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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A new study published in Science offers a stark warning about the climate crisis: Even if we completely halted fossil fuel use in the near term, we would still blow through the carbon budget needed to avoid catastrophic climate change unless we change the trajectory of emissions from the global food sector. Although many have warned about the climate impact of modern food production and land use, this new science is soberingly clear, and it has garnered attention around the world.

Without radically reducing emissions from agriculture, the research shows we won’t meet the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit average warming to 1.5°C – 2°C degrees. And yet, even those targets still position us to face some pretty extreme climate impacts.

Civil Eats talked with Michael Clark, a researcher at the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford and one of the lead authors on the study, about the findings, what they teach us about collective action to move the needle on climate, and how we might build the political will to do so.

Why does the food system have such a big climate toll?

One of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions from food systems is meat, and within that red meat from ruminants: beef, sheep, goats, and—to a lesser extent—other livestock like pork. The reason why ruminants have a relatively large impact is two-fold: They’re particularly inefficient at converting grass into things we can eat; or, if they’re not being fed grass, converting soy or other feed into food for humans. This matters because you have to include the climate impacts of producing the feed we then give to cows and other ruminants. Another reason why ruminants are particularly high emitters is because during their digestive process, they convert their food into methane, a potent greenhouse gas that they then burp.

The other large source of emissions within food systems is from fertilizer use—from how it is processed to emissions from application. Nitrogen naturally converts into nitrous oxide, which is one of the other very potent greenhouse gases.

This I think has been a blind spot. We’ve disrupted the carbon cycle, but we’ve disrupted the nitrogen cycle, too.

Exactly. Estimates are that humans have doubled the amount of reactive nitrogen in the world—that is human sources of reactive nitrogen are at least as large as the amount of reactive nitrogen that is naturally available. Not ideal.

Your findings paint a picture based on current trends. What trends did you track?

Very broadly speaking, emissions from the food system are a function of what we eat, how it’s produced, and the size of the population. We looked at these three factors and trends to date and projected out if these patterns continue over the next several decades.

What we found at a global scale is that the most important driver is changes in dietary habits; populations eating more food and eating a larger proportion of that food from animal sources, either meat, dairy, or eggs. Population growth is an important driver, but it’s not as important as dietary habit change. And while changes in food production—like having better management techniques and reducing emissions per unit of food—could counter those shifts, it would not be by a huge amount.

Now, all this is at a global scale; for any single country, that global pattern may not match up. Diets are changing, but not uniformly. For instance, diets are not changing by a huge amount in the United States, but if you go to a place like China or Brazil, countries experiencing large economic transitions, there are massive dietary shifts happening and with them those emissions are going to be driven up.

Do you feel the story of food systems emissions has been late to the game in climate change?

Rightfully, a lot of the effort, focus, and political will has targeted emissions abatement through fossil fuels. That makes a huge amount of sense. But we’re getting better knowledge about the impact food has had on the environment—and the trajectory of emissions—and starting to see, thankfully, food becoming a bigger part of the conversation.

Talk about some of the main levers for change. First, plant-rich diets: Let’s get into what you mean by that and why this diet shift makes a difference.

We mean a reduction in meat, dairy, and eggs and an increase in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, and so on. What’s critical here is that while the endpoint is similar for everyone in the world, the direction you might need to go to get there will be really different. In the United States, for instance, this shift in diets might mean a typical person eating much less meat and much more fruits and vegetables. The second thing I really want to stress is that these plant-rich diets are associated with pretty large increases in health outcomes. While for this paper we focused on climate, plant-rich diets have enormous co-benefits.

Let’s talk about another lever for reducing food system emissions; what you and your co-authors call “healthy calories.”

Approximately half the global adult population is eating too much or not enough. In certain countries the figures are even more extreme. For my co-authors and me, the healthy diet lever means—independent of a plant-rich diet—what proportion of calories are coming from fruit, vegetables, and other healthy sources of calories. We know that so many people are not getting the right amounts of food for a healthy diet. Similar to the plant-rich lever, this means in some places, eating a lot less, in other places, it will mean people eating more [healthy foods].

Food waste has gotten a lot more attention in the past few years—in part, I think, because the percent of food that is wasted is so high and because addressing food waste feels so doable.

Yes, it’s pretty shocking: About one-third of all food that is produced remains uneaten, ether because it’s thrown away, rots, or otherwise doesn’t get to the people who want to eat it. The sources differ widely by country, sometimes it’s a lack of refrigeration, lack of storage, grain silos, and so on. In the United States, a family of four wastes on average $1,600 worth of produce a year. That’s a pretty big incentive to act.

It always surprises people that if the emissions associated with food loss were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world.

Let’s talk about what you are seeing in terms of policy responses.

One of the joys and complications of working on a global study is that the policy responses are going to look very different wherever you are. We talked earlier about the climate impacts of nitrogen fertilizer use. One policy that has really been effective has been the 1991 European Union Nitrates Directive. Now, when it was passed, it was designed to reduce nitrogen runoff because agricultural sources of runoff were one of the main causes of water pollution in Europe. Since then, fertilizer applications per hectare have decreased by about half, yet crop yields have continued to increase as they were before. It’s just one example of a relatively large geographically scaled policy that is working. While it wasn’t specifically designed to address emissions, it most certainly has had emissions benefits.

We can look at farmers choosing different production pathways. Like in some cases adding more crop rotations into their planning or using agroecological approaches, such as planting hedgerows, agroforestry, and more. Honestly, there really is a huge amount that can be done. But it’s important to stress that no single action is going to solve the problem.

One of the big food-climate debates is about soil carbon sequestration and livestock. What do you think about those who argue for livestock’s ability to rehabilitate soils?

We know for sure we can be doing a lot better in terms of soil carbon storage. And we are seeing incredible results from a range of strategies, like some I mentioned: planting cover crops, intercropping, and silvopasture, planting hedges between fields that can prevent soil loss—and more. All of these can help sequester more carbon in the soil, but I think the key message should be: Soil carbon sequestration is part of the solution, but it isn’t the only solution.

Now, for the debate about cows! The instances where I’ve seen cows or other ruminants’ potential to be net negative in terms of greenhouse gas emissions—after accounting for methane emissions—is over short timescales, in certain conditions, on previously degraded land. So, yes, it may be possible for cows to play a helpful role, but in a limited way. How the cows are raised matters; but how many cows you’re raising matters more.

Do you feel like any parts of your paper have been misunderstood as this complex story gets translated for the general public?

I actually think the coverage has been good. There are basically three main points and I think the media has been capturing them well: One, food matters to climate and if we continue eating the way we are, it will result in catastrophic climate change; two, there is a lot we can do; third, everyone has a role to play—consumers, businesses, food processors, everyone.

I know one question those who work on climate often gets asked is, “Are you optimistic or pessimistic?”—but, I feel I should ask the same of you.

I’m laughing because it’s an uncomfortable question to answer. We are starting to move in the right direction, but honestly, we’re not moving anywhere close to as fast as we need to. We need to start acting now. It would have been great to have made these changes years ago, but we didn’t.

Right. As they say, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. The second best time is today.

Exactly.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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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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For Native people, colonization and environmental injustice go hand in hand. So argues Dina Gilio-Whitaker in her new book As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. We were pleased to feature it as our November Real Food Reads book as we celebrate Native American Heritage Month. And I was honored to have a rich and fascinating conversation with Dina on the podcast.

Food, we are reminded in the book, has been used throughout history as a tool of war and subjugation. Prior to colonization, Native people were some of the healthiest people in the world—far healthier than Europeans. Genocide, forced displacement, and industrialism led (first) to starvation in Indian country and (later) to dependence on foreign, unhealthy foods.

The loss of access to culturally-appropriate food sources went hand-in-hand with the loss of access to sacred places and traditional plant medicines. This rupture of Native peoples’ relationship with ancestral lands made way for an extractive, capitalist economy that put us on the path to the climate crisis and sixth mass extinction of the earth’s biodiversity.

It’s a powerful story indeed. One that locates colonialism—and the philosophy of domination over nature that accompanied it—at the root of today’s multiple crises.

It also challenges us to ask hard questions: Who controls—and benefits from—land and resources? How are people dispossessed from their lands and what are the health and environmental consequences of that dispossession? What do food, climate, and environmental justice look like when we identify colonialism as the root cause of injustice? And how can we decolonize our movements for the transformation we need?

“We all have to band together and build alliances because all of our futures are at risk now.” —Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Real Food Reads podcast

For Dina, Native peoples can provide hope in this dark time, not least for having survived near-total devastation. Perhaps for that very reason, Indigenous peoples lead the global movement for climate justice. But Indigenous knowledge and worldviews must also be recovered and Native political sovereignty recognized. Our movements must grapple with histories of genocide and land theft, and also seek to understand, uplift, and protect Indigenous conceptions of the sacred and sacred places. 

My biggest takeaway from our conversation? The most important work non-Native people can do is be brave enough to decolonize our ways of thinking and organizing—and understand how colonialism has shaped the political and legal structures in which we operate. This decolonizing work is urgently needed in order to forge effective alliances, and build political power, with Native peoples. 

There is room for different conceptions of the sacred to come together in these alliances. But there’s no less at stake than the survival of all human and non-human life. 

Tune in to my conversation with Dina Gilio-Whitaker, author of As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock on the Real Food Reads podcast. 

Featured image: Canoe and Minnesota wild rice. Photo by Eli Sagor/Flickr.

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As many have been saying for a long time (ah-hem, my mother), the biggest crisis in our food system isn’t a scarcity of food, it’s a scarcity of democracy. The world is producing 2,900 calories for every man, woman, and child on the planet—more than enough—and yet one in three children is malnourished. One in three!  And most of those children are malnourished not because they don’t have enough calories, but because they’re consuming too many of the wrong calories. Consider that 62 percent of teenagers in high-income countries drink one sugary drink a day or that only 42 percent of babies under 6 months are exclusively breastfed. Being clear on root causes is how we get clear on solutions. 

If the problem is not productivity, but rather democracy, then the solutions will clearly not be found in technological solutions, but in policy ones. We need to be asking: Who is calling the shots about what foods are regulated and what foods are taxed? Who has a say over what farming practices are incentivized and what agricultural research is funded? Who’s deciding the role food companies can play in our lives, from what marketing to kids is allowed to who sits at the table at governing bodies like the World Health Organization? 

To make real, transformative change in the food system, more of us—regular people and communities, not corporations—need to be asking those questions (and answering them). To fix our food, in other words, we need to fix our democracy.

Header photo: Future of Food panel at SOCAP 2019. Pictured (L-R): Roy Steiner, Rockefeller Foundation; Anna Lappé, Real Food Media; and Deb Eschmeyer, Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems. Photo by SOCAP. 

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Indigenous Peoples’ Day has us thinking about all the ways indigenous communities, knowledge(s), cultures, seeds, and foodways are central to building the world we need. This isn’t just about preserving traditions, it’s about recognizing indigenous people as leaders, change-makers, and innovators of food and climate justice movements.

This great article by Nick Estes—which we shared in our latest issue of the Real Food Scoop— argues that the green jobs envisioned in the Green New Deal have been pioneered and are already being modeled by indigenous peoples, whose stewardship of nature is rarely viewed as “productive work”: 

Rarely is Indigenous caretaking defined as work. Yet, like unwaged caregiving work, land defense and water protection are undervalued but necessary for the continuation of life on a planet teetering on collapse.

Demonstrators reach out for food donated by supporters in Quito on Oct. 9. (Photo by Jonatan Rosas/Washington Post)

Indigenous people in Ecuador are leading one of the most powerful protests in the world right now against the extractive industries that are wrecking the climate—with the first and most severe impacts felt by indigenous farmers. The protests are led by the indigenous confederation CONAIE, with strong leadership from women. 

In many ways, indigenous worldviews are better equipped to understand the climate crisis and organize collective responses to it that are rooted in centuries of sustainable land and water management and adaptation to changing weather patterns. Critical to applying this invaluable knowledge to the current climate emergency is protecting, and restoring, indigenous community control over land and territory—especially considering these territories are home to upwards of 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity.     

Modern agroecology—the science, movement, and practice of sustainable agriculture—is based in large part on the many techniques, insights, and principles developed by indigenous peoples around the world. 

Alliances across multiple sectors of society are necessary if we are to address the most urgent ecological and humanitarian crises of our time. But in this new global movement we are building— against environmental destruction and (neo-)colonialism, and for relationships that protect and care for the earth and each other—we would do well to center indigenous peoples and leadership.

Check out our four Real Food Reads book picks in celebration of Indigenous People’s Day, and for more reflection, discussion, and action on the climate crisis, see our Climate Toolkit.

Header image: People demonstrate in Quito on Oct. 9. The march is made up of a union of all ethnic groups originating in the Ecuadoran Andes. In the coming days the Amazon communities will also join the rallies. (Jonatan Rosas/Washington Post)

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