Rebuilding local food systems from the grassroots up

Monthly Review, July-August, 1998 by Elizabeth Henderson

The restructuring of the world food system under corporate control since the Second World War has resulted in a crisis with environmental, economic, and social dimensions. The symptoms of the crisis include loss of farmland and farmers (and in the United States, especially minority farmers), impoverishment of rural economies and the decline of small towns, shrinking of the farmer's share of the food dollar, erosion of the soil, pollution of air and water with synthetic pesticides and farm run-off, the spread of monoculture and the correspondent decline of biodiversity - the litany of problems goes on and on. In the absence of a unified organizational response, a wide variety of individuals and groups have tackled different aspects of these problems and proposed solutions.

Around the world, people have responded by resisting, nowhere so clearly or eloquently as the Zapatistas rallying for land and against Mexican participation in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Resistance in the United States to the restructuring of the world food system has focused on protecting the family farm, saving the environment, and promoting food safety. These three strands come together in consumer desire for organic food. The resistance has also inspired research for the benefit of family farms in this hostile environment, efforts to rebuild rural communities, to find ways to reduce total reliance on the "free (global) market," and to save the genetic resources of the third world from patenting by agribusiness. Trying to attack single issues, the various organizations have not always grasped the systemic nature of the problems or the need for an integrated analysis and many-sided response. Worse yet, groups have sometimes been pitted against one another because they failed to see the connections. For example, some major environmental organizations joined with corporate interests to resist targeting price supports for small farmers in the deluded belief that it would be easier to control pollution from a few large farms. Failing to see that low prices for farm commodities were linked with the low wages paid to farmworkers, small farmers have sometimes joined in attacks against better conditions for farmworkers. The history of the growth of the movement for a sustainable food and agriculture system is the complex story of how more and more of these separate groups are discovering their interconnections and common interests.

The grassroots movement for a sustainable food and agriculture system has been gaining momentum over the past decade. From a scattering of isolated individuals practicing alternative farming methods and small, local organizations, sustainable agriculture is swelling into a significant social movement with a national network and an effective policy wing. Populist in spirit, with strong feelings for civil rights and social justice, and an underlying spirituality, this movement is not linked with any political party or religious sect. It is firmly grounded in every region in the country, encompassing organic and low-input farmers; food, farming, farmworker, community food security, and hunger organizations; animal rights activists; and environmental, consumer, and religious groups.

The very decentralization and lack of hierarchical leaders that has impeded the convergence of this movement is, at the same time, the source of its great populist vitality and increasing strength. Like a vast jigsaw puzzle that someone dropped in a dark closet, the pieces have had to discover one another and figure out how to fit together. Many of the pieces have joined in the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture. The Campaign has a broad definition of sustainable agriculture as a food and agriculture system that is economically viable, environmentally sound, socially just, and humane. Or, in the simple words of Wendell Berry, "an agriculture that does not deplete the land or the people." Berry has been one of the moving spirits in the movement, writing poems, novels, and essays from his farm in Kentucky. He articulates a fierce critique of the irresponsibility of the impersonal relations of the industrialized, corporate, global food system, while lifting up the homely values of stewardship of the land and respect for the local people, their farms, businesses, and living web of interdependencies. (See The Unsettling of America - Culture and Agriculture, 1977, and The Gift of Good Land, Further Essays, 1981).

By the end of the lobbying effort directed at Congress in relation to the 1996 Farm Bill, over 500 groups were associated with the National Campaign. An ongoing task for the Campaign steering committee is to broaden the circle continually by reaching out to new groups, help heal wounds from old battles, and reveal deeper connections. This brief introduction can only give a taste of the vitality and diversity of the expanding network that makes up the movement for a sustainable food and agriculture system. The discussion below is arranged by the major goals the organizations are striving to achieve.