Originally published by Food Tank

Bonnie Haugen and her family run a grazing dairy farm in Southeastern Minnesota. She recently spoke about the impacts of corporate concentration on her community in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform: “When we bought these acres 29 years ago, there were about 12 dairy farms within a three mile radius of us. Now, there’s only one other dairy with approximately 400 cows aside from us. What I’ve seen in my community mirrors national trends: the pressure of corporate ag has taken a fair opportunity away from my neighbors who wanted to keep or pass on dairy farming.” 

Squeezed by inflation that is pushing up the cost of both everyday goods and farm inputs, Midwest farmers increasingly support candidates committed to busting up corporate monopolies in food and farming. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, for instance, in a tight re-election race against Republican opponent Jim Schultz, has led the charge on tackling anticompetitive practices in the agricultural sector that are contributing to inflation. 

“Three of my grandkids ages 8, 6, and 3 want to farm,” continued Haugen in her July 2022 statement, “I want them to have the opportunity to farm without being a serf to corporate ag.” Haugen is a supporter of the Land Stewardship Action Fund (LSAF), dedicated to electing leaders that promote family farming and strong rural economies. 

Farmers Doubly Squeezed

Farmers don’t just grow food, of course; they also consume food–and all manner of basic goods. This means farmers are doubly squeezed by the higher cost of both production and consumption. On the consumption side, farmers and non-farmers alike have felt the increase in living expenses; grocery prices, for instance, are up 13 percent from a year ago. With a few large firms dominating every step in the food chain—from retailers like Walmart to processors like Nestle to seed and chemical giants like Bayer—consolidation is a major contributor to high food prices. 

Former Whole Foods executive and retail market expert Errol Schweizer explains: “Corporate concentration is the strategy, but the goal is extreme profiteering, redistributed upwards to investors and executives. Market concentration increases prices to consumers while hurting worker bargaining power Squeezing farmers is just the first step in a radically inequitable value chain.” 

The Midwest has been beset by precarious farm incomes for decades—dipping into the red more often than not, which means assuming more and more debt. As food analyst Ken Meter points out in his book Building Community Food Webs, between 1996 and 2017, growing corn resulted in an aggregate loss of US$524 per acre while cumulative losses for wheat farmers totaled US$1,236 per acre.

“The commodity system draws wealth out of rural communities,” Meter said. “Over the past century, farmers have really only made money when there was some external crisis, such as the oil crisis of 1973, the global housing finance crisis of 2008, and the war in Ukraine. Otherwise, net income keeps falling even as food prices rise for consumers. But the monopolies in the middle profit every year.”

A new report from Midwest Healthy Ag confirms that Midwest farmers are struggling under the weight of rising costs, including for fertilizers, diesel, and renting land, combined with decreased income from selling milk, grain, and other products. One farmer interviewed for the report said, “Increased fuel prices, along with decreased price for a bushel of corn make me doubt I can survive after 2021.”

Policymakers Rally Against Consolidation

While corporate concentration in agriculture has gone relatively unchecked for decades, food cost inflation has brought the issue front and center. “Corporate profiteering and out-of-control consolidation by big agricultural firms have led to increased prices at every point on the food chain, from the farm to the grocery store,” said Representative Mark Pocan (D., WI—2nd) in a statement announcing the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act of 2022. 

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has also disparaged corporate concentration in agriculture: “Highly concentrated local markets in livestock and poultry have increasingly left farmers, ranchers, growers, and producers vulnerable to a range of practices that unjustly exclude them from economic opportunities and undermine a transparent, competitive, and open market—which harms producers’ ability to deliver the quality, affordable food working families depend upon,” said Vilsack.

Vilsack’s statement was made in September 2022 as President Biden announced a new US$15 million fund to ramp up collaboration between the USDA and State Attorneys General on enforcement of competition laws, such as the laws against price-fixing. The news follows a December 21, 2021 letter to Secretary Vilsack from a bipartisan coalition of 16 attorneys general offering recommendations for improving competition in the livestock industry.

“One of the ways corporations keep profits high at consumers’ expense is by creating unfair markets where there’s no meaningful competition,” said Minnesota AG Keith Ellison, who spearheaded the letter, “This is especially true in agriculture, where farms and farming communities often face artificially high prices and struggle to afford their lives because antitrust behavior by Big Ag deliberately leaves them with few choices.”

Randy Krzmarzick, a row crop farmer and LSAF supporter in Sleepy Eye, MN, commented, “I’ve been farming some 40 years and I’ve seen continued consolidation in all parts of agriculture, fewer companies that supply our products and buy our commodities.” When asked why he’s planning to vote for Keith Ellison, Krzmarzick said, “I think it’s important to have an attorney general who’s watching out for abuses and who’s on our side—the side of family farmers, of which there’s less and less of us all the time.” 

Photo courtesy of Jed Owen, Unsplash

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In 1979, an idealistic 44-year-old Black woman named Nettie Mae Morrison moved with her husband to Allensworth, 75 miles south of Fresno, in California’s Central Valley. 

“She wanted to be a part of history,” said her son, Dennis Hutson, who was in his mid-20s at the time. The town had a distinctive past. It was founded in 1908 by Allen Allensworth, a man born into slavery who became the first African American to reach the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. About 3 square miles in size, , it was the first town in California founded and governed by Black people—and it served as a beacon of possibility for Black people all over the nation, its population growing to around 1,200 people. 

But the community soon fell on hard times.

In 1914, the Santa Fe Railroad Company moved its rail stop from Allensworth to nearby Alpaugh, a majority-white town, dealing a major blow to Allensworth’s economy. That same year, Col. Allensworth died after being struck by a motorcycle during a visit to Los Angeles. 

It was access to water, however, that proved the most challenging. 

According to California’s water regulatory agency, “The company that sold the land to Col. Allensworth,” the Pacific Farming Company, “didn’t fulfill its promise to build an adequate water system, leaving the growing population with debt and dry wells. Drought struck the Central Valley soon after the town was founded, which led to poor crop yields and further decreased vital water supplies.”

In 1966, the town suffered another blow when officials discovered arsenic in the drinking water, and by the 1970s Allensworth no longer appeared on most maps.

The town’s storied past and ongoing challenges were what drew Morrison there, Hutson said of his mother. She dedicated the rest of her life, from 1979 until her death in 2018, to Allensworth, where she joined church efforts and nonprofit campaigns against local polluters and rallied to secure clean drinking water for the community. On weekends, her five grown children joined her in her efforts.

Decades later, two of her children—twins Dennis Hutson and Denise Kadara, felt a similar calling to Allensworth. Hutson, a Methodist preacher and Air Force chaplain living in Las Vegas at the time, remembered his frustration that little seemed to have improved for local residents despite his mother’s many efforts. As recently as 2020, nearly one-third of the population still lived below the poverty line. 

“[I asked myself], ‘Why doesn’t the government do something?’” Hudson recalled. “A voice [in my head] responded, ‘Why don’t you do something?’”

So in 2007, Hutson and Kadara, age 54, and Kadara’s husband, Kayode Kadara, decided to buy 60 acres from a retiring farmer in Allensworth, calling it the TAC Farm (TAC originally stood for The Allensworth Corporation, an entity that has since been dissolved.) Over the next few years, Hutson moved from Las Vegas and the Kadaras from Half Moon Bay, California, to settle in Allensworth full-time.

Their goal was to create a Black-owned, Black-operated farm that would honor Allensworth’s legacy and boost the local economy in the Valley. They began to farm a mix of collards, okra, mustard greens, watermelon and black-eyed peas because, as Hutson said, “I’m going to grow food that I know Black people want to eat.”

The Central Valley is sometimes called the nation’s breadbasket, producing about 8% of total agricultural output and nearly 40% of the country’s fruits and nuts. But climate change poses a serious threat to the region’s farms. Annual average maximum temperatures in Allensworth, and the surrounding San Joaquin Valley, which is part of the Central Valley, increased by 1 degree F from 1950 to 2020. That figure is projected to increase another 4 or 5 degrees F in the next 30 years, according to a state-commissioned report released earlier this year. The region is also experiencing its most severe drought in a millennium, according to a separate study published earlier this year in the journal Nature.

The extreme heat and drought don’t just threaten crops. These conditions make farm work more dangerous for workers and pose critical health risks for surrounding communities, according to Chantelise Pells, a water-systems researcher at UC Merced and co-author of the state-commissioned report.

“When you compound the expenses of air conditioning, poor air quality and limited access to water, [the climate crisis] is a huge economic burden for low-income communities,” Pells said. “They have to make a choice of whether to suffer in the heat or not have enough money to meet their basic needs.”

According to the same report, hundreds of thousands of residents in the San Joaquin Valley—many of whom are farmworkers—do not have access to clean drinking water and instead rely on store-bought bottled water. More frequent heat waves, which are often accompanied by poor air quality, increase the economic burden on low-income communities in the region that already experience disproportionate rates of asthma and heat-related illnesses.

Lack of rainfall and snowmelt runoff also mean farmers rely more heavily on groundwater, a practice that has become unsustainable, experts say. And amid the water scarcity, small-scale farmers like the Hutson-Kadaras are struggling to compete with larger farms.

“Most small-scale farmers don’t have the means to dig deeper wells and compete with large farms for access to groundwater,” said Angel Santiago Fernandez-Bou, a researcher at UC Merced and another co-author of the state-commissioned report.“During a drought, this can be a big problem for small or disadvantaged farmers.”

In 2007, for example, Hutson dug a 720-foot well on his family’s property, only to discover that his neighbors, who operate larger-scale operations, have wells thousands of feet deep. He realized that meant his well—and the farm’s lifeline—would be at risk of drying up long before his well-financed neighbors’ water sources would. (Around 42% of public wells in the San Joaquin Valley are at risk of drying up due to current drought conditions, according to the state-commissioned report.)

”When you are in the midst of a drought in a state that is having severe water challenges, it seems to me that you would rethink how you do your farming,” Hutson said, “—that it would encourage you to consider other ways to provide for your livestock [while] at the same time trying to provide for your environment.” 

In 2011, the Hutson-Kadaras participated in an organic farming training program, where they learned adaptive practices, such as enriching their soil with organic compost and installing windbreaks—hedges of trees to protect crops against wind—that would limit their reliance on synthetic fertilizers, reduce soil erosion and conserve water. 

In the past decade, the TAC Farm has adopted other climate friendly practices, including closed-loop agriculture—a technique in which farmers recycle nutrients and organic matter material back to the soil.The Hutson-Kadaras also raise rabbits, feeding them organic alfalfa and using their nutrient-dense manure as fertilizer. 

Hedgerows and windbreaks reduce soil erosion, minimizing soil disturbance, which in turn leads to less dust and fewer pollutants in the air. Healthy soil increases water retention, leaving more water in the aquifers. The cover crops add fertility to the soil, reducing the need for agrochemicals that pollute the air and water. The benefits of these farming practices, if adopted widely, reverberate throughout the surrounding community, according to Pells.

“Using regenerative practices [like cover cropping and reducing tillage] is a win-win,” Pells said. “It improves water and air quality, while lessening the economic burden on the farmers themselves.”  

The experiences over the past 15 years have convinced the Hutson-Kadaras of the importance of small-scale and cooperative farming. The benefits aren’t just environmental, Hutson said. Surrounding communities have been shown to benefit economically as small farms generate jobs and circulate income among local establishments. 

State officials are now looking to the Hutson-Kadaras’ farm as a model for developing a new generation of small-scale, sustainable farmers. Earlier this summer, state lawmakers earmarked $10 million in funding to help Hutson and Kadara develop a farmer training program that focuses on sustainable practices and cooperative methods that can help fight the tides of climate change and transform the Central Valley into a more economically and environmentally sustainable region. 

The program will primarily recruit burgeoning Black, Indigenous and other farmers of color in an effort to close some of the racial disparities that are rampant in food and agriculture. After 7 months of training, participants can lease a small plot of land on the Hutson-Kadara’s farm for the next 2½ years and sell their goods to local cooperatives. (While land access has been, and continues to be, an issue for many beginner farmers, organizations like Minnow exist to facilitate the transfer of land into the hands of California’s farmers of color while advancing Indigenous sovereignty.) 

Drought and extreme heat notwithstanding, Hutson said his dream—to make Allensworth once again a beacon of hope for Americans of color—is slowly becoming a reality. In June 2022, California state Governor Newsom set aside an additional $32 million dollars in the state budget for Allensworth—a majority of which will go to building a new visitor center that will connect the town’s history of Black self-determination with its future as a sustainable and equitable farming hub.

“I want Allensworth to be known for training and producing the next generations of cooperative, small-scale, sustainable farmers—whether they are Black, Latinx, Indigenous or Asian,” Hutson said. “That’s what I hope for and that’s what we are working toward.”

This article was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations for Nexus Media News.  Nexus Media News is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. 

Header image: LA Times

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Alongside a public health emergency, Covid-19 has unleashed a staggering spike in global hunger. More than a quarter of a billion people are expected to face acute food insecurity as a result of the pandemic. Among the hardest hit are Black, brown, and Indigenous small-scale food producers – and the consumers they feed – from countries already scarred by colonialism, import dependence, and the climate crisis. Yet, these are the very people who are leading movements to address the roots of hunger while responding to the disruptions wrought by Covid-19. 

Recognising the precarity of an industrial food system that drives farmers into debt and poisons their soil and water, these producers are increasingly embracing agroecology – a way of farming that coexists with natural ecosystems to produce healthy food. At the Agroecology Fund, we acted swiftly to support their mutual aid and solidarity responses to Covid-19 – channeling nearly $1 million through an emergency fund to 59 grassroots organisations across five continents earlier this year.

In the process, we learned several key lessons on how to respond to an acute crisis, while deepening transformative change.

Lesson 1: Take the lead from grassroots organisations and BIPOC communities

Traditional grantmaking deliberations often place an onerous burden on grassroots groups with limited resources for funder engagement. Funders must make their decision-making processes more equitable and expedient. For this emergency fund, we simplified requests for proposals, and streamlined grant disbursements. But making funding processes more accessible is critical beyond moments of crisis. We stand with our peers calling for such transformations in philanthropic practices, including the US-based network HEAL Food Alliance, which urged food systems funders to do more to center racial equity and resource BIPOC communities who are already scaling critical solutions.

Lesson 2: Support food sovereignty and food security

Last month, the United Nations’ World Food Programme was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for providing food aid to almost 100 million vulnerable people globally. While a powerful recognition of just how urgent food security is, food aid – too often consisting of imported genetically modified (GMO) grains, ultra-processed foods, and surplus commodities – actually undermines local economies and small food producers.

For nearly a decade, the Agroecology Fund has prioritised food security without compromising food sovereignty – the right of peoples to determine what they eat and how it is produced. Social movements like our partner, La Via Campesina, representing 200 million peasants worldwide, remind us that we can only end hunger by supporting the small producers who already feed the majority of the world’s population. 

Increasingly, governments and UN agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Environment Programme (UNEP) endorse principles of agroecology. It is becoming clearer to policymakers that strengthening local resilience means supporting communities to grow and distribute emergency relief in times of crisis even as they steward ecosystems and ensure a sustainable food supply through the year.

Lesson 3: Invest in long-term resilience

To some, addressing the Covid-19 hunger crisis may seem an impossible trade off between providing urgently needed handouts or investing in long-term solutions. Our emergency grantees show it’s possible to rapidly mobilise mutual aid while strengthening long-term food security in their communities. 

From the Philippines to Argentina, through interventions as diverse as online marketplaces and microcredit programs, our grassroots partners are helping their communities’ weather the crisis and build resilience. In Zimbabwe, when market closures left thousands of farmers stuck with perishable produce, our grantee Pelum Zimbabwe mapped local supply chains to reveal healthy food options to consumers and policymakers. In India, Amrita Bhoomi launched a producers’ cooperative so farmers could supply healthy, locally grown food at fair prices.

Grantees we support have also been working to shape the policy response to the crisis. In Brazil, for example, the Landless Workers Movement (MST) has been advocating for public procurement sourced from agroecological farmers. 

Lesson 4: Tap the power of pooled funds

Faced with the scale of today’s interlocking crises, collective action is essential. Pooled funds help individual donors move swiftly to make well-informed investments. Groups like ours – a pooled fund of more than 30 donors – and other networks including Thousand Currents and Grassroots International have deep connections to social movements that can help steer resources towards transformational change. As one of our fund donors said, ‘On my own, I would never know which grassroots groups in the Philippines or Brazil or Uganda to support to address the food crises unfolding there.’

Pooled funds also help generate positive peer pressure among collaborating organisations to give more. Promisingly, many of our peers are offering matching grants, disentangling donations from asset returns, and even initiating spend downs in response to this global crisis.

Today’s challenges are immense; tomorrow’s will be no less so. We must work together to fund grassroots-led humanitarian relief and activism that builds toward lasting, systemic change, ensuring our charitable dollars function not as a Band-Aid, but as part of a global effort to eradicate the roots of hunger in all its complexity.

Amrita Gupta leads communications at the Agroecology Fund and Daniel Moss is its executive director. Anna Lappé directs the food and democracy program of the Panta Rhea Foundation and is a member of the fund.

The post Food Today, A New Food System Tomorrow appeared first on Real Food Media.

Photo from Somali Bantu Community Association Facebook page

The Somali Bantu Community Association’s Liberation Farms have served as a lifeline of food and financial security to more than 200 refugee farmers whose communities are disproportionately hit by both COVID and hunger, while also serving the broader community, including provision of fresh, healthy foods to local schools.

With over two million members, the All Nepal Peasants’ Federation is working to dismantle casteism, as well as sexism and ageism, with special branches dedicated to the empowerment of Dalits (“untouchables” in the caste system), women, and youth. ANFPa has also played an active role in Nepal’s democratization process, achieving the inclusion of food sovereignty in the country’s new constitution. Nepal is now one of several countries in the world to have adopted food sovereignty into law.

Organized by the US Food Sovereignty Alliance, the Food Sovereignty Prize is awarded each year as a counterweight to the “World Food Prize” which critics decry for its singular focus on top-down, industrial approaches.

Learn more about the 2020 Food Sovereignty Prize awardees here. 

Featured image: All Nepal Peasants’ Federation courtesy of US Food Sovereignty Alliance

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by Anna Lappé with Daniel Moss, Heated / Medium

As COVID-19 spreads worldwide, we’ve become attuned to those on the front lines: Doctors and healthcare workers, yes, but also those who feed us. If we didn’t get it already, this global crisis is a wake-up call for how our collective fate is tied to the way we relate to nature, use the land, and treat farmers and workers who grow, process, and distribute our food.

Unfortunately, in the last half-century, both public and private investments in industrial food systems that exploit people and undermine the natural systems on which food security depends have ramped up.

Worldwide, industrial agriculture drives 80 percent of deforestation. On nearly every continent, land grabs by agribusiness have pushed small farmers onto increasingly marginal land and indigenous communities off ecosystems they’ve long stewarded. These dynamics have brought wild animal populations, natural hosts for pathogens, into closer contact with humans.

Scientists have long warned it would only be a matter of time before those pathogens found new hosts — us. Indeed, damning evidence from evolutionary biologists and epidemiologists suggests that the industrial food system has helped create the structural conditions for this outbreak, and for others to follow in its wake. This crisis is a powerful reminder that our industrial food system puts us all at risk.

But there is another way. As funders investing in food systems that promote biodiversity, farmer well-being, and health, we’ve witnessed incredible innovations in the past few decades that give us hope amid the crisis. Earlier this year, we helped convene innovators — scientists, farmers, policymakers, funders, and advocates from five continents — sharing strategies for food system resilience and the policies needed to defend it.

We heard from indigenous Peruvian potato farmers, West African women rice farmers, and indigenous livestock breeders from Kyrgyzstan whose work is all rooted in what is known as “agroecology” — the science, on-farm practices, and social movements that support food systems working with nature instead of fighting against it with synthetic, external inputs. Guided by principles of diversity, regeneration, and localization, agroecology combines indigenous and traditional agriculture with modern science, boosting animal and crop health for maximum nutritional benefit and ecosystem restoration.

At that gathering in southern India, we heard firsthand accounts of the impact of our industrial food system even before this current pandemic: Reliance on chemical inputs and fossil fuels — for pesticides, fertilizer, packaging, and transportation — destroys biodiversity, plunges farmers into debt, and contributes to the climate crisis.

We heard about how a myopic focus on commodity crops has resulted in unhealthy diets responsible for the surge in diet-related illnesses worldwide and how industrial animal agriculture operations breed disease and drive massive water and air pollution. We also heard how such a dependence on commodities, bought and sold on a volatile global market, creates a shaky foundation for food security and breaks the connection between eaters and food producers.

But we also heard solutions. In Kyrgyzstan, peacebuilding programs are working with herders and geneticists to revive the disappearing gene pool of two aboriginal livestock breeds — the Kyrgyz horse and the Buryat cow — to help restore Central Asia’s nomadic pastoralism and pasture ecosystems. By focusing on preserving this genetic diversity, these breeders ensure that native livestock thrives — livestock that is resilient to the region’s harsh climate. In contrast, animals bred exclusively for productivity crammed into factory farms increases the risk of illnesses and dangerous pathogens.

In Burkina Faso, Groundswell International is working with farmers’ movements using agroforestry, mixed cropping, rainwater harvesting, and composting to gain incredible results despite the water scarcity near the encroaching Sahara desert. With these practices, they’ve reclaimed abandoned land for farming and obtained up to 130 percent yield increases of millet and sorghum, while regreening the landscape and adapting to climate change. In agroecological systems like these, the use of diverse and native species bridges wild and cultivated areas, helping to manage pests while also providing vital pollinators with continuous habitat.

In southern India, grassroots farmer networks like the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha and village-level women’s self-help organizations have been advocating for years for a shift to natural farming practices to prevent dependency on chemical inputs, farmer debt, and spiraling farmer suicides. Policymakers listened. Today, the Andhra Pradesh state government supports more than half a million farmers to adopt agroecological practices in a massive public program called Community Managed Natural Farming.

In Ecuador, the civil society-led Agroecology Collective collaborates with municipal governments in a campaign for healthy, safe, and locally grown food through a network of farmers markets and direct-to-consumer food programs, known as CSAs or community-supported agriculture. Shortening the supply chain between those producing food and those consuming it, as it’s being done in Ecuador, is essential to weather crises.

From Malaysia to Mozambique to Mississippi, we heard about the myriad benefits of solutions grounded in those core principles of agroecology: diversity, regeneration, and localization. These benefits have inspired not just foundations like ours to invest in agroecology; they have inspired burgeoning public investments and acknowledgment of the value of these practices. In 2014, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization endorsed agroecology as a key pillar of the food and agriculture system we need. This year, the Convention on Biological Diversity will consider including agroecological solutions in its biodiversity framework. And ministries of environment and agriculture around the world are increasing investments in agroecology, many as pillars of post-Paris Agreement climate mitigation and adaptation action plans.

COVID-19 has reminded us we cannot take our interrelation for granted — with each other or with nature. We must rethink an industrial food system that ruptures these vital relationships and step up our efforts to support practices that restore and sustain them. By ramping up private and public investment for agroecology now; we can feed the world and strengthen our resilience against this crisis — and the ones yet to come.

Anna Lappé is an author and advisor to funders supporting food system transformation. Daniel Moss is the Executive Director of the Agroecology Fund.

Header photo by Groundswell International 

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These past few weeks, we have witnessed militarized police actions against the peoples of Wet’suwet’en to make way for fracked gas pipelines across Canada. Dozens of solidarity road and railway blockades have been erected in support of the land defenders and Indigenous self-determination. As these struggles unfold, they evoke the memory of Standing Rock — and the many battles to protect Native lands and sacred sites throughout Turtle Island (North America) and beyond.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s new book, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock provides excellent context for understanding the inseparable link between colonization and environmental injustice in these ongoing struggles. She also explores the often-fraught terrain of solidarity and the role of alliances in the fight for environmental, food, and climate justice.

I spoke with Dina in November for the Real Food Reads podcast. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Tanya Kerssen: Your book centers on the concept of “environmental justice” and efforts by scholars and activists to indigenize environmental justice. First of all, how did this phrase enter our popular and legal vernacular? And what are some of the ways environmental justice, at least at first, wasn’t addressing the needs of Native peoples?

Dina Gilio-Whitaker: The term environmental justice can mean a lot of different things. It emerges in the early 1980s, born out of Black communities in the deep South who were experiencing what they suspected to be the deliberate targeting of their communities for toxic waste dumps. And it led to a series of community-based studies and then government-sponsored studies seeking to understand if there really was such a thing as what they were calling “environmental racism.” And the studies showed that indeed there was: that communities can be targeted for these kinds of toxic development because of their race and culture. This led to action on the governmental and legal level.

This concept of “indigenizing” environmental justice acknowledges that the way we understand environmental justice is far too narrow to fit for Native Americans. Environmental justice is about the fair and equal distribution of environmental risks and harms that disproportionately expose communities of color. But that depends on understanding all communities as equal as ethnic minority communities. And this just does not fit for American Indian people and communities because American Indians are not ethnic minorities. American Indians are nations with territories, sovereignty, and jurisdiction and entirely different histories that go back millennia on the land as well as histories of colonization, which is not true for any other population on this continent.

Tanya: The book opens with the story of Standing Rock as an illustration of the ongoing environmental disruption and environmental injustice faced by Native people as well as the critical role of alliances in defending Native lands. Why do you start with Standing Rock and what does it illustrate about indigenous environmental justice?

Dina: My book with Roxanne [Dunnbar-Ortíz], ‘All the Real Indians Died Off’ and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans had just come out in October of 2016 when the Standing Rock conflict was escalating. And my editor posed the question: What does environmental justice look like through the lens of settler colonialism? And I said, well gee, it’s funny you should ask. I have a long history of writing about that. And so it just came out of that particular time.

I went to Standing Rock that Thanksgiving weekend when the population was at its peak. Prior to that point it had been mostly Native people there. But after the human rights abuses really started with the dog attacks on Labor Day, that’s when people started pouring in. What non-Native people came into was a space dominated by Native culture, specifically Lakota — Lakota protocol and Lakota worldview. Everything was determined by Lakota people, which was a very different orientation for people.
As I document in the book, there were rumblings of people treating it like a music festival; like it was a fun thing. People talked about going because they felt “called” to be there. People sort of made it about their own individual spiritual journey when that was not the focus of what was happening, right? This was a serious protest gathering, a resistance event where people were defending the water and the land with their lives.

Yet these other narratives were playing out in an almost New Age kind of way — which has been very common with the advent of the New Age movement and the counter-culture. [Non-native people] were looking to Native people to imagine a different kind of society and there was a lot of cultural appropriation. It wasn’t that it wasn’t well-intended, but they brought with them their worldviews steeped in white supremacy and white privilege and they demanded their right to practice the religion and spirituality of other people. And this has been a problem ever since.

Tanya: The problem seems to be when non-Native — even Liberal or Progressive environmentalist movements — come with all of this unexamined baggage around the settler colonialist framework in which they operate.

Dina: Absolutely. And it’s kind of a bitter pill to swallow for Lefties who like to think of themselves as politically enlightened. I mean, we can have this conversation, for better or worse, since the Trump election. All this in-our-face white supremacy and racism has given us an opportunity to have an honest conversation about it — to acknowledge that we don’t live in the post-racial state. The scales are not balanced just because we had a Black president.

But for Native people, it’s not just about racial privilege. This is some of the work that I’m going deeper into: understanding that white privilege goes beyond the concept of race. We have to be able to talk about these systems of oppression beyond race because for Native people it’s way beyond that, which is why the discourse of environmental justice and environmental racism is so inadequate.

Tanya: When you say that environmental justice needs to go beyond environmental racism, what you’re explicitly referring to are the different worldviews and relationships to place and conceptions of the sacred. This is something that struck me as a main thread throughout your book — that these things can’t adequately be contained, maybe, within a racial justice or a racial equity frame.

Dina: Exactly. Especially in a legal system that systematically denies Indigenous worldviews of the sacred. That’s the reality of the legal system in this country going back to the 1980s with a decision called the Lyng Decision [Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association] that basically denied the ability to protect a Native sacred site in effect because it didn’t acknowledge Native religions as legitimate in the same way Christian religions, for example, are recognized.

Tanya: I was surprised to read about the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which wasn’t passed until 1978, allowing Native peoples to freely practice their religion and spiritual and ceremonial practices. But also that this act didn’t guarantee the environmental integrity of sacred sites or the conditions necessary for religious practices in those spaces.

Dina: Most people don’t realize that Native Americans are the only people who didn’t have religious freedom in this country. Our religions were outright banned beginning around 1883. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 was the marking point for officially overturning that. But yes, it sounds good on the surface, but it’s one of those kind of toothless laws. And as you said, it might protect access to certain sites, especially in public lands, but it doesn’t protect the integrity of those places. That’s why we see conflicts like the San Francisco Peaks [outside Flagstaff, Arizona] where they fought for years to stop what

Native people see as the desecration of this place by the spraying of treated sewage water on these public lands. This not only has health risks associated with it, but is also seen as a desecration of these sacred places. And there’s absolutely no kind of legal structure to protect from that. These are the kinds of battles we’re fighting all over the place.

Tanya: The conversation about sacred places is also linked to, and probably inseparable from, access to land and territory and food-producing resources. As a food activist, I loved the chapter in your book about food sovereignty and health, which also looks at traditional plant medicines. Can you ground us a little bit in the history of how food has been used as a weapon against Native people and how that legacy of violence is still experienced today?

Dina: We are talking about settler colonialism as a system that is intent on eliminating indigenous existence and replacing Native people with a different population. That’s how we as scholars write about it. It’s in the process of separating people from their lands and placing them on reservations—that’s one way. But it goes deeper than that: settler colonialism is this violent process [that also involves] the targeting of people’s food crops. This is something that happened a lot. It was a technology of war, this scorched earth policy in order to starve people into submission. They attacked their food sources — from plant-based foods to the decimation of the buffalo.

It happened in other ways, too, like with the building of dams in the 20th century. Even well after the Indian Wars period is over, when settler government was building infrastructure and harnessing hydro-power for irrigation and electricity. Well, all these dams had devastating effects in Native communities. These included the blockage of salmon passage in places like on the Columbia River, which led to the near extinction of salmon there.

Nick Estes has written about the Pick-Sloan dam project on the Missouri River, flooding so much land that it became the most destructive to Native life of all the histories of dams. It robbed people of food, sources of timber, access to medicines, all of these kinds of things. These are hugely devastating actions that continue to play out. Settler colonialism is a structure of genocide that continually plays itself out.

Going back to the idea of food sovereignty, there’s a lot to learn from Native people and their projects to reclaim their foods. The food sovereignty movement is a way of reclaiming not just culture, but health and life. Because the way this genocidal system has affected Native people has played out in people’s physical bodies.

Native people were known to be some of the most healthy people in the world, and certainly healthier than Europeans. We didn’t have nutrition-related diseases like Europeans had until our food sources were taken away and we had European diets imposed on us. So we went from being people of robust health to being people who were being starved to death. And then when we start having these Western foods brought into our communities in order to stave off the starvation, we went from being starving people to being obese within a generation. And so now Native people are commonly afflicted with diet-related illnesses like heart disease and high blood pressure and cancer and diabetes that increasingly affect all of modern America.

Tanya: Does a particular example come to mind of a way food sovereignty is being used to upend that model of food dependence and dependence on unhealthy foods and return to and revitalize Native foodways?

Dina: I worked on the Muckleshoot Food Sovereignty Project, which is often held up as a model project. The Muckleshoots are in Washington State in an area that, prior to colonization, was so rich in natural resources that the people there didn’t even need to farm. Their natural environment provided them with so many different food sources and ocean resources and they had this amazingly diverse diet. But their reservation now is very small. The way that the environment’s been compromised means that they can’t really practice their food practices the way they used to.

So they’ve come up with different kinds of programs to re-instill their traditional medicines and food banks. In areas when you can do hunting they’ll teach the youth on how to hunt and fish, bringing back those practices. Re-indigenizing their systems is what it amounts to. How do you indigenize your system in the context of a very colonized society? These are big challenges, but there’s lots of innovation that people are coming up with to do this.

We were working on an assessment that looked at how spending money outside the reservation community, in grocery stores for example, is a drain on a tribal economic system. Because that money is not circulating within the tribal community. And when we did that assessment, we discovered that something like $3 million a year was leaving the reservation and not coming back. It’s part of that extractive economy. So we talk about an extractive model, it extracts in all different kinds of ways.

Tanya: Speaking of the extractive economy, in your book you talk about some of the regulations being rolled back under the Trump administration, regulating extractive industry and air and water pollution, drilling, infrastructure, and lots more. You mentioned there were 67 rules being rolled back at the time the book was published. I looked up the most recent figure in The New York Times and it’s now 85, which is really disturbing. This is bad news, obviously, for everyone not just for Native peoples, but can you offer some perspective on this from the long history of Indigenous resistance?

Dina: I want to be sanguine. I want to be hopeful. I want to be optimistic. But what I can say is that for Native people, we are people who are surviving genocide. To be Native today is to have survived a 95 percent genocide. Maybe that’s something to take heart in. I don’t know how else to think about it. I think the reason that we survived is because of our unending resistance. We just kept going. And so here we are. Now we are at the point that we are leading the resistance movement — the environmental resistance movement, the climate justice movement. Native people are the forefront of it. Maybe it’s because of the fact that we have survived this total devastation.

Tanya: I don’t think I would call it a silver lining, but maybe if there is a positive outgrowth of the last couple of years it’s been a greater willingness to understand how real and ever-present racism is in our political and legal structures — and also in our movements, unfortunately. And understanding that is really incumbent on all of us in order to build the movements that we need.

Dina: We have to be brave enough to understand how settler colonialism built a system that benefited a whole lot of people at the expense of a whole lot of people. How do we get our heads around that? How do we decolonize that? What does it mean? Who has to give up what? What is it going to take to build a system that affirms life for everyone that’s not built on the death of other people and the death of the environment and other species? This is what’s being asked of us and it means we all have to look at whatever privilege we have and who sacrificed for that. This is about how anybody who’s not Indigenous to this land benefited from indigenous death — and exploited labor, right? A system in which [enslaved] people were forced into developing stolen land.

We have to grapple with this stuff and be able to talk about what decolonization means — it’s not just racial justice. But what does racial justice mean in the context of decolonizing a settler colonial system? These are obviously structural, paradigmatic issues and they implicate capitalism. And none of us are going to survive if we don’t confront it. You know, Europeans brought with them a worldview that was built on the domination of the natural world. We find ourselves, as a result, in the middle of a sixth mass extinction event. And so how do we shift that? This is where indigenous knowledge is so important.

Native people understand the world in a whole different way. We understand ourselves as related and part of this web of life. We have to change our relationship to the natural world. And this is where Native people and Indigenous knowledge have so much power to effect that change. Part of indigenizing environmental justice is infusing environmental justice with this indigenous worldview, with traditional ecological knowledge so that we can create these changes.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker, a descendant of Colville Confederated tribes, is a lecturer of American Indian studies at California State University San Marcos and a consultant and educator in environmental justice policy planning. She’s also an award-winning journalist, co-author with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz of the book, ‘All the Real Indians Died Off’ and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans, and author of the 2019 book, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock.

Listen to this Real Food Reads conversation (and many others) on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, GooglePlay, or Stitcher.

First published on Medium.

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The words “Food Out of Thin Air” were projected on a massive screen at the front of a grand hotel ballroom. The man at the podium, Pasi Vainikka, was pitching a new protein powder called Solein made with hydrogen as the energy source and CO₂ as the carbon source. (Yes, food from air). Vainikka was speaking to a packed audience of investors and entrepreneurs at a food tech conference earlier this year in the center of the start-up universe — San Francisco. He was one of dozens that day promising investors they could feed the world, address the environmental impacts of processed foods, and make a huge return on investment all at the same time.

Sitting in the audience, I was struck by how many pitches and panels sounded like they had been copied from a Sunrise Movement activist’s notebook: “We need to turn our planet carbon neutral by mid-century!” declared one entrepreneur. “We have climate change! We need to feed 10 billion people! We need to make the most sustainable food ingredients,” proclaimed another. During a break, I chatted with a rep from a firm working on cellular agriculture whose motto is “Food without Fields.” He explained, it’s about “decoupling food from the ecosystem.”

The presumption behind many of these pronouncements is that the best way to protect ecosystems is to take farming out of them — and put food production in the lab. That’s a big presumption, and its implication is that there’s no cost-effective and ecologically sound way to keep the farm in the field. But evidence is showing that agriculture — when aligned with ecological principles — is key to solving our environmental crises, not exacerbating them. The idea that this decoupling will necessarily deliver eco-benefits ignores growing concerns about some of these new food technologies and discounts the proven benefits of sustainable practices.

What we know, based on the peer-reviewed literature and on-the-ground evidence, is that on-farm practices can provide a multitude of positives for ecosystems: from protecting pollinator populations to promoting soil health, from carbon sequestration to water filtration. While agriculture is one of the most significant drivers of land loss, deforestation, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, it doesn’t have to be. It’s the industrial model of production that pushes extractive farming — one reliant on fossil fuels, petrochemicals, monocultures — that’s driving environmental degradation.

Unfortunately, many of the tech “solutions” being hawked today, including many in that San Francisco ballroom, do little to get us away from such a model. For all its hype, for instance, the Impossible Burger — the non-meat burger that “bleeds” like the real thing — is a patty made with a genetically engineered protein (never tested for human consumption, mind you) and, since this year, produced with genetically engineered soybeans sprayed with an arsenal of herbicides and other chemicals. While Impossible Foods, the company behind the burger, likes to tout its water and energy savings compared with feedlot beef burgers, its product actually doesn’t move us away from industrialized food. Indeed, it creates a new market for commodities like GE soy, which is key part of our industrial food system.

There are other big concerns about the rush to embrace these new technologies. Investors assume consumers will happily flock to them — a sort of food-from-the-lab glorification that gaslights the long histories of food cultures as integral, indivisible elements of spiritual and religious traditions around the world. We need to consider, too, the vast amount of time and resources diverted to technologies that entrench us further in a fossil-fuel dependent food chain versus a liberated, regenerative one.

I’ll leave it to actor Jeff Goldblum, and his Jurassic Park character Ian Malcolm, to have the last word: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Header photo by David Parry / PA Wire

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by Kendra Klein and Anna Lappé, The Guardian

More than 50 years ago, Rachel Carson warned of a “silent spring”, the songs of robins and wood thrush silenced by toxic pesticides such as DDT. Today, there is a new pesticide specter: a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. For years, scientists have been raising the alarm about these bug killers, but a new study reveals a more complete picture of the threat they pose to insect life.

First commercialized in the 1990s, neonicotinoids, or neonics for short, are now the most widely used insecticides in the world. They’re used on over 140 crops, from apples and almonds to spinach and rice. Chemically similar to nicotine, they kill insects by attacking their nerve cells.

Neonics were pitched as an answer to pests’ increasing resistance to the reigning insecticides. But in an effort to more effectively kill pests, we created an explosion in the toxicity of agriculture not just for unwanted bugs but for the honeybees, ladybugs, beetles and the vast abundance of other insects that sustain life on Earth.

What we now know is that neonics are not only considerably more toxic to insects than other insecticides, they are far more persistent in the environment. While others break down within hours or days, neonics can remain in soils, plants and waterways for months to years, killing insects long after they’re applied and creating a compounding toxic burden.

“Neonics can remain in soils, plants and waterways for months to years, killing insects long after they’re applied”

The new study, published in the science journal PLOS One, designed a way to quantify this persistence and combine it with data on the toxicity and total pounds used of neonics and other insecticides. For the first time, we have a time-lapse of impact: we can compare year-to-year changes in the toxicity of US agriculture for insects. The results? Since neonics were first introduced 25 years ago, US agriculture has become 48 times more toxic to insect life, and neonics are responsible for 92% of that surge in toxicity.

Looking at this toxic time-lapse, another interesting detail emerges: there’s a dramatic increase in the toxic burden of US agriculture for insects starting in the mid-2000s. That’s when beekeepers began reporting significant losses of their hives. It’s also when the pesticide companies that manufacture neonics, Bayer and Syngenta, found a lucrative new use for these chemicals: coating the seeds of crops like corn and soy that are grown on millions of acres across the country. These seed coatings now account for the vast majority of neonic use in the US.

Neonics are “systemic”, meaning they are water soluble and therefore taken up by the plant itself, making its nectar, pollen, and fruit – all of it – toxic. Only about 5% of a seed coating is absorbed by the plant, the remainder stays in the soil and can end up in rivers, lakes and drinking water with its runoff causing harm to wildlife and, as emerging evidence shows, to people.

This study comes on the heels of the first analysis of global insect populations, which found 40% of species face extinction, with near total insect loss possible by century’s end, driven in part by pesticides, with neonics a particular concern.

“An analysis of global insect populations found 40% of species face extinction, with near total insect loss possible by century’s end”

For all of this harm, farmers get few, if any, benefits from neonic seed coatings. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, they provide “little or no overall benefits to soybean production”, though nearly half of soybean seeds in the US are treated. Similar analyses have found the same for corn, yet up to 100% of US corn seeds are treated.

All this risk without reward has led some regulators to take action. The European Union voted to ban the worst neonics in 2018. But the US government has so far failed to act. Chemical company lobbying can explain much of this inaction. Bayer, maker of the most widely used neonics, spent an estimated $4.3m lobbying in the US on behalf of its agricultural division in 2017.

Not only has the EPA stalled scientific review of neonics, last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service reversed an Obama-era ban on use of these dangerous insecticides in wildlife refuges. Congress could change this. Democratic Representative Earl Blumenauer’s Saving America’s Pollinators Act would ban neonicotinoids and other systemic, pollinator-toxic insecticides. The bill has 56 co-sponsors, but faces a major hurdle clearing the House agriculture committee given that the chairman representative, Collin Peterson, a Democrat from Minnesota, counts Bayer and the pesticide industry’s trade association, Croplife America, among his top contributors.

Beyond a ban, we need a concerted effort to transition US agriculture away from dependence on pesticides and toward ecological methods of pest control. We already know how to do this. Research shows that organic farms support up to 50% more pollinating species and help other beneficial insects flourish. And by eliminating neonics and some 900 other active pesticide ingredients, they protect human health, too.

More than five decades ago, Rachel Carson warned that the war we are waging against nature with toxic pesticides is inevitably a war against ourselves. That is as true today as it was then. For the sake of the birds and bees – and all of us – this war must end.

Originally published in The Guardian

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by Kendra Klein and Anna Lappé, The Guardian

hen Andreina Febres, a mother of two living in Oakland, California, signed up for a study evaluating whether an organic diet could make a difference in the amount of pesticides found in her body, she didn’t know what researchers would find. But her family, and the three others across the country that participated, would discover that they all had detectable levels of the pesticides being tracked. They would also discover that after only six days on an organic diet, every single person would see significant drops in those pesticides, including several linked to increased risk of autism, cancer, Parkinson’s, infertility, and other significant impacts on health.

“It’s good to see that just after a week there was a dramatic drop,” Febres said after seeing the results. “I would love to get those pesticides out of my body and my family’s bodies.”

This just-published peer-reviewed study helps answer a question many of us ask when deciding whether to reach for the conventional or organic option at the store: does organic really make a difference? The results say yes, a big difference. Choosing organic can protect you from exposure to toxic pesticides.

This study, led by researchers at University of California, Berkeley and Friends of the Earth, and co-authored by one of us, tracked pesticide levels in four families from across the country for two weeks. The first week, the families ate their typical diets of non-organic food; the following week, they ate completely organic. Urine samples taken over the course of the study were tested for pesticides and the chemicals pesticides break down into, called metabolites.

The results? Of the 14 chemicals tested, every single member of every family had detectable levels. After switching to an organic diet, these levels dropped dramatically. Levels across all pesticides dropped by more than half on average. Detectable levels for the pesticide malathion, a probable human carcinogen according to the World Health Organization, decreased a dramatic 95 %.

Malathion was just one of the pesticides found in this study that are part of a group called organophosphates, which have long concerned public health experts because of their impact on children’s developing brains. Created as nerve agents in World War II, organophosphates have been linked to increased rates of autism, learning disabilities, and reduced IQ in children. The organophosphate chlorpyrifos, found in all of the family members, is so worrisome to public health that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) planned to ban it in 2017 – a proposal dropped by the Trump administration. In the wake of inaction from the administration, Hawaii passed the first state-level chlorpyrifos ban in 2018; and Representative Nydia Velázquez introduced a federal bill to ban it.

This brings us back to the case for organic. When you choose organically-grown products, you’re guaranteed they were not grown with chlorpyrifos or the roughly 900 synthetic pesticides allowed in non-organic agriculture. Many of these pesticides are now understood to cause cancer, affect the body’s hormonal systems, disrupt fertility, cause developmental delay for children or Parkinson’s, depression, or Alzheimer’s as we age. This study shows that eating organic can dramatically decrease the pesticides you’re exposed to.

But we know providing people with information about the benefits of choosing organic foods is not enough. Far too many of us don’t have the choice. Today, billions of our tax dollars are subsidizing pesticide-intensive agriculture while organic programs and research are woefully underfunded. This misdirection of public dollars is one of the reasons many people across the country still don’t have access to, or can’t afford, organic food.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has argued that in a modern, moral, wealthy society, no person should be too poor to live. We believe it follows that in such a society, none of us should be too poor to afford food raised without toxic chemicals and that all of us should be able to support a food chain that protects the health of farmers, farmworkers and communities who are otherwise on the front-lines of pesticide exposure.

As another mother in the study put it: “Health should not be limited to your income, your education, your race, your gender, or your geographic location. I think everyone has the right to clean, organic food.”

Organic for all, is that too radical of an ask?

Header photo by Andres Carreno / Unsplash

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Food dystopias make my stomach a little queasy. I remember a food industry conference that opened with one businessman dreaming of a day when cooking food would be as bizarre for consumers as sewing a pair of their own jeans. Applause ensued. What is the future of food? Are everyday people in the kitchen? Are farmers on the land?

The answer to these questions is hotly contested. Listen to the venture funds and private equity firms investing in synthetic meat, CRISPR technology, or biotech seeds. For them, the answer lies in the lab, not the soil. Tune into the billionaires backing some of the biggest food conglomerates, beverage companies, or grocery retailers, and the answer is found in bottles and cans and processed foods.

But tune into the voices of the people closest to the land, to the people buying the food, and to the data about the human and environmental impacts of industrialized farming, and you hear a different answer entirely. It’s an answer that puts farmers back at the heart of the future of food and real, whole food—not the processed stuff that fills a typical Big Box store—squarely in the center. It’s an answer that reflects the reality that, globally, smallholder farms still produce as much as 70 percent of the world’s food and are stewards of three-quarters of the world’s seed biodiversity. Likewise, listen to the researchers and scientists who have studied the potential of smallholder agroecology to feed the world and cool the planet. Their research debunks the food industry’s biggest myth: that we need chemicals, engineered seeds, and animal factory farms to feed the world.

A new photographic exhibit and campaign, We Feed the World, challenges the patronizing dogma that farming with ecological principles at heart is backward-looking by lifting up the stories of farmers who are charting a different future. These farmers, photographed by world-renowned photographers, upend the dominant story that industrial agriculture—dependent on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides, and drug cocktails in animal operations—is key to feeding a growing world population.

The campaign is also a reminder that we don’t have to guess where the industrial path, if pursued globally, would take us. We don’t have to imagine that future; we’re living it. Here in the United States, where industrial agriculture and processed diets have dominated for the last half a century, we’re experiencing record rates of diet-related illnesses and water and air pollution driven by petrochemicals and synthetic fertilizer. As a recent index on diet-related illness worldwide found, the number of “lost years” as a result of nutritional deficiencies and heart diseases has risen precipitously in the past decade. In the major agricultural state of Iowa—a top producer of corn, pork, and eggs and the second and third largest producer of soybeans and cattle, respectively—residents know far too well these consequences. Dozens of communities have “no drink” municipal water orders because of agricultural runoff, which is also a major contributor to aquatic dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. Iowa’s capital, Des Moines, has water so contaminated that the city’s nitrate removal facility has operated a record number of days in recent years.

Thankfully, there is another way of farming that embraces agroecological methods; one that reduces chemicals and water pollution, integrates livestock into sustainable farm models, and produces abundant, nutritious food—all while protecting the environment and our health. A growing movement of farmers, scientists, and consumers have the data to show that this way of farming has been found to use less water and fossil-fuel based inputs and to have higher yields during weather extremes like droughts and floods, which will only become more common in the coming years. It holds the best hope for food security in a climate unstable future.

We also know that this way of farming will be critical to addressing our climate crisis: while the global food system is responsible for one-third of all emissions driving the climate crisis, farmland can offer a powerful solution. Organic farming practices not only reduce on-farm emissions, they can help pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, where we don’t want it, and store it in the soils—where we do. Rattan Lal, one of the world’s leading experts on soils, has estimated that if these practices were adopted across the world’s farmland with techniques like cover cropping, crop diversification, green manure, agroforestry, and sustainable animal husbandry, while restoring wetlands and peatlands and forests, we could sequester as much as one fifth of the world’s current emissions.

This ecological way of farming marries the best of modern science with ancient wisdom; it protects ecosystems while producing food that nourishes. And all around the world, from the peatlands in Indonesia to the mountain highlands of Peru, smallholder farms are increasingly rejecting industrial farming methods pushed by trade and development policies for decades and embracing these practices.

But the transition won’t happen simply by farmers committing to farm more ecologically. The power of industrial agriculture is formidable. Industry has helped to craft trade, subsidy and patent laws in their favor. The same farmers who are preserving a healthy food system are fiercely advocating for policies that make a new food system possible.

We Feed the World showcases those at the frontlines of such advocacy and innovation with stories like that of Maria Loretha from Indonesia who is helping to revive native sorghum there. For decades, government officials had discouraged sorghum planting while promoting commercial rice and corn varieties, monoculture commodities that despite heavy applications of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides were failing to yield, leaving farmers indebted. Working with local smallholders, Loretha found indigenous sorghum varieties were thriving. Now, she’s helping others in her region plant the indigenous crops, inspiring farmers to break free from the chemical-treadmill.

As the portraits in We Feed the World embody, smallholder farms still feed the majority of the planet’s people, and if we turned the current perverse agricultural subsidy system upside down, could feed even more. If we’re serious about protecting the climate, biodiversity, and public health, it’s vital that these farmers are supported—to become even better stewards of the land, protectors of carbon in the soil, and providers of food that truly nourishes.

Anna Lappe spoke as part of the We Feed the World program, which launched at the Bargehouse Gallery in London on October 12^th and closes on Sunday, 21^st October. A US tour is expected next year.

Originally published on Food Tank 

Photo courtesy of We Feed the World Exhibition

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