“We are the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe. And reclaiming democratic control over our food and water and our ecological survival is the neces- sary project for our freedom.” 3 — Vandana Shiva, physicist and activist

3. More Praise for Harvesting Justice
“If our people want to eat twenty years from now, we will need food justice. We will need to transform
a dependent, fossil fuels based industrial food system into one which reaffirms and restores our collec-
tive relationship to the land, the plants, and each other. The stories and the vision shared in Harvesting
Justice inspire and inform that work. I’m grateful for the storytellers and those whose hands are on the
earth.”
— Winona LaDuke, Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, author of Recovering the Sacred: The
Power of Naming and Claiming and The Militarization of Indian Country
“Field and Bell’s transformative work gets to the cultural and political heart of food politics and pro-
duction. Harvesting Justice more than captures a deep, intelligent explanation of the state of food
sovereignty in the Americas – it gives us an empowering, community-based framework for meaningful
action. If you believe that food has power to change lives, read on.”
— Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet and EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think,
to Create the World We Want
“Ben and Jerry’s has always promoted local agriculture. Harvesting Justice uses a wide-angle lens to show
why that is so important, and how the sum of local efforts everywhere can contribute to a global shift in
food and agricultural systems. We can reclaim power from agricultural corporations, for our future and
the earth’s. This important book gives many insights and tools on how to do so.”
— Jerry Greenfield, Co-founder, Ben and Jerry’s
“From my standpoint as a farmer, food sovereignty is a God-given right. Everyone should have the right
to clean water, clean air, and wholesome food. As long as people are hungry there will be no justice. We
should all consider where, how, and whom we share our food with. Harvesting Justice will help educate
all people who interact with food about their role in creating a humane food system and a healthy earth.
It’s all about the blessings we have from Mother Earth – Protect Her.”
— Ben F. Burkett, Farmer, President of the National Family Farm Coalition
“Anyone interested in understanding more about justice in the food system should take a good look at
this book. But don’t just look… use it as a resource to connect with others and take action, so you can be
part of the creation of the food movement’s next chapter.”
— Gerardo Reyes Chávez, Staff member, Coalition of Immokalee Workers
“Many people are familiar with the quest for healthy, organic food. But the food movement also includes
the need for food justice, land reform, and other faces of food sovereignty. If you want to see nutritious
and wholesome food produced with respect for the earth available to all, you’ll love Harvesting Justice.”
— John Robbins, author of Diet For A New America and The Food Revolution, Co-founder of The Food
Revolution Network

5. Harvesting Justice
Transforming Food, Land, and Agricultural
Systems in the Americas

6. Other Worlds
Ph: 504.684.4895
PO Box 791127, New Orleans, LA 70179
info.otherworlds@gmail.com
www.otherworldsarepossible.org
2013 Other Worlds, under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Unported license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Front Cover: Corn leaf. ©David Lauer
Back cover: Members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers at a demonstration, illustrating that they must pick enough
tomatoes to fill 153 buckets in a day to earn the minimum wage. ©Jacques-Jean Tiziou, www.jjtiziou.net.
Design: Micah Bazant, www.micahbazant.com
US Food Sovereignty Alliance
c/o WhyHunger, 505 Eighth Ave., Suite 2100
New York, NY 10018
info@usfoodsovereigntyalliance.org
www. usfoodsovereigntyalliance.org

7. Dedication
Harvesting Justice is dedicated to peasant, indigenous, landless,
and small farmers around the world, with respect and appreciation
for their work of growing food and growing justice.
We also dedicate it to the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance, with the
hope that – as a result of the collective work of the Alliance and its
members – food sovereignty will soon flourish in the U.S.

9. Table of Contents
Introduction: Breaking Bread 2
Harvesting Justice: Transforming Food, Land, and Agricultural Systems
in the Americas
1. Time to Make Salt: Food Sovereignty 5
2. A Level Planting Field: Challenging Corporate Rule 21
3. Good Growing Conditions: Changing Government Policies 36
4. Bringing it Home: Creating and Reviving Local Food Systems 47
5. Land of Plenty: Making Good Food Accessible to All 62
6. Honor the Hands: Food Worker Justice 74
7. Inherit the Earth: Land Reform 86
8. Homelands: Indigenous Territories and Sovereignty 99
Appendices
Gratitude 117
Dig Deeper 119
Authors and Contributors 131
About Other Worlds and the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance 133

10. 1
Indigenous and other farmers marched on the Governor’s Palace in Chihuahua, Mexico to denounce Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).
Social movements have been trying to get the Sierra Tarahumara declared as a GMO-free region since 2004, when genetic contamination was
first discovered in rural communities. ©David Lauer
1

11. 2
Breaking Bread: lntroduction
“This isn’t just a romantic exercise. We don’t like the way the food
system treats the earth and its negative health effects on the
people, and we are working to actualize an alternative.”
— Miguel Santistevan, New Mexican farmer and teacher
In the fall of 2011, the Occupy movement was growing, as they say, like a weed – quickly and
strongly. In groups as small as two and as large as 200,000, people gathered in public spaces
around the world to challenge an economic system that has long abandoned the majority for
the profit of a few, creating what writer Arun Gupta called “liberated territory” in the “great
cathedral of global capitalism.”1
The first group of protestors on New York City’s Wall Street
publically delivered 23 complaints, outlining the ways in which corporations control our daily
lives. Number four asserted, “They have poisoned the food supply through negligence and
undermined the farming system through monopolization.”2
The same season, on the other side of the earth, farmers in Lufeng, China were also in the
streets. They were protesting the city government’s seizure and sale of 800 acres of farmland to
an upscale property development ironically named Country Garden.
In Bolivia, around the same time, the president was forced to suspend construction of a
major highway after indigenous activists led a 41-day march in protest. The road would have
cut through protected forests and indigenous ancestral lands in order to shuttle commerce
between Brazil and ports in Chile and Peru.
And simultaneously, back in the Northern hemisphere, in rural New Mexico, a winter farmers’
market was starting up on Taos Indian Pueblo land. The shelves held garlic, carrots, chokecherry
1. Arun Gupta, “The Revolution Begins at Home: A Clarion Call to Join the Wall Street Protests,” AlterNet, September 27, 2011, www.alternet.
org/story/152557/the_revolution_begins_at_home%3A_a_clarion_call_to_join_the_wall_street_protests?page=entire.
2. Revg33k, “Forum Post: First Official Release from Occupy Wall Street,” Occupy Wall Street website, September 30, 2011, http://
occupywallst.org/forum/first-official-release-from-occupy-wall-street/.

12. 3
jam, blue corn flour, hot tamales, and giant heads of Napa cabbage harvested from the green-
house. The market room and greenhouse were both heated by a furnace stoked with wood
from the surrounding hills. A sign on the front door said “come back next week and we’ll have
fresh buffalo.”
A common thread links these stories happening around the globe: a vision of a society that
values life and the earth over profit. One cornerstone on which this vision rests is the revival of
community-led, sustainable food systems, and an end to the corporate control of food, land,
and agriculture.
How we feed ourselves and each other is the backbone of how, historically, we have organized
our communities and societies. The ways in which we arrange our agricultural systems make
evident our larger worldviews. Food literally and figuratively connects us to each other, to
our ancestors, to our cultures, and to the earth. All food is soul food (with a low bow to true
Southern cooking) because it is, in fact, that deep.
From community gardens to just global policy, a movement is growing to reclaim and transform
our food systems. The movement addresses:
• The well-being of the land, air, and waters;
• The ability of all to eat adequate and healthy food;
• The rights, health, and fair wages of those who plant, harvest, produce and prepare food;
• The need to restore and protect small farms and local food systems;
• The preservation and reclamation of local culture;
• The right of every nation to control its own food and agriculture; and
• An end to corporate control of food and agriculture, including an end to trade rules and
international agreements that prioritize profit over the well-being of people and the earth.
We created this book in order to share stories about some of the countless heartening changes
that are happening in this movement. We also hope it will illuminate the connections and
interdependence between different initiatives. Understanding the ways our visions overlap and
strengthen each other is, we think, vital.
A few notes about our language choices. We refer to ‘agriculture’, ‘farming’, and ‘farmers’,
often. Really, we wish we had better words that encompassed the full array of farmers, fish-
ermen and women, hunters, gatherers, shepherds, ranchers, and all those involved in food
provision. We apologize for the many places where we fall short of capturing the whole picture.

13. 4
Also, we at times refer to ‘peasant farmers’ when talking about small farmers in Latin America
because, though the term is uncommon and sometimes considered pejorative in the U.S., it
is how most small and subsistence farmers identify themselves in other parts of the world. It
describes a socio-economic position in a way that the descriptor ‘farmer’, which describes only
a profession, does not. Additionally, we use the terms ‘movement’, ‘food movement’, and ‘sus-
tainable agriculture movement’ loosely and interchangeably to refer to the huge spectrum of
efforts to create food systems that are nourishing, just, and healthy for people, animals, the
earth, and future generations.
A note about organization: This booklet starts with a chapter on food sovereignty, which is the
overarching framework for most of the discussions that follow. Of the remaining chapters, we
have loosely divided them between the U.S. and Latin America, because people in the U.S. tend
to think about issues along a domestic/international binary. Also, certain food and agricultural
issues predominate more in one hemisphere than the other. Yet all of the issues discussed here
are global. They crosscut North-South divides, reflecting the impacts of our globalized eco-
nomic relationships.
At the end of this book you’ll find an appendix of organizations that are engaged in exciting
work, books that we appreciate, resources to feed your interest and enthusiasm, and ideas for
turning dedication into action.
And lastly, any quotes that are not otherwise attributed come from interviews with the authors.
May we continue to break bread and make change together.
Blessings on the meal.

14. 5
1. Time to Make Salt: Food Sovereignty
“We are the food we eat, the water
we drink, the air we breathe. And
reclaiming democratic control
over our food and water and our
ecological survival is the neces-
sary project for our freedom.”3
— Vandana Shiva, physicist and activist
“Over a half-century ago, Mahatma Gandhi
led a multitude of Indians to the sea to
make salt – in defiance of the British
Empire’s monopoly on this resource critical
to people’s diet. The action catalyzed the
fragmented movement for Indian indepen-
dence and was the beginning of the end for
Britain’s rule over India. The act of ‘making
salt’ has since been repeated many times in
many forms by people’s movements seek-
ing liberation, justice and sovereignty: César
Chávez, Nelson Mandela, and the Zapatistas
are just a few of the most prominent exam-
ples. Our food movement – one that spans
the globe – seeks food sovereignty from the
monopolies that dominate our food systems,
with the complicity of our governments.
3. Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and
Peace (Massachusetts: South End Press, 2005), 5.
We are powerful, creative, committed and
diverse. It is our time to make salt.”4
So begins a statement by the People’s
Movement Assembly on Food Sovereignty
from the 2010 U.S. Social Forum in Detroit.
Today, you can find similar declarations
on food sovereignty crafted by communi-
ties around the world, from small rural
towns and villages to high-profile global
gatherings.
Food sovereignty is not a one-size-fits-all
approach but an expansive set of principles,
policies, and practices. It is grounded in the
belief that everyone has the right to healthy,
sustainably produced food, and that people
and nations must have democratic control
over their food and agricultural systems.
In 2007, in the West African country of Mali,
more than 500 small farmers, food produc-
ers, and activists from around the world
came together for the Nyéléni Forum for
Food Sovereignty, named after a legendary
woman farmer from the region. The final
statement articulated six key attributes of
4. Statement from the People’s Movement Assembly on Food
Sovereignty, U.S. Social Forum, Detroit, 2010.
5

15. 6
The impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement has been devastating to Mexican farmers. In 2008, farmers’ organizations
drove their tractors on the route Pancho Villa took during the 1910 revolution, traveling from the U.S. border to Mexico City as part of the
“Without corn there is no country” and “The land can’t take anymore” campaigns, demanding support for sustainable food production.
©DavidLauer
food sovereignty.5
Below are excerpts from
that declaration.
1. Focuses on Food for People: Food sov-
ereignty stresses the right to sufficient,
healthy and culturally appropriate
food for all individuals, peoples and
5. “Nyéléni 2007: Forum for Food Sovereignty: Definition of Food
Sovereignty” (from the Declaration of Nyéléni), Sélingué, Mali,
February 27, 2007, www.ienearth.org/docs/nyeleni-food-sov-en.pdf.
communities. Food sovereignty rejects
the proposition that food is just another
commodity for international agribusiness.
2. Values Food Providers: Food sovereignty
values and supports the contributions,
and respects the rights, of women and
men, peasants and small-scale family
farmers, pastoralists, artisanal fishers,
forest dwellers, indigenous peoples,
and agricultural and fisheries workers,

16. 7
including migrants, who cultivate, grow,
harvest and process food.
3. Localizes Food Systems: Food sover-
eignty puts providers and consumers at
the center of decision-making on food
issues; protects food providers from the
dumping of food and food aid in local
markets; and resists governance struc-
tures, agreements, and practices that…
promote… inequitable international
trade and give power to remote and
unaccountable corporations.
4. Makes Decisions Locally: Food sover-
eignty seeks control over and access to
territory, land, grazing, water, seeds,
livestock and fish populations for local
food providers. These resources ought
to be used and shared in socially and
environmentally sustainable ways which
conserve diversity.
5. Builds Knowledge and Skills: Food
sovereignty builds on the skills and
local knowledge of food providers and
their local organizations that conserve,
develop and manage localized food
production and harvesting systems,
and that pass on this wisdom to future
generations. Food sovereignty rejects
technologies that undermine, threaten
or contaminate these, e.g., genetic
engineering.
6. Works with Nature: Food sovereignty
seeks to heal the planet so that the
planet may heal us; and rejects methods
that harm beneficial ecosystem func-
tions, that depend on energy-intensive
monocultures and livestock factories,
destructive fishing practices and other
industrialized production methods.
Local to Global, and Everything
in Between
Food sovereignty recognizes that transform-
ing our food systems necessitates working
in our communities, changing international
policies, and everything in between. The
movement is rooted in the daily work of
every small farmer, rancher, fisherperson,
landless farm worker, and everyone else
involved in local food production. Yet no
matter what they produce, their ability to
survive is affected by international mar-
ket forces. The movement, therefore, also
“This is not ultimately
a battle about food
and farming. It is
about the survival
of all of us.”
— Shalmali Guttal, Focus
on the Global South

17. 8
includes community, national, and interna-
tional activists working for just trade and
economic systems.
The principles of food sovereignty challenge
the neoliberal economic model that governs
food systems in much of the world. The
neoliberal model promotes globalized trade,
favoring the import and export of large
quantities of food across borders. It assumes
that a low- or middle-income nation’s best
option is that of fitting into the economic
position allotted to it by richer countries
and financial institutions. If the American
Midwest can grow massive amounts of
corn, the rationale goes, then it should
grow corn for the world, while Colombian
farmers export coffee, Brazilian farmers
bananas, and so on. This logic favors a food
industry reliant on industrial-scale farming,
monocropping, and massive inputs of fuel,
fertilizers, and pesticides. The beneficiaries
are the corporate middlepeople who consol-
idate, arrange, package, and ship the food
around the world.
The proponents of this model are the World
Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF),
World Trade Organization (WTO), govern-
ments of industrialized countries, large
landholders, and corporations. They insist
that global South countries lower agri-
cultural tariffs on food coming into their
countries so as to open their markets to for-
eign trade. They also pressure countries to
eliminate agricultural subsidies, even though
many high-income countries like the U.S.
maintain large subsidies of their own. These
measures undermine local production and
the livelihoods of the world’s small-scale
farmers who cannot compete on an uneven
playing field with corporate giants.
A food system that depends on import-
ing and exporting goods around the globe
leaves everyone more vulnerable to the
whims of global market forces. When oil
prices rise, for example, communities and
countries who can’t afford the resulting
price spikes in food, or who no longer have
their own strong agricultural systems in
place, are left hungry.
Food sovereignty calls for the democratic
participation of the population in shap-
ing food and trade policies. It promotes
tariffs on food imports to protect local
markets and an end to international trade
“For a poor person in
Thailand, Brazil or Haiti, a
marginally lower number on
a computer screen in New
York, London or Tokyo may
be the difference between
eating and going hungry.”
— Helena Norberg-Hodge,
founder, International Society
for Ecology and Culture

18. 9
agreements and financial institutions that
interfere with the sovereignty and sus-
tainability of food systems. It promotes
de-industrialized agriculture, where local
farmers grow for domestic consumption
under local control.
Building the Food
Sovereignty Movement
The most powerful international coali-
tion promoting food sovereignty is Via
Campesina, an alliance of approximately
150 groups from 70 countries, representing
around 200 million small- and medium-size
farmers and food producers, landless people,
indigenous peoples, and rural women. The
coalition includes groups as wide-ranging
as the Indonesian Peasant Association, the
Confederation of Farmers’ Unions in Turkey,
and the U.S National Family Farm Coalition.
Via Campesina takes strong stands around
trade and financial institutions and poli-
cies, and opposes any intervention of the
World Bank, IMF, and WTO on questions
of food and land. For each critique, the
coalition advocates specific alternatives.
Via Campesina provides a network in
which groups can work together on global
campaigns, international days of action,
country-specific mobilizations, public edu-
cation, and demonstrations at prominent
venues such as climate talks and WTO
meetings.
Another important grassroots force for
food sovereignty is the Latin American
Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC
by its Spanish acronym), whose members
are both farmers and farmworkers. CLOC
represents the Latin American branch of
Via Campesina, but it also takes indepen-
dent positions and actions. CLOC pursues its
vision of a future without hunger through
three primary campaigns: challenging free
trade agreements, promoting agrarian
reform, and creating food sovereignty. More
recently, its focus has expanded to oppose
biotechnology. CLOC members develop their
political program through lobbying, popu-
lar education, protests, mass mobilizations,
international campaigns, and international
tours.
Another network that has spread through-
out Latin America over the past 30 years
is the Farmer to Farmer Movement
(Movimiento Campesino a Campesino). In
this network, small farmers are developing
sustainable agricultural techniques and inno-
vation, and passing this knowledge on via
several hundred thousand ‘farmer-promot-
ers’ or ‘farmer-technicians.’ The promoters
travel to communities across various regions,
sharing information, ideas, seeds, and tools.
Opposite Page: John Kinsman is a dairy farmer, forester, and president of Family Farm Defenders which works to change U.S. food and
farming policy and collaborates with Via Campesina and the international movement for food sovereignty.
©Nic Paget-Clarke, www.inmotionmagazine.com

19. 10

20. 11
The Launch of the U.S. Food
Sovereignty Alliance
Early on a gray Saturday morning in
November 2011, 75 people gathered around
an altar of seeds, soil, and burning sage in
the basement of a Chinese Methodist church
in Oakland, California. The group was a
mix of young organizers, Native community
leaders, Washington policy analysts, immi-
grants’ rights advocates, dairy and vegetable
farmers, fishermen, farm workers, and oth-
ers passionate about food sovereignty.
For the preceding year and a half, starting
with a small convening at the U.S. Social
Forum that declared, “It is our time to make
salt,” organizers had been nurturing the cre-
ation of the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance.
Now the diverse assemblage from North,
Central, and South America came together
for the first official meeting and spent the
day in intense political discussion, strategiz-
ing, and celebration.
The members of the assembly commit-
ted themselves to spreading the concept
of food sovereignty, already so prevalent
in many parts of the world, within the U.S.
They identified the power of agribusiness
corporations as the key challenge at hand,
and committed themselves to fighting it as
well as land and resource grabs. They agreed
to dedicate their energies toward land
reform, immigrant rights, trade justice, the
rights of Mother Earth, and defense of the
global commons. They also committed to
tackling power dynamics – including issues
of race, nationality, class, and occupation –
within the group itself, and to ensuring that
the Alliance truly represents the joint vision
of all those involved. Concluding with pro-
test songs and chants from food and land
movements around the world, the assembly
left participants energized and inspired for
the coming year of collaboration and collec-
tive struggle.
“Farmers everywhere in
the world are at root the
same farmers. Let us say
that the key to peace
lies close to the earth.”
— Masanobu Fukuoka,
farmer and philosopher

21. 12
“A Living Reality”
Dawn Morrison6
Dawn Morrison is the coordinator of the British Columbia Food Systems Network’s Working
Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty.
Secwepemc are the original people who come from the land where the water flows from high-
est mountains through the rivers on its way to the ocean. And like many indigenous people
around the world, our name tells who we are in relation to the land.
We have agricultural techniques and cultivation techniques that have been a part of our culture
for thousands of years, but it’s primarily hunting, fishing, and gathering. We are continuously
broadening the discussion in the food security movement to include the hunting, the fishing,
and the gathering. It brings [the movement] to a broader ecological perspective.
Food sovereignty has been a living reality for our people for thousands of years. The concept
may just have been newly introduced in the English language, but the living reality is very
much alive and well in our communities.
Really, there is no universal definition of food sovereignty because it’s up to each community to
describe for themselves what it means, recognizing the diversity of many different nations of
indigenous peoples.
With respect to that, I think the most important principle is the sacredness, that food is a gift
from the creator. In my language it’s Tqelt7kukpi. Food sovereignty is about our responsibility
to maintain those relationships to the plants and the animals that provide us with our food. It’s
not something that can be constrained by colonial laws or policies. It is up to us to be maintain-
ing our responsibility. Food sovereignty is about self-determination, about being free from the
control of the corporately owned globalized food system. It’s about being able to make those
decisions for ourselves about where we get our food.
6. Dawn Morrison, excerpted from presentation at the Community Food Security Coalition conference, October 2010.
12

22. 13
Food sovereignty is also about our partici-
pation and our responsibility. It’s based on
day-to-day actions and being involved in
traditional harvesting activities. On the indi-
vidual, family, and community level, we must
be participating in it or we become assimi-
lated into the globalized food system.
Food sovereignty is also about policy. We
recognize colonial policies are impacting
our ability to harvest our foods. We rec-
ognize that food sovereignty is ultimately
based on policy driven by practice from a
community base.
In Haiti, members of the Union of Peasant Groups of Bay map out the families and resources in their community as a step in planning
and tracking their local development process.
©BenDepp
13

23. 14
Miami Rice, or Food
Sovereignty, in Haiti?
Somewhere between 60 to 80 percent of
Haiti’s citizens are farmers.7
But despite this
large population of food producers, more
than half of what Haitians eat is imported.8
Up to half the nation is estimated to face
food insecurity and one-third of children
under five are chronically malnourished.9
This crisis is not a natural phenomenon. It
is the result of policy choices. In the 1980s
and 1990s, the U.S. and IMF pressured Haiti
to lower tariffs on food imports in order to
open up the market to foreign companies.
This led to a flood of underpriced food into
the country with which Haitian farmers
could not compete – notably rice, which
is among the seven most heavily subsi-
dized crops in the U.S.10
The subsidized and
7. U.S. Agency for International Development & Office of Foreign
Disaster Assistance, “Seed System Security Assessment, Haiti,”
August 2010, 1. USAID estimates that approximately 60 percent
of Haiti’s population are farmers; peasant groups such as the
Peasant Movement of Papaye use the figure 80 percent.
8. World Bank and UN, “Development at Work in Haiti,” April
2009, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTHAITI/Resources/
HaitiBrochureEng.pdf. This 2009 report states that “local
production accounts for only 45 percent of food consumption.”
9. UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs,
“Humanitarian Bulletin: Haiti,” September 21-October 18, 2011, 3,
http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/OCHA%20
Haiti_Humanitarian%20Bulletin_11_ENG.pdf; and Lucy Basset,
World Bank, “Nutrition Security in Haiti: Pre- and Post-Earthquake
Conditions and the Way Forward,” En Breve, June 2010, No. 157, 2.
10. Environmental Working Group, “The United States Summary
Information,” accessed February 24, 2012, http://farm.ewg.org/re
gion?fips=00000&regname=UnitedStatesFarmSubsidySummary.
industrial-scale U.S. production, on top of
lowered import tariffs in Haiti, created a
bizarre outcome: rice grown in such places
as Arkansas and California and shipped in by
boat could be sold cheaper than rice grown
in a neighboring field in Haiti. Between 1992
and 2003, rice imports in Haiti increased by
more than 150 percent,11
pushing hundreds
of thousands of Haitian farmers out of their
livelihoods and into the city to search for
work in sweatshops. (An overcrowded capi-
tal city is one reason why the toll from the
2010 earthquake was so high.) The import’s
impact was so great that Haitians dubbed
it Miami Rice, after the TV show popular at
the time. Today, a full 90 percent of the rice
eaten in Haiti comes from the U.S., while
local rice farmers struggle to survive.12
What would it take to turn this around?
What would it take to transform Haiti’s econ-
omy such that its role in the global economy
is no longer that of providing cheap labor
for sweatshops? What would it take for the
400,000 people left homeless by the 2010
earthquake to have a secure life and income?
According to Haitian small-farmer organi-
zations, food sovereignty and support for
peasant agriculture are big parts of the
11. Oxfam International, “Kicking Down the Door: How
Upcoming WTO Talks Threaten Farmers in Poor Countries,” April
2005, 26, http://www.fao.org/righttofood/KC/downloads/vl/en/
details/214560.htm.
12. USA Rice Federation, “USA Rice Efforts Result in Rice Food-
Aid for Haiti,” January 20, 2010, http://www.usarice.com/index.
php?option=com_content&view=article&id=957.

24. 15
solution. “It’s not houses that are going to
rebuild Haiti, it’s investing in the agriculture
sector,” says Rosnel Jean-Baptiste of Heads
Together Small Peasant Farmers of Haiti (Tèt
Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen). “If the country
doesn’t produce, farmers won’t be able to
survive. And we’ll always have to depend
on others.” Peasant groups and allies are
developing long-term plans for reorienting
Haiti’s political economy in favor of agricul-
ture. Their vision includes technical-support
programs for farmers, land reform, protec-
tion of native and traditional seeds, access to
credit, aid for seeds and equipment, govern-
ment investment in food storage facilities
and transportation systems, attention to
deforestation and Haiti’s ecological health,
and rural public services.
Women’s Declaration on Food Sovereignty (excerpted), Nyéléni,
February 27, 200713
“We, women from more than 40 countries, from different indigenous peoples of Africa, the
Americas, Europe, Asia and Oceania and from different sectors and social movements, have
gathered together in Sélingué [Mali] to participate in the creation of a new right: the right to
food sovereignty. We reaffirm our will to act to change the capitalist and patriarchal world
which puts the interests of the market before the rights of people. Under the watchful eye of
Nyéléni, an African woman who defied discriminatory rules, who shone from her creativity and
agricultural prowess, we will find the energy to establish our right to food sovereignty, carrier
of hope in constructing another world. We will carry this message to women all over the world.”
13. Nyéléni 2007, “Women’s Declaration on Food Sovereignty,” February 27, 2007, http://www.nyeleni.org/spip.php?article310.

25. 16
Women’s Work: Gender and
the Globalized Food System
“The notion of food sovereignty fits
well with a feminist agenda. Food
sovereignty recognizes women as
agents and actors and not merely
consumers in the food system.”
— Alexandra Spieldoch, director of the
Trade and Global Governance Program
at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade
Policy (IATP)14
Women produce 60 to 80 percent of all food,
both as subsistence farmers and as agricul-
tural wage laborers.15
They are the primary
providers for the majority of the world’s 925
million hungry people, obtaining food, col-
lecting firewood and water, and cooking.16
And yet they have less access to land and the
14. Alexandra Spieldoch, “A Row to Hoe: The Gender Impact of
Trade Liberalization on our Food System, Agricultural Markets and
Women’s Human Rights,” Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy,
March 2007, 12.
15. Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, quoted in:
Alexandra Spieldoch, “A Row to Hoe: The Gender Impact of Trade
Liberalization on our Food System, Agricultural Markets and
Women’s Human Rights,” Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy,
March 2007, 5-10.
16. Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, “925 Million in
Chronic Hunger Worldwide: Though Improved, Global Hunger Level
‘Unacceptable,” September, 14, 2010, http://www.fao.org/news/
story/en/item/45210/icode/; and World Food Programme, “Women
Shoulder Heaviest Burden in Global Food Crisis,” March 5, 2009,
http://www.wfp.org/stories/women-shoulder-heaviest-burden-
global-food-crisis.
resources necessary to grow on it than their
male counterparts. Inequitable distribution
of land, labor, and resources leaves farm-
ing women triply burdened by work: in the
fields, in the home, and in society.
How do the agricultural policies of interna-
tional financial institutions (IFIs), such as the
International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank, affect women? We have adapted the
following from Gender Action’s 2011 report
on gender and the food crisis:17
• When the collapse of agricultural mar-
kets – often precipitated by IFI policies
– forces men to leave home and travel
to other countries in search of work,
women are left behind to tend to family
and work family farmland;
• IFI pressure on governments to abolish
taxes on food imports and repay debts
reduces governments’ ability to pay for
healthcare and education. Spending
cuts in these sectors inevitably cause the
most harm to women and girls;
• Rising food prices put additional pres-
sure on already strained household
budgets. When women enter the formal
work force to help support household
consumption, girls are often forced to
leave school to attend to household
chores and care for younger siblings;
17. Excerpted from: Alana Fook, “Gender, IFIs and Food
Insecurity,” Gender Action, April 2011, www.genderaction.org/
publications/fdsec/primer.pdf.

26. 17
• IFI agriculture investments support big
businesses, not women farmers. IFI
investments tend to focus on agro-
processing and commercial agriculture,
which mainly utilize male laborers and
focus on external markets. These invest-
ments tend to overlook women, who
are often restricted to subsistence farm-
ing, and instead mainly benefit the
transnational corporations that win IFI
procurement contracts.
Though facing difficult challenges, women
around the world have been making strides
both in national policy and in land move-
ments themselves. In some places, they are
gaining greater access to arable land, tech-
nology, credit, markets, training, equipment,
and control over agricultural knowledge. In
certain countries, they have won the right
for their name, not just their husband’s, to
go on the land title, making them direct
beneficiaries of land reform. More women
In the Mexican state of Chihuahua, Rarámuri women choose corn to save for next year’s planting. They just finished participating in a
farmer-to-farmer workshop on seed selection.
©DavidLauer
17

27. 18
are directly earning wages for their agri-
cultural labor, instead of through their
husbands or fathers. And some countries are
articulating women-specific labor rights in
their constitutions.
Food sovereignty movements explicitly
recognize the importance of women in
agriculture. Via Campesina has made chal-
lenging gender inequity a central goal of
its work, both internally and globally. It
has hosted three international women’s
assemblies, led campaigns challenging
gender-based violence, hosted trainings
and exchanges for women, and commit-
ted to integrating a gender analysis into
each of its program areas. Internally, it now
requires that one woman and one man
from each region participate in the inter-
national coordinating committee. It has set
a goal of having 50 percent of delegates in
all committees and conferences be women.
It challenges its member organizations to
ensure that women play an equally signifi-
cant role in all leadership structures.
Reclaiming Control of Food and Agriculture
Peter Rosset
Agricultural economist Peter Rosset is with the Center for the Study of Rural Change in Mexico
and the Land Research Action Network. He is also a member of the technical support team of
Via Campesina.
There are several fundamental pillars that are necessary to take control over food and agricul-
tural systems. One is to force even reluctant or reactionary governments to regain control over
their national borders from the flow of imported food. That means canceling free trade agree-
ments and not signing WTO agreements. It means stopping the import either of incredibly
cheap, subsidized food from agro-export countries which drives local producers out of business,
or of food made ridiculously expensive by food speculation.
Governments also need to support peasant and small-farmer agriculture as the fundamen-
tal source of food for national economies. Why not big farms or agribusiness? It’s more than
proven in any country in the world that if agribusiness controls the majority of the land, there
will not be enough food for people because agribusiness just doesn’t produce food for local
18

28. 19
people. What agribusiness
does, be it the United States
or Thailand, is produce exports.
Sometimes those exports are
not even food for people but
soybeans for animals, or ethanol,
or biodiesel for automobiles in
other part of the world.
On the other hand, the real voca-
tion of the small farm, the family
farm, the peasant farm, the
indigenous farm, is producing
food for the family, for the local
economy, and for the national
economy. All over the world,
these farmers are underrepre-
sented in control of land. So a
second essential element to claim control over food and agricultural systems is for countries to
place their bets on peasant and family agriculture. And that means land has to be taken away
from agribusiness. That, in turn, means real agrarian reform, redistribution of land to people
who are landless, who are poor, who want to earn a living with dignity by producing food for
people. And that means rebuilding small and family agriculture by investing in it. That neces-
sitates changing budget priorities so that, instead of government subsidies flowing to support
the exports of agribusiness, they flow to small farms.
Yet a third pillar in reclaiming control of agriculture means changing how we produce food. Via
Campesina and other social movements say that we can no longer afford to keep food prices
tied to the cost of petroleum. We can’t keep using indiscriminate amounts of chemical fertilizer,
tractors, mechanical harvesters, and pesticides. We need to engage in ecological agriculture
that preserves soil fertility for future generations.
Fourthly, we need to defend the territories of indigenous peoples and peasant communi-
ties who haven’t yet lost their land. Part of the strategy must also be to gain new territories
through land reform or land occupations.
A fifth element involves seeds. We can’t allow seeds to be patented and privatized by
Monsanto and Syngenta and other corporations. We can’t allow them to be contaminated by
A Via Campesina march in Hong Kong, 2005, demanding an end to WTO trade
negotiations over agriculture.
CourtesyofViaCampesina
19

29. 2020
GMOs. We need to support the free exchange of local, indigenous seeds, because those variet-
ies are much more adapted to local environmental conditions and can form a much stronger
basis for new national food systems.
Sixth, we need to nationalize the food reserves that are in the hands of transnational corpora-
tions. Part of the origin of the recent food crisis is that under neoliberal policies of the past 20
years, most countries sold off their food inventories that were in the hands of the public sec-
tor. World food reserves are now largely in the hands of private corporations like Cargill and
Archer Daniels Midland. This is a problem because when it comes to food reserves, the public
sector and the private sector behave in exactly opposite ways. If there’s a food shortage, the
public sector releases food from storage so that prices won’t rise so fast, or so people who can’t
afford food can get it from public sources. But private traders and transnational corporations
hoard and speculate. That is, they withhold food from the market in order to drive prices up
even higher so that they can make a windfall profit, at the cost of some people not being able
to eat.
But we can’t just renationalize food reserves in the hands of governments because we can’t
trust governments. There has to be some kind of a co-management scheme where farmers and
consumers, through their social movements and grassroots organizations, participate in owning
and managing food reserves so that those reserves exist in every country – but at the service of
people, not of private profit.
Via Campesina and allied social movements have all gathered together under the banner of
food sovereignty. This is the collective banner of struggle to build counter-power to transna-
tional corporations, to renationalize food systems, and to regain control over rural territories
and the land. To make sure that land is used to support rural peoples. To support production,
for local and national consumption, of healthier food, more affordable food, food that’s not
speculated with, that’s not hoarded, that’s not contaminated with GMOs. To reclaim our food
systems and protect our lands and territories.

30. 21
2. A Level Planting Field:
Challenging Corporate Rule
“The farmer is the one who feeds us all.
Lives on credit ‘til the fall,
Then they take him by the hand,
And they lead him from the land,
And the middleman’s the
one who gets it all.”
— “The Farmer is the One,” traditional
from the 1800s (excerpted)
Just outside of the small town of Maumelle,
Arkansas sits your run-of-the-mill American
strip mall. And as in so many other box store
hubs, a Walmart dominates the landscape.
But something is a shade different about
this one: Its big, looming letters are not the
standard blue. These letters, in a new, green
hue, spell out “Walmart Neighborhood
Market.” Focused primarily on groceries,
Walmart’s “Neighborhood Markets” seem
a valiant attempt at a makeover, an effort
to woo the growing number of people who
find themselves driving down Main Street,
craving an actual, legitimate neighborhood
market.
A little further down the interstate, a giant
billboard with a photo of a stoic-looking
farmer watches over the speeding traffic.
He’s staring into the distance against the
backdrop of a glowing wheat field, with the
caption “America’s Farmers Grow America.”
It’s an image to melt all our pastoral hearts.
Until we read the small print in the corner:
“Monsanto.”
It’s true, Monsanto and Walmart catch
all the flack. But they are irresistible tar-
gets for a reason. Walmart now sells more
groceries than anyone else in the country,
and Monsanto is the world’s largest seed
company. Together, they profit off of a tre-
mendous percentage of the food that will
eventually make its way into our stomachs.
It’s no secret that we are bombarded and
manipulated by corporate name brands
every day. A Coca-Cola annual report some
years back stated, “All of us in the Coca-Cola
family wake up each morning knowing that
every single one of the world’s 5.6 billion
people will get thirsty that day… If we make
it impossible for these 5.6 billion people
21

31. 22
to escape Coca-Cola…, then we assure
our future success for many years to come.
Doing anything else is not an option.”18
‘Impossible’ to ‘escape’ certainly sounds
daunting. Creepy, even. Yet people are
escaping by the droves, escaping a food sys-
tem more obsessed with money than with
sustenance. Around the globe people are
declaring an end to the corporate takeover
of food.
In the small village of Hinche, Haiti on a hot
June day in 2010, a circle of thousands of
farmers stood around a small pile of smoul-
dering seeds. Though seeds are sacred to
farmers, this pile was not being offered up
in reverence, but in resistance. A few months
18. Coca-Cola Corporation, 1993 Annual Report, quoted in E.F.
Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (Blond & Briggs, 1973), 8.
earlier, the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture
had given Monsanto permission to import
and ‘donate’ 505 tons of hybrid corn and
vegetable seeds. “It’s a declaration of war,”
peasant leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste
said. The importation of massive amounts
of hybrid seed threatens Haiti’s traditional,
regionally adapted seed stock. It also creates
a cycle of dependence, with farmers buying
seeds from Monsanto each year rather than
relying on local markets or their own saved
seed. In an open letter, Jean-Baptiste, the
Executive Director of the Peasant Movement
of Papay (MPP), called the entry of Monsanto
seeds into Haiti “a very strong attack on
small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity,
on Creole seeds…, and on what is left of our
environment in Haiti.”19
19. Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, group email, May 14, 2010.
©TequilaMinsky
Small farmers burn Monsanto seeds in Haiti, June 2010. The hats say, “Down with Monsanto.”

32. 23
The same day as the protest in Haiti, activ-
ists in Seattle gathered in solidarity. They
burned Monsanto seeds in front of the
headquarters of the Gates Foundation,
which is promoting genetically modified
seeds in Africa. In Missoula, Montana,
activists dressed in lab coats and Tyvek to
protest. In Chicago, a Haiti support group
didn’t have Monsanto seeds, so they burned
Cheetos instead. The Organic Consumers
Association’s network sent more than 10,000
emails protesting Monsanto to USAID and
President Obama.
Once the maker of Agent Orange, Monsanto
is also a leading herbicide company and a
primary force in the creation and marketing
of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Via Campesina, the international alliance
of small farmers, peasants, landless people,
and indigenous people, declared Monsanto
and other transnational corporations the
“principle enemies of peasant sustainable
agriculture and food sovereignty.”20
The
coalition keeps the spotlight on Monsanto at
the majority of its protests, most recently at
the 2011 UN Climate Change Conference in
Durban, South Africa. In October 2009 and
2010, the coalition organized international
days of action against the company and agri-
business in general, with teach-ins, marches,
20. Via Campesina, “Peasants Worldwide Rise up Against
Monsanto, GMOs,” October 16, 2009, viacampesina.org/en/
index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=797:peasan
ts-worldwide-rise-up-against-monsanto-gmos&catid=49:stop-
transnational-corporations&Itemid=76.
JeremySeifert,www.gmofilm.com
Protesting in Los Angeles.

33. 24
hunger strikes, land occupations, and pro-
tests of all types carried out in at least 20
countries.21
From Corn to Cheetos:
Food as Big Business
The nation’s move towards industrializa-
tion in the 19th Century ushered in major
changes in agriculture. The focus shifted to
creating an abundance of affordable food
for a growing population, while simulta-
neously reducing the number of people
laboring in the fields in order to free them
up for work in the factories. The need for
more food with less labor meant more
mechanization and therefore bigger farms.
The emergence of vast, spread-out farms
required that food travel long distances, and
went hand-in-hand with the creation of
companies to transport, package, and pro-
cess food.
Over the years, our food has become increas-
ingly commodified, that is, converted from
nourishment to a mass-marketed consumer
product. These days, an ever-shrinking
number of mega-corporations controls an
ever-expanding amount of food production,
from seeds to equipment, from chemi-
cal inputs to processing. Consider these
statistics:
21. Food First, “La Via Campesina Carries out Global Day of
Action against Monsanto,” Institute for Food and Development
Policy, October 19, 2009, www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2595.
• Just four companies own approximately
84 percent of the U.S. beef market;22
• Four firms control 66 percent of the
pork-packing market and another
four control 58 percent of poultry
processing;23
• Four companies own 43 percent of the
world’s commercial seed market;24
• Three companies (Archer Daniels
Midland, Cargill, and Bunge) control 90
percent of the global grain trade;25
and
• Four companies own 48 percent of
grocery retailers (Walmart being the
largest).26
22. Food and Water Watch, “Horizontal Consolidation and
Buyer Power in the Beef Industry,” July 2010, http://www.
foodandwaterwatch.org/factsheet/beef-industry/.
23. Food and Water Watch, “Taking on Corporate Power in the
Food Supply,” March 2011, http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/
factsheet/taking-on-corporate-power-in-the-food-supply/.
24. Kristina Hubbard, “Out of Hand: Farmers Face the
Consequences of a Consolidated Seed Industry,” Farmer to Farmer
Campaign on Genetic Engineering, National Family Farm Coalition,
December 2009, 4, http://farmertofarmercampaign.com/Out%20
of%20Hand.FullReport.pdf.
25. Eric Holt-Giménez, “The World Food Crisis: What Is Behind
it and What We Can Do,” Hunger Notes, October 2008, http://www.
worldhunger.org/articles/09/editorials/holt-gimenez.htm.
26. Forty-eight percent statistic is from Food and Water
Watch, “Taking on Corporate Power in the Food Supply,” March
2011, http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/factsheet/taking-on-
corporate-power-in-the-food-supply/. Walmart’s position as the
largest grocery retailer is recorded in Capital Reporting Company,
“Workshop on Agriculture and Antitrust Enforcement Issues in our
21st Century Economy,” Agriculture and Antitrust Enforcement
Issues, December 8, 2010, 183, www.justice.gov/atr/public/
workshops/ag2010/dc-agworkshop-transcript.pdf.

34. 25
The True Price of a Banana:
Hidden Costs of a Corporate-
Controlled Food System
The underlying objective of much of our
industrial food system is to provide a profit
to shareholders and CEOs. Coca-Cola’s
advertising budget was over $2.9 billion dol-
lars in 2010.27
It’s money well spent from a
stockholder’s point of view; profits that year
were $11.8 billion.28
The current system, however, was arguably
not built only to amass wealth. Many policy-
makers and supporters, historically and
today, have been driven by the conviction
that industrial-scale agriculture is the best
way to produce massive amounts of afford-
able food. And indeed, in some ways it has
accomplished this. People in the U.S. spend
relatively little on food – about 7 percent of
their total spending, as compared to 13 per-
cent in France, 23 percent in Mexico, and 38
percent in Vietnam.29
As individuals, most of
27. Jeremiah McWilliams, “Coca-Cola Spent More Than $2.9
Billion on Advertising in 2010,” Atlanta Journal Constitution online,
February 28, 2011, accessed February 29, 2012, http://www.ajc.
com/business/coca-cola-spent-more-856183.html.
28. CNN, “Fortune 500’s Top Companies: Most Profitable,” CNN
Money online, May 23, 2011, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/
fortune/fortune500/2011/performers/companies/profits/.
29. U.S. Department of Agriculture/Economic Research Service,
“Table 97 - Percent of household final consumption expenditures
spent on food, alcoholic beverages, and tobacco that were
consumed at home, by selected countries, 2010,” June 2011, www.
ers.usda.gov/Briefing/CPIFoodAndExpenditures/Data/Table_97/
table97_2010.xls.
us in the U.S. are devoting less time, energy,
and money to feeding ourselves then we
ever have historically.
On the buying end, it seems an irresistibly
good deal, our 99¢ soda or $1.50 loaf of
bread. But these prices represent just a frac-
tion of the true costs of getting that soda
and bread into our shopping bags. There
are hidden costs in our industrialized food
system that don’t show up at the register,
but which we pay for in multiple ways. Some,
depending on class, race, nationality, and
livelihood, pay more dearly than others.
Some of these costs do show up financially.
We subsidize food corporations through our
taxes, which pay for public works like trans-
portation infrastructure for long-distance
shipping (highways, airports, and railroads),
communication infrastructure (satellites,
television, radio and internet), energy infra-
structure (coal plants and nuclear power
stations), and research and development
(like government-funded crop research). Tax
dollars also fund the government subsidies
that keep certain crop prices low, allowing
corporations to create their processed foods
so cheaply.
Small- and medium-sized farmers are pay-
ing extremely high hidden costs. Their farms
have been steadily disappearing as land is
further consolidated into the hands of fewer
people. The U.S. has lost 800,000 farmers

35. 26
and ranchers in the last 40 years.30
Between
1900 and 2002, the number of farms in the
U.S. shrank by 63 percent, while the average
farm size increased by 67 percent.31
The dairy
industry has undergone an even starker
decline: in just over 35 years, between 1970
and 2006, the country lost 88 percent of
its dairy farms, while the average herd size
per farm increased from 19 to 120 cows.
30. Capital Reporting Company, “Workshop on Agriculture
and Antitrust Enforcement Issues in Our 21st
Century Economy,”
Agriculture and Antitrust Enforcement Issues, December 8, 2010,
6, www.justice.gov/atr/public/workshops/ag2010/dc-agworkshop-
transcript.pdf.
31. Carolyn Dimitri, Anne Effland, and Neilson Conklin, “The 20th
Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy,” USDA
Economic Research Service, Electronic Information Bulletin, No.
3, June 2005, www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib3/eib3.htm. An
additional statistic from the EPA reports that the number of farms
in the U.S. fell from 6.8 million in 1935 to about 2 million in 1997.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Demographics,” modified
September 10, 2009, accessed February 29, 2012, www.epa.gov/
oecaagct/ag101/demographics.html.
Farmworkers and other laborers all along
the food supply chain also pay by receiving
inadequate wages; they are twice as likely to
be living below the poverty line.
As consumers, we all pay with our health
and well-being. Our country’s most popular
cuisine is affectionately called ‘junk,’ after all.
Eating the highly processed food made read-
ily available to us has led to epidemic levels
of diabetes and heart disease. Individuals get
chastised for their own diet-related problems
while ‘junk’ food is much easier and cheaper
to access than healthy food.
Recent outbreaks of Listeria and stomach
acid-resistant E. coli are other manifesta-
tions of the costs to our health. Food-safety
experts blame the industrialized produc-
tion of grain-fed cattle and poultry for the
emergence of these dangerous bacteria
“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground,
bethought himself of saying, This is mine, and found people
simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil
society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from
how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have
saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the
ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this
imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of
the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1755.

36. 27
strains.32
Manure from overcrowded animal
farms seeps into the groundwater and rivers.
When vegetable crops are irrigated, bacteria
in the water can contaminate the food sup-
ply. If you’ve ever driven past a commercial
livestock lot, the smell alone lets you know
something has gone terribly wrong.
The most profound hidden costs are enacted
on our planet as a whole: polluted water,
air, and soil; deforestation; acid rain; species
extinction; and climate change. The corpo-
rate food system wreaks countless ecological
harms.
Monocropping, a farming system where the
same crop is grown on a piece of land year
after year, is foundational to industrial-scale
agriculture. It’s what makes farming such
gigantic swaths of land physically possible.
Yet monocropping depletes the soil, upends
the ecological balance, and creates condi-
tions highly susceptible to pests and disease,
requiring more pesticides and fertilizers.
Spraying toxic pesticides on our food has
become the norm, so much so that we call
32. Nina Planck, “Leafy Green Sewage,” The New York Times
online, September 9, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/
opinion/21planck.html?ex=1159675200&en=219a8917c1497
4f2&ei=5070. Made to digest grasses, the stomachs of these
animals become unnaturally acidic on grain diets, creating perfect
laboratories for bacteria that are harmful to humans. Farms try to
counteract these bacteria by using vast amounts of antibiotics. In
2009, nearly 29 million pounds of antibiotics were sold for animal
production. 2009 FDA report referenced by Helena Bottemiller,
“FDA Releases First Estimate on Antibiotics in Ag,” December 13,
2010, Food Safety News, www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/12/fda-
releases-first-estimate-on-antibiotic-in-ag/.
it ‘conventional’ agriculture, though there’s
nothing conventional about it. Introduced
in large scale only after World War II, using
surplus warfare chemicals,33
pesticides are
now applied at a rate of 1.1 billion pounds
per year in the U.S. That’s 22 percent of the
world’s total use.34
These chemicals move
throughout our ecosystem, making their
way into groundwater and our drinking sup-
ply, traveling down streams and rivers, and
eventually reaching the ocean. In just one
example, fertilizer running off fields and
down the Mississippi River has created such
an imbalance that there is a ‘dead zone’,
where nothing can survive, the size of New
Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico.35
Pesticides
also wind up on our plates and in our
bloodstreams. In 2005, the Environmental
Working Group tested the umbilical cords of
10 babies from different U.S. hospitals and
found an average of 200 industrial chemicals
and pollutants in their blood, including a
number of pesticides.36
33. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of
Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006).
34. Arthur Grube, et al., “Pesticide Industry Sales and Usage
2006 and 2007 Market Estimates,” US Environmental Protection
Agency, February 2011, http://www.epa.gov/opp00001/
pestsales/07pestsales/usage2007.htm#3_1.
35. Elizabeth Weise, “Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone Predicted to
be the Size of New Jersey This Year,” USA Today online, June 29,
2010, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/
post/2010/06/gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone-predicted-to-be-the-
size-of-new-jersey-this-year/1.
36. Environmental Working Group, “Body Burden - The Pollution
in Newborns: A benchmark investigation of industrial chemicals,
pollutants, and pesticides in umbilical cord blood,” July 14, 2005,
http://www.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden2/execsumm.php.

37. 28
If all of these costs showed up in the
prices we pay at the store, things
would be very different. If the prices
reflected the oil that powers the
jet to bring a banana thousands of
miles, together with the air pollution
that results, the workers’ healthcare
costs after handling pesticides, and
the future loss of soil health due
to monocropping, this fruit would
certainly be a luxury item in the
North rather than part of an average
American breakfast.
“What single thing could change
the U.S. food system, practically
overnight? Widespread public
awareness – of how this system
operates and whom it benefits,
how it harms consumers, how it
mistreats animals and pollutes
the land, how it corrupts public
officials and intimidates the press,
and most of all, how its power
ultimately depends on a series of
cheerful and ingenious lies.”
— Eric Schlosser, author of Fast
Food Nation37
37. Eric Schlosser in “One Thing to Do about Food: A Forum,”
Alice Waters, ed., The Nation online, August 24, 2006, http://www.
thenation.com/article/one-thing-do-about-food-forum.

38. 29
Who Put That Fish in
My Tomato?
GMOs are one frightening demonstration
of how corporations are gaining more con-
trol over our food supply. GMOs are formed
when genetic material from one plant or
animal is inserted into another, creating
an organism with new genetic traits. Since
their introduction in the U.S. in the mid-
1990s, GMOs have been met with heated
protest for a myriad of ecological, health,
and economic reasons.
Though relatively new, GMO technology
has spread quickly. Today, 90 percent of the
country’s soybean acreage and 80 percent
of corn acreage is planted with Monsanto’s
GMO varieties.38
Eighty percent of gro-
cery items in the U.S. now contain GMOs.39
Because corporations such as Monsanto,
Pioneer and Syngenta own the patents on
GMO seeds, GMOs establish further eco-
nomic control of farmers by agribusiness.
Farmers who buy GMO seeds are required to
sign contracts prohibiting them from saving
or replicating the seed. They also are prohib-
ited from doing any research on the seeds
(to determine under which conditions they
38. Kristina Hubbard, “Out of Hand. Farmers Face the
Consequences of a Consolidated Seed Industry,” Farmer to Farmer
Campaign on Genetic Engineering, National Family Farm Coalition,
December 2009, 4, http://farmertofarmercampaign.com/Out%20
of%20Hand.FullReport.pdf.
39. Organic Consumers Association, Millions Against Monsanto
website, accessed February 29, 2012, www.organicconsumers.org/
monsanto/action.cfm.
thrive, to compare seeds from different com-
panies, or to investigate environmental side
effects, for example).40
Not only do farmers
find themselves locked into a cycle of buying
new seeds from a particular company each
year, they also oftentimes become reliant on
the same company’s pesticides, which are
made to accompany many GMOs.
GMOs also contaminate non-GMO crops.
Because plants cross-pollinate via wind and
insects, the pollen of GMO plants can travel
to nearby fields and cross with other plants.
This threatens farmers’ control over their
seed supply and the unique crop traits that
they, or their ancestors, may have devel-
oped by saving seeds over the years. Organic
growers can lose their organic certification if
their crops are contaminated. Adding insult
40. The Editors, “Do Seed Companies Control GM Crop
Research?,” Scientific American online, August 13, 2009, http://
www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-seed-companies-
control-gm-crop-research.
Some 250 farmers, scientists, and activists destroying
experimental GMO potatoes, Belgium, May 2011.
CourtesyoftheBelgianFieldLiberationMovement,
http://fieldliberation.wordpress.com/press/”

39. 30
to injury, Monsanto has sued more than
144 farmers since the mid-1990s for patent
infringement when their crops have become
contaminated. An additional 700 farmers
have settled out of court.41
In response to this trend, in 2011 the Organic
Seed Growers and Trade Association –
together with 82 other plaintiffs, including
agricultural associations, seed companies,
and farmers – brought a lawsuit against
Monsanto in Manhattan federal district
court to establish protections for organic
farmers whose crops are contaminated by
GMOs. The court ruled against them, and as
of this writing the plaintiffs are considering
an appeal.
The Organic Consumers Association
has spearheaded the “Millions Against
Monsanto” campaign, demanding that the
company stop intimidating small family
farmers and forcing untested and unlabeled
genetically engineered foods on consumers.
In 2012 the Association gathered enough
signatures for a ballot initiative in California
to mandate labeling of products containing
GMOs. They hope that forcing companies
to label in California, the eighth-largest
economy in the world, will prompt coun-
trywide labeling. And that ultimately, this
41. Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, “Judge Sides
with Monsanto: Ridicules Farmers’ Right to Grow Food Without
Fear, Contamination and Economic Harm,” Organic Seed Growers
and Trade Association website, February 27, 2012, www.osgata.
org/judge-sides-with-monsanto-ridicules-farmers-right-to-grow-
food-without-fear-contamination-and-economic-harm.
transparency, coupled with consumer educa-
tion, will make GMO products unmarketable.
Labeling laws are also being considered
by legislators in Vermont, Washington,
Connecticut, and other states.
Around the world, farmers and activists
have long been taking it upon themselves to
destroy Monsanto’s GMO crops. Groups have
cut down or pulled up fields of corn, pota-
toes, rapeseed, and other crops, sometimes
laying them at the entryways of govern-
ment buildings where they are demanding
anti-GMO legislation. In 2003 in the state of
Paraná in Brazil, activists uprooted plants at
one of Monsanto’s experimental labs. They
went on to file and win a land reform claim
and then started their own agroecology cen-
ter on the site.
“The seeds of life are the seeds
of all humanity, our common
inheritance for more than
10,000 years, and they should
remain as numerous and diverse
as the stars above, shared by all,
owned by none, and ever filling
us with awe and wonder.”
— Jeremy Seifert, maker of an
upcoming film about GMOs

40. 31
From Growing Profit to
Growing Food:
Reclaiming Agriculture
A mass movement of people is actively creat-
ing and supporting smaller-scale, local food
networks. But in order for these local sys-
tems to truly thrive, we must simultaneously
dismantle the policies and structures that
have taken agriculture out of the hands of
small farmers the world over. The following
are a few recent campaigns and victories in
the U.S., where farmers, food justice activ-
ists, and consumers are uniting to challenge
corporate rule.
• In one strategy to reduce corporate con-
trol of the milk industry, many states,
including Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts,
Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Texas,
Washington, and Wisconsin, are con-
sidering bills that would allow more
farmers to sell raw milk.42
Milk that
is produced and sold locally in small
batches doesn’t require the lengthy
shelf life or, therefore, the pasteuriza-
tion process that has become status quo
for industrialized milk. Most often sold
42. Real Raw Milk Facts, “Raw Milk Facts State by State,” Real
Raw Milk Facts website, accessed February 29, 2012, http://www.
realrawmilkfacts.com/raw-milk-regulations; Dan Flynn, “Indiana,
Iowa Stir Raw Milk Debate,” Food Safety News, February 16, 2012,
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2012/02/indiana-iowa-stir-raw-
milk-debate/; and Dan Flynn, “Raw Milk Debates Underway in
Several States,” Food Safety News, February 6, 2012, http://www.
foodsafetynews.com/2012/02/raw-milk-games-already-underway-
in-3-statehouses.
directly off the farm, raw milk creates a
more direct link between farmers and
consumers, cuts out corporate middle-
people, and provides farmers with a
larger percentage of the consumer dol-
lar. And any raw-milk lover will swear
it tastes better and is more nutritious.
Vernon Hershberger, a Wisconsin dairy
farmer who was recently charged with
operating without a license and four
criminal misdemeanors for supplying
raw milk to a buyers’ club, says, “There
is more at stake here than just a farmer
and his few customers... [T]his is about
the fundamental right of farmers and
consumers to engage in peaceful, pri-
vate, mutually consenting agreements
for food, without additional oversight.”43
• Nine U.S. states have established
some legal restraints to keep corpora-
tions from buying and owning farms.44
In Pennsylvania, the Community
Environmental Legal Defense Fund has
helped individual towns pass and defend
local ordinances banning corporate
farming in their communities.
43. County Sheriff Project, “Farmer Faces Possible 3-year Prison
Term for Feeding Community,” February 24, 2012, http://www.
countysheriffproject.org/17-health-freedom/38-declaration-of-
food-independence-march-2-in-wisconsin.
44. New Rules Project, “Corporate Ownership Limitations,” The
Institute for Local Self-Reliance, accessed February 29, 2012,
www.newrules.org/agriculture/rules/corporate-ownership-
limitations.

41. 32
• Organizations like the Program on
Corporations, Law, and Democracy
(POCLAD) have popularized the need
to eliminate ‘corporate personhood,’
not just in agriculture but in society in
general. Corporate personhood gives
corporations the same constitutional
rights as human beings under the 14th
Amendment, which means they are
entitled to due process, equal protec-
tion, and free speech. POCLAD has been
doing research, hosting workshops, and
publishing books and articles to spark
conversations about the effects of cor-
porate power on our governance, lives
and the planet.
• Activists are challenging the 2010
Supreme Court decision Citizens United
v. Federal Election Commission, which
prohibits government restrictions on
political spending by corporations. Big
agribusiness, as well as all other cor-
porate industries, can now have even
greater sway over the political process.
Communities around the country, led by
organizations like Move to Amend and
United for the People, have introduced
local resolutions calling on Congress to
pass a constitutional amendment over-
turning Citizens United. As of March
2012, 120 municipalities and two states
had passed these resolutions. At the fed-
eral level, 19 different resolutions have
been proposed in Congress.
• In 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice
and the Department of Agriculture held
five workshops throughout the country
to hear public opinion about corporate
consolidation in agriculture. In prepara-
tion, organizations formed the ‘Bust
the Trust’ coalition to ensure that fam-
ily farmers and consumers had a strong
presence at the workshops. In May
2011, when the government had still not
released its findings from the hearings,
160 groups sent a letter to the govern-
ment asking that they announce an
action plan for addressing the problem
of corporate consolidation.45
45. Testimony from the hearings can be found at www.justice.
gov/atr/public/workshops/ag2010/index.html.
A rally in New York City, February 2012, following hearings in
a lawsuit to protect farmers against legal action if their crops
become contaminated with GMOs.
©TequilaMinsky

42. 33
The Consumer’s Got To Change The System
Ben Burkett46
Ben Burkett is a family farmer, the coordinator of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives for
the state of Mississippi, the president of the board of the National Family Farm Coalition, and a
member of the food sovereignty commission of Via Campesina.
The Federation of Southern Cooperatives grew out of the civil rights movement. We are prob-
ably 90 percent African American, but we have white, Native American, and Hispanic farmers.
Racism is still here in the marketplace and in credit, but we have learned to deal with it and not
give up on changing the system. We struggle every day to bring about a change.
We work with co-ops in 16 Southern states. Everything we’re about is food sovereignty, though
I don’t think that many farmers in Mississippi really know the term. It’s the right of every
individual on earth to wholesome food, clean water, clean air, clean land, and the self-deter-
mination of a local community to their rights of intellectual property to grow and to do what
they want.
We just recognize the natural flow of life; it’s just what we’ve always done. Like myself, I’m a
fourth-generation farmer on a farm that my great-grandfather homesteaded in 1889. That
wasn’t but about 20 years after the end of slavery. He got 164 acres from the United States gov-
ernment. I still have the title – they called it a patent – signed by Grover Cleveland. And we’re
still farming that same land.
Our view is local production for local consumption. The crops we grow, we sell them mostly
within a 300-mile radius of this [Indian Springs Farmers Association-owned] packing facility.
We don’t want a change. We just want to go back to the way things were. It’s just supporting
mankind as small farmers and family farmers. It’s not so much a matter of making money, it’s a
matter of carrying on so your farm will continue on. But you have to make some profit off it in
order to keep it going.
Some say the system is working. It appears to be working fine, but corporate agriculture is not
sustainable. Our system of growing food is heavy, heavy, heavy dependent on petro-chemicals,
46. Ben Burkett, interview with Beverly Bell, Indian Springs Farmers Association Co-op packing plant, Indian Springs, MS, June 22, 2010.
33

43. 34
Ben Burkett on his farm in Petaluma, Mississippi, with his great-nephew.
courtesyofGrassrootsInternational
on inorganic compounds, mostly petroleum-based. And then it takes too much control out of
the local community. Now, it might last for several decades, but in the end it can’t last.
You’ve got a few companies that want to control all the seedstock of the world, and they’ve
just about got a handle on marketing three of the main commodities: corn, soybean, and cot-
ton. It’s hard to find seeds that aren’t treated with the Monsanto-manufactured Roundup
Ready. I’ve tried to find cotton that wasn’t treated, but I couldn’t. Now they’re working on con-
trolling wheat and rice.
34

44. 35
And they make those seeds so most of them don’t regenerate the next year anyway. But if you
do save any of the seeds, Monsanto and the other companies are going to prosecute you for
saving their property. Those seeds are patented, the property of the seed company, so they
reserve the right to keep them. They’ll take you to court and make you pay back their money.
Basically you’re just sharecropping for them, you’re leasing their seeds.
I don’t think that’s fair. Once you’ve bought the seeds and planted them on your own land,
it looks to me like they ought to be your own seeds. That’s the essence of life. Where did
Monsanto and the other companies get their first seed from? Someone gave them to them.
Those seeds didn’t fall out of the sky.
Through the National Family Farm Coalition, we signed onto the protest against the seeds
Monsanto sent to Haiti. Developing countries such as Haiti have no need for Monsanto, for
hybrid seeds or GMO seeds, no kind of way. Let them use their traditional seeds they’ve been
saving for hundreds of years. Let them propagate and then continue to farm traditionally.
Because if they get used to buying from America, they’ll lose the diversity of seed that they
need in order to build new seed. Normally when those types of seeds and other products from
America hit a country, local farmers lose. They get put out of business, they can’t compete.
We’ve been – I don’t want to use the word co-opted – trained by the institutions of agriculture,
the companies, the university system, and technology, to give our rights over to the company,
which I think is absolutely wrong. We have to be more proactive than reactive as small farmers,
family farmers. We can’t wait for the government and large corporations to dictate to us what
we can do in our region.
They got a unique way of buying you off to not fight here. The American consumer doesn’t
care as long as it’s cheap. But no matter what us farmers plant, the consumer’s got to change
the system. People buying the end product have to complain. As long as they don’t complain,
there’s no need even talking about it. The marketplace dictates.
35

45. 36
“If I’m hoeing or cleaning out the chicken
house, I have time to think. If I’m on the
tractor, I have time to think.”
Dena Hoff is explaining how she fits dream-
ing up ways to challenge international trade
policies into her days.
At the moment, she has stepped away from
her farm, close to 500 acres of everything
you can imagine – vegetables, dry beans,
corn, wheat, sheep, poultry, cows, and more
– for eight precious days of summer in order
to be a part of the National Family Farm
Coalition (NFFC) board meeting. “That’s way
too long this time of year. I try not to be
away from lambing through harvest.” But
Dena shows up for these meetings each year
anyway, motivated, she says, by “the audac-
ity of multinational corporations to control
government agencies and to write the rules
that impact us.”
NFFC is a network of 28 rural and family
farm organizations from around the coun-
try. Together with other national coalitions,
they bring together farmers, organizers, and
policy analysts towards the goal of changing
government agricultural policy.
“I grew up where Union Carbide mined ura-
nium,” says Dena, “and I saw people all over
my little community dying because Union
Carbide left this big pit and then went away
when it was no longer economically viable
for them. Then I started learning all these
other issues like corporate concentration and
the lack of credit and farm bill issues, and
realized how interconnected everything was,
from the grassroots all the way to the global.
You have to pay attention to the whole
picture.”
“Brought to you by…”:
How Government Policies
Underwrite Corporate Profit
In tandem with the steady industrialization
of our food systems, the last 50 years have
witnessed the erosion of national agricul-
tural policies that support farmers. The
U.S. government, for example, used to set
3. Good Growing Conditions:
Changing Government Policies
36

46. 37
price floors for certain commodity crops
(nonperishable staples like corn, wheat, rice,
and cotton), which acted like a minimum
wage for farmers, regulating the lowest
amount they could be paid for their prod-
ucts. Another government program, that of
maintaining grain reserves, allowed farmers
to store some grain crops in seasons when
they overproduced; the reserves could then
be released into the market in future, less
abundant seasons. This regulation of extra
grain helped prevent food shortages and
price spikes.
But agribusinesses wanted to buy com-
modity crops, from which they make their
products, as cheaply as possible. So they
pressured legislators to end price-regulat-
ing policies. In the 1970s, the government
started chipping away at price floors and
grain reserves, and in 1996 they were elimi-
nated completely. Farmers lowered their
prices in response, attempting to attract
more customers, and at the same time had
to boost production to compensate for lost
income. Prices spiraled downward. Farmers
were suffering and the government, to keep
them from going under, ramped up the
subsidy system. Subsidies, which began in
the 1930s during the Great Depression, use
taxpayer money to give commodity farm-
ers direct payments, tax breaks, subsidized
insurance, and other financial support.
These government payments allow farms to
continue selling their products cheaply with-
out going out of business.
Despite common misperceptions, the real
winners of the subsidy system are not by and
large the farmers receiving the payments.
Instead, they are the corporations who buy,
process, transport, and resell the commodi-
ties. Commodity crops are generally not sold
directly to consumers. They are sold to mid-
dlepeople who package and resell them, or
who turn the raw materials into other prod-
ucts – corn to produce animal feed, corn
syrup, or ethanol, for example. Subsidies
allow corporations to buy these goods from
farmers for such artificially low prices that
they make an even higher profit, while tax-
payers foot the bill. The meat industry is a
perfect example. About half of all the corn
and soybeans grown in the U.S. are used to
feed livestock.47
The cheaper the cost of corn
and soybeans, the less money factory farms
pay out for animal feed, the less money pro-
cessors pay out for meat, and the more both
make in profit.48
The mix of subsidies, together with deregu-
lated agricultural policies, creates such a
skewed equation that some commodity
crops are sold for even less money than it
costs to grow them. This practice, called
47. Timothy Wise, “Identifying the Real Winners from U.S.
Agricultural Policies,” (Global Development and Environment
Institute Working Paper No. 05-07, December 2005), 3.
48. Meat raised in this way costs less on grocery store
shelves, but only in exchange for mistreated animals, a degraded
environment, and meat that is less healthy for consumers. Small
farmers who don’t rely on grain but instead allow their animals to
graze on pasture – a healthier practice for animals, consumers,
and the planet – don’t reap the financial benefits of cheap
industrial animal feed.

47. 38
stamps, can be positive for both farmers and
consumers. Subsidies need to be restruc-
tured while, even more fundamentally, new
policies need to be implemented to promote
a just and sustainable food system.
“The only way we’re going to…
change the most basic attitude
of policy-makers… is for you
and me to become the policy-
makers, taking charge of every
aspect of our food system –
from farm to fork.”51
— Jim Hightower, former Agriculture
Commissioner of Texas
Seeds of Policy Change
People across the nation are advocating for
policies that better support small farmers,
make healthy food accessible to all, respect
the rights of farmworkers, and preserve
farmland. They’re also promoting changes
in international policies, like trade agree-
ments and food aid programs, to stop
harming farmers in other parts of the globe.
Some recent policy victories and campaigns
include:
51. “Jim Hightower” in “One Thing To Do about Food: A Forum,”
Alice Waters, ed., The Nation, September 11, 2006, 21.
‘dumping,’ enables corporations to undercut
farmers around the world. Between 2000
and 2003, for example, while the cost of pro-
ducing rice was approximately $415 per ton,
government subsidies allowed agribusiness
companies to sell it overseas for just $275
per ton.49
In 2002, cotton was exported at 61
percent, and wheat at 43 percent, below the
cost of production.50
This whole perplexing system is kept in place
by close-knit relationships between corpora-
tions and government. Members of Congress
give out subsidies that keep costs low for
agribusiness and pass legislation that opens
markets in their favor. In return, corporations
support legislators with campaign contribu-
tions, votes, and investment in their districts.
A revolving door spins government officials
into corporate positions and then back again.
Yet throwing out government subsidies alto-
gether isn’t a workable solution. Eliminating
this support system without changing the
underlying conditions that make commod-
ity farms dependent on it won’t benefit
farmers. And some subsidies, like grants
for sustainable agriculture, tax credits for
renewable energy conversions, and food
49. Kate Raworth and Duncan Green, “Kicking down the Door:
How Upcoming WTO Talks Threaten Farmers in Poor Countries”,
(Oxfam Briefing Paper #72, Oxfam International, April 2005),
4, http://www.fao.org/righttofood/KC/downloads/vl/en/
details/214560.htm.
50. Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, “United States
Dumping on World Agricultural Markets: February 2004 Update,”
(Cancun Series Paper #1, February 2004), 3, www.iatp.org/files/
US_Dumping_on_World_Agricultural_Markets_Febru.pdf.

48. 39
• The National Family Farm Coalition,
farmer Dena Hoff’s group that we men-
tioned above, is educating and lobbying
for better loan and grant programs for
farmers. They’re also working for the
reinstatement of price floors which
would set minimum prices farmers must
receive for their goods, as well as grain
reserves to regulate the dramatic swings
of scarcity and surplus. They, together
with other groups like Food and Water
Watch, Food First, and the Institute
for Agriculture and Trade Policy, are
engaged in research, education, and
strategy to help turn farmers, consumers,
and all of us into effective policy-change
advocates.
• People from all walks – rooftop garden-
ers, PTA parents, ranchers, and chefs
– are becoming more involved in the U.S.
Farm Bill. Up for renewal every five to
seven years, this hugely influential legisla-
tion lays out the framework for national
food and farming policy. It regulates agri-
cultural subsidies, food stamps, school
lunch programs, rural conservation, and
everything in between. Given the heavy
impact the set of laws has on our daily
lives, more and more people are assert-
ing that we cannot leave its shaping to
policymakers alone. The Community Food
Security Coalition, a coalition of nearly
300 organizations, drafted a platform of
top priorities for the 2012 Farm Bill, and
helped organizations learn about and
lobby for those changes
During the lead-up to the Farm Bill
vote in 2008, the Farm and Food Policy
Diversity Initiative brought together
farmers and farmworkers of color to
ensure that their perspectives were
heard in the legislative process. They
helped secure policies putting a morato-
rium on land foreclosures in cases where
there was a claim of discrimination, pri-
oritizing socially disadvantaged farmers
for federal loans and grants, and pro-
moting locally grown produce in food
stamp and school-lunch programs.
• In 2009, the “Country of Origin Labeling”
(COOL) law went into effect. This fed-
eral law mandates that retailers label
certain meats, produce, and nuts with
their country of origin. In 2011, the
WTO ruled against the COOL label-
ing for meat products, claiming that it
interfered with international trade law.
(Other WTO decisions that year included
a ruling against U.S. ‘dolphin-safe’ tuna
labels and the overturning of a U.S. ban
on candy- and cola-flavored cigarettes.)
Activists and groups like Food and Water
Watch are pressuring President Obama
to appeal the ruling. Some states such
as Vermont, Minnesota, Montana and
Maine have their own state-labeling
policies and programs to help residents
choose foods produced closer to home.
Regional efforts, like one run in Western
Massachusetts by Community Involved
in Sustaining Agriculture, also label local
goods. Their ‘Local Hero’ logo adorns

49. 40
products in grocery stores, restau-
rants, farms, garden centers, and public
institutions.
• U.S. meat- and dairy-eaters are becom-
ing wise to the ways of industrial meat,
dairy, and egg production, and demand-
ing an end to animal abuse. Ninety
percent of laying hens in the U.S., for
example, spend their entire lives in cages
smaller than the standard-sized piece
of paper.52
In 2008, California residents
organized a ballot initiative requiring
that “calves raised for veal, egg-laying
hens and pregnant pigs be confined
only in ways that allow these animals
to lie down, stand up, fully extend their
52. The Humane Society of the United States, “Battery Cages,”
July 14, 2010, www.humanesociety.org/issues/confinement_farm/
facts/battery_cages.html.
Occupy Wall Street march, New York, December 2011. The National Young Farmers Coalition connects new farmers to share skills and
fight for national policies that will “keep them farming for a lifetime.”
EdwardCrimmins

50. 41
Residents speak to the Springfield, Massachusetts city council in support of a local ordinance to protect and promote community
gardens, March 2012. The youth organization Gardening the Community began crafting the ordinance after losing access to the garden
lot they had been working on for more than 10 years.
limbs and turn around freely.”53
More
Californians voted for the law than for
any other citizen initiative in state his-
tory.54
Though the right to stand up or
53. California Office of the Secretary of State, “Prop 2:
Standards for Confining Farm Animals,” California General
Election Official Voter Information Guide, November 4, 2008, http://
voterguide.sos.ca.gov/past/2008/general/title-sum/prop2-title-
sum.htm.
54. Tracie Cone, “Lawmakers Rally around Animal Welfare
Issues,” Associated Press, May 29, 2009, http://www.nctimes.
com/news/state-and-regional/article_71d7def6-5874-5c09-93c0-
7e0643eb904b.html.
turn around is a small step, California’s
legislation is part of an overall trend in
addressing animals’ well-being. Michigan
has since passed a similar bill, and
Arizona, Colorado, Florida, and Maine
have passed laws to phase out gestation
crates, in which pregnant pigs are kept in
cages only slightly larger than the span
of their bodies. Individual consumers are
increasingly switching to cage-free eggs
and pasture-raised meats, and corpora-
tions are being forced to change their
practices as a result.
AaronDonovan

51. 42
Youth Food Bill of Rights: Rooted in Community
Rooted In Community (RIC) is a national grassroots network that empowers young people to
take leadership for food justice. Each year RIC organizes a gathering where youth from around
the country come together to share knowledge and skills, build relationships, and strategize. At
the 2011 leadership summit, youth began creating a Youth Food Bill of Rights. In RIC’s words:
“It’s what youth believe our food system should be like! It’s a work in progress. It’s created by
youth. It’s a Statement to All. It’s a tool for Change!!!” There are currently 19 demands that span
from school-wide to global. Here are just a few:
• We the youth demand more healthy food choices in our schools, and in schools all over the
world. We want vending machines out of schools unless they have healthy choices. We need
healthier school lunches that are implemented by schools with the ingredients decided on
by the youth. We demand composting in schools
and in our neighborhoods.
• We the youth demand a ban on high fructose
corn syrup and other additives, and preservatives
that are a detriment to our and our communities’
health. This must be implemented by our govern-
ment, and governments around the world.
• We demand school assemblies to recruit more
youth to promote food justice. The continuation
of the movement for food justice, food sover-
eignty and cultivation of future youth leaders is
necessary for feeding our youth, our nation and
our world.
Youth from Rooted in Community
sign the Youth Food Bill of Rights.
courtesyofRootedinCommunity
42

52. 43
Declaring Local Control:
Food and Community
Self-Governance
On a windy November day in Blue Hill,
Maine, Heather Retberg is standing at the
microphone on the steps of town hall sur-
rounded by 200 people bundled in heavy
coats. “We are farmers,” she tells the crowd,
“who are supported by our friends and our
neighbors who know us and trust us, and
want to ensure that they maintain access to
their chosen food supply.”
Blue Hill is one of a handful of small Maine
towns that have been taking bold steps to
protect their local food systems. In 2011,
they passed an ordinance exempting their
local farmers and food producers from fed-
eral and state licensure requirements when
these farmers sell directly to customers.
The federal government has stiffened
national food-safety regulations in order
to address the health risks associated with
industrial-scale farming. Recent widespread
recalls of contaminated ground turkey, can-
taloupe, eggs, and a host of other foods
illustrate the serious problems at hand.
These outbreaks have been linked to indus-
trial farms with overcrowded animals and
unbalanced ecosystems. Furthermore, the
significant distance between industrial farms
and consumers creates a lack of accountabil-
ity and difficulties tracing problems when
they arise.
Small-scale farming, however, doesn’t spark
the same safety risks. Small farmers who
sell their food locally will tell you that the
nature of their business, based on face-to-
face relationships with the people who eat
their food, creates a built-in safety protec-
tion. They don’t need inspectors to make
sure they are following good practices; keep-
ing their neighbors, families, and long-time
customers in good health is an even better
incentive. Customers are also more able to
witness the farming practices firsthand.
Still, small farmers are being pushed out of
business because they are saddled with the
financial and bureaucratic burdens of the
same regulations as large industrial farms.
Heather and her family’s Quill’s End Farm
raise grass-fed beef and veal, lamb, pastured
pork, chickens for eggs and meat, turkeys,
dairy cows and goats, a diverse mix that is
better both for the land and the economic
viability of the farm. Given the scale of their
business, building their own chicken process-
ing unit is financially out of the question,
however, so instead, they were butchering
at a neighboring farm’s USDA-approved
unit. When state inspectors told them that
USDA regulations didn’t allow them to share
this neighbor’s facility, Quill’s End Farm was
forced to stop raising and selling chickens
altogether.
“I just remember the feeling that if that was
happening to us, the same message was
being given to all sorts of farmers of our
scale and people were just going to give up

53. 44
Since then, says Heather, “We’ve heard
from people in Tennessee, Texas, California,
Virginia… someone in New Zealand. Last
year, Vermont passed a food sovereignty
resolution with similar language. Over in
California they’re working in the direction
of an ordinance in Mendocino County. In
Arizona they’re beginning to circulate peti-
tions. And this fall we heard that a town in
Utah had passed the ordinance.”
As of this writing, Maine’s State Department
of Agriculture is challenging one of the
local ordinances by suing a dairy farmer.
Community members are reaching out to
friends in surrounding counties and national
Farmers and community members in Blue Hill, Maine rally to
defend their recently enacted Local Food and Community Self-
Governance Ordinance.
and stop farming,” says Heather. “My sense,
more than anything, was a really daunting
realization that, ‘Oh, this is how farms get
disappeared.’ And people are so supportive,
but then when we disappear, everybody
might just kind of shake their heads like,
‘Oh, it must just be really tough to make
it farming.’ There’s sort of an expectation
that farming will fail but not much under-
standing about why that happens.”
So Heather, together with a small group
of other farmers and farm patrons in
Maine, began crafting the Local Food and
Community Self-Governance Ordinance,
the first of its kind in the country. The
ordinance exempts direct sales between
farmers and customers (at farms, farm-
stands, and markets, for example) from
state and federal licensing and inspec-
tions. It allows Heather, for example, to sell
chicken at her farmstore, and Bob St. Peter,
a fellow farmer and organizer, to sell his
homemade cookies at the farmers’ market.
In March 2011, the ordinance passed
unanimously in the town of Sedgwick,
Maine. Three days later it was presented at
Heather’s town meeting in Penobscot. “We
spent a good while talking about whether
to give $3,000 to our local library,” says
Heather, “and I was sitting there thinking
‘Whoa, this is a tough crowd.’ But then when
the ordinance came up, it was another unan-
imous vote. It was tremendous.” Four other
towns in Maine followed suit.
PeterRobbins

54. 45
“Collective black self-recovery takes place when we begin to
renew our relationship to the earth, when we remember the
way of our ancestors… Living in modern society, without a
sense of history, it has been easy for folks to forget that black
people were first and foremost a people of the land, farmers.”
— bell hooks
food justice coalitions, asking them to call in and urge the state to drop the suit. Meanwhile,
organizers from far and wide are watching closely, hoping to launch similar initiatives in their
own communities.
In addition to town efforts like those in Maine, farmers and activists are attempting to tackle
the government’s one-size-fits-all approach to food safety at the federal level. When U.S. leg-
islators voted to increase FDA inspections and reporting requirements for farms in 2010, over
150 food groups succeeded in winning an amendment that provides some exemptions for small
farmers. “Foodborne illnesses don’t come from family agriculture,” says Senator Jon Tester
from Montana, who co-sponsored the amendment.55
55. Helena Bottemiller, “Tester Offers Hope on S. 510, Help for Small Farms,” Food Safety News, September 27, 2010, accessed February 28,
2012, http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/09/tester-offers-positive-outlook-on-s510-amendment/.