies that have made developing countries reliant on imported food at the expense of domestic local production. Farmers from Haiti to Indonesia to Mexico have been driven off their land due to trade agreements that dismantled tariff protections and domestic state support for local farmers. This allowed U.S. agribusinesses to dump cheap commodities into overseas markets, forcing countries to be at the mercy of global markets for their food security instead of relying on local family farmers. With commodity prices now skyrocketing, governments are no longer able to provide food for their citizens.

The TRADE Act offers positive steps to help countries practice food sovereignty instead of “free trade.” Ben Burkett, President of the National Family Farm Coalition and a Mississippi farmer said, “We applaud the introduction of the TRADE act. The legislation is clear that fair trade begins with farmers being able to earn fair prices reflecting cost of production, fair treatment of farm labor, and limitations against unfair dumping practices. It allows for countries who are part of a trade agreement to establish strategic food and energy reserves, an important policy that must be reinstated to address the global food crisis.”

The TRADE Act comes at an opportune time to begin addressing the global food crisis, as world leaders gather this week in Rome at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization conference. NFFC is deeply disappointed that USDA Secretary Ed Schafer and U.N.  Secretary General Ban Ki Moon continue to advocate for more free trade policies and advancing the Doha Round as a solution to address high food prices. “It is outrageous for our leaders to continue their disastrous trade liberalization policies, ignoring that free trade has caused the instability threatening our food security. Family farmers around the world have been devastated by below-cost dumping from agribusinesses as a result of the WTO and free trade. Countries have surrendered their food sovereignty to the likes of Cargill and Wall Street,” said NFFC Vice-President Dena Hoff, who is at the UN FAO meeting as a civil society participant with Via Campesina.

The National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC), founded in 1986, provides a voice for grassroots groups on farm, food, trade and rural economic issues to ensure fair prices for family farmers, safe and healthy food, and vibrant, environmentally sound rural communities here and around the world. For further information about the organization, visit www.nffc.net.

Alexandra Strickner, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP)
Rome, Italy, 3 June 2008

Watch the 3 minute video on http://wsftv.net

Farmer and civil society leaders carrying out a peaceful action today in Rome, Italy at the FAO Summit on the Food Crisis were forcefully removed from the premises. At around 1:30pm farmers and representatives of civil society organizations staged an action at the press room to deliver a message that millions of additional people are joining the ranks of the hungry as the corporations that control the global food system are making record profits.

The issues of corporate control and speculation, which are leading causes of recent spikes in food prices, are not being discussed by the government delegations and the international agencies meeting in Rome to debate solutions to the crisis.

“We are outraged that such fundamental aspects of the food crisis were nowhere on the agenda for the Summit,” says Paul Nicholson, member of the International Coordinating Committee of Via Campesina and one of the farmer leaders who was expelled from the Summit.The 10 people involved in the action carried posters contrasting the record profits of agribusiness corporations during the lastest reporting financial quarter of 2008 with the estimated 100 million people in the world who now, alongside 800 million or so others, are hungry because they cannot afford to eat.

Profits for Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company, were up 108 percent, while Cargill and Archer Daniel Midlands, the world’s largest food traders, registered profit increases of 86 and 42 per cent respectively. Profits for Mosaic, one of the world’s largest fertilizer companies, rose 1,134 percent.

The action was necessary to bring to the world’s attention that the main causes of the world food crisis are not being dealt with and that the world’s food producers– the farmers, fisherfolk, agricultural workers and indigenous people– have been shut out of the discussion. In previous high-level FAO events, civil society was given more space to express its views and to have a dialogue with the delegates. For this Summit, civil society was blocked from meaningful participation in the preparation and in the event itself.

“We are concerned that this Summit will only reinforce corporate control of the food system and lead to a further destruction of the way of life of indigenous peoples and their survival,” says Saul Vicente Vasquez of the International Indian Treaty Council and one of the supporters of the action. “It is time for indigenous people and other food producers to take charge of food policy.”Those involved in the action have been meeting with other civil society organizations at the Terra Preta* civil society forum, parallel to the FAO Summit.

A video of the action and the suppression of the action is available on http://wsftv.net. During the action, the security guards seized a banner reading: “Stop corporate control over food!”.

—-

Information about Terra Preta and a statement from the forum can be found
at www.foodsovereignty.org

The original article, translated by Peter Rosset, was originally published in Spanish in La Jornada:

May 9, 2008

The Time has Come for La Via Campesina and Food Sovereignty

Peter Rosset

Around the world it seems more and more that the time has come for La Via Campesina. The global alliance of peasant and family farm organizations has spent the past decade perfecting an alternative proposal for how to structure a country’s food system, called Food Sovereignty. It was clear at the World Forum on Food Sovereignty held last year in Mali, that this proposal has been gaining ground with other social movements, including those of indigenous peoples, women, consumers, environmentalists, some trade unions, and others. Though when it comes to governments and international agencies, it had until recently been met with mostly deaf ears. But now things have changed. The global crisis of rising food prices, which has already led to food riots in diverse parts of Asia, Africa and the Americas, is making everybody sit up and take note of this issue.

But, what are the causes of the extreme food price hikes? There are both long term and short causes. Among the former, the cumulative effect of three decades of neoliberal budget-cutting, privatization and free trade agreements stands out. In most countries around the world, national food production capacity has been systematically dismantled and replaced by a growing capacity to produce agroexports, stimulated by enormous government subsidies to agribusiness, using taxpayer money.

It is peasants and families farmers who feed the peoples of the world, by and large. Large agribusiness producers in most any country have an export “vocation.” But policy decisiones have stripped the former of minimum price guarantees, parastatal marketing boards, credit, technical assistance, and above all, markets for their produce. Local and national food markets were first inundated with cheap imports, and now, when transnational corporations (TNCs) have captured the bulk of the market share, the prices of the food imports on which countries now depend have been drastically jacked up.

Meanwhile the World Bank and the IMF have forced governments to sell off their public sector grain reserves. The result is that we now face one of the tightest margins in recent history between food reserves and demand, which generates both rising prices and greater market volatility. In other words, many countries no longer have either sufficient food reserves or sufficient productive capacity. They now depend on imports, whose prices are skyrocketing. Another long term cause of the crisis, though of lesser importance, has been changing patterns of food consumption in some parts of the world, like increased preference for meat and poultry products.

Among the short term causes of the crisis, by far the most important has been the relatively sudden entry of speculative financial capital into food markets. Hedge, index and risk funds have invested heavily in the futures markets for commodities like grains and other food products. With the collapse of the home mortgage market in the USA, their already desperate search for new avenues of investment led them to discover these markets for futures contracts. Attracted by high price volatility in any market, since they take their profits on both price rises and price drops, they bet like gamblers in a casino. Gambling, in this case, with the food of ordinary people. These funds have already injected an additional 70 billion dollars of extra investment into commodities, inflating a price bubble that has pushed the cost of basic foodstuffs beyond the reach of of the poor in country after country. And when the bubble inevitably bursts, it will wipe out millions of food producers throughout the world.

Another important short term factor is the agrofuel boom. Agrofuel crops compete for planting area with food crops and cattle pasture. In the Philippines, for example, the government has signed agreements that commit an area to be planted to agrofuels that is equivalent to fully half of the area planted to rice, the mainstay of the country’s diet. We really ought to label feeding automobiles instead of people as a crime against humanity.

The major global price increases in the costs of chemical inputs for conventional farming, as a direct result of the high price of petroleum, is also a major short term causal factor. Other factors of recent impact include droughts and other climate events in a number of regions, and a conspiracy involving the CIA to destabilize certain governments not well-liked by Washington. In Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina, the private sector and the TNCs are working hard to export food items sorely needed by the local population, or otherwise prevent them from reaching market, as a way to delegitimize the leaders of those countries.

Faced with this global panorama, and all of its implications, there is really just one alternative proposal that is up to the challenge. Under the Food Sovereignty paradigm, social movements and a growing number of progressive and semi-progressive governments propose that we re-regulate the food commodity markets that were de-regulated under neoliberalism. And regulate them better than before they were deregulated, with genuine supply management, making it possible to set prices that are fair to both farmers and consumers alike.

That necessarily means a return to protection of the national food production of nations, both against the dumping of artificially cheap food that undercuts local farmers, and against the artificially expensive food imports that we face today. It means rebuilding the national grain reserves and parastatal marketing boards, in new and improved versions that actively include farmer organizations as owners and administrators of public reserves. That is a key step toward taking our food system back from the TNCs that hoard food stocks to drive prices up.

Countries urgently need to stimulate the recovery of their national food producing capacity, specifically that capacity located in the peasant and family farm sectors. That means public sector budgets, floor prices, credit and other forms of support, and genuine agrarian reform. Land reform is urgently needed in many countries to rebuild the peasant and family farm sectors, whose vocation is growing food for people, since the largest farms and agribusinesses seem to only produce for cars and for export. And many countries need to implement export controls, as a number of governments have done in recent days, to stop the forced exportation of food desperately needed by their own populations.

Finally, we must change dominant technological practices in farming, toward an agriculture based on agroecological principles, that is sustainable, and that is based on respect for and is in equilibrium with nature, local cultures, and traditional farming knowledge. It has been scientifically demonstrated that ecological farming systems can be more productive, can better resist drought and other manifestations of climate change, and are more economically sustainable because they use less fossil fuel. We can no longer afford the luxury of food whose price is linked to the price of petroleum, much less whose industrial monoculture production model — with pesticides and GMOs — damages the future productive capacity of our soils.

The time has truly arrived for La Via Campesina and for Food Sovereignty. There is no other real solution to feeding the world, and it is up to each and every one of us to join mobilizations to force the changes in national and international public policy that are so urgently needed.