02041 Food Justice

Justice in Farm Country

There isn’t a lot of justice in farm country these days.

Most farmers compete in a world-wide marketplace for food. Large producers have the advantage over smaller producers. If the profit on a bushel of wheat is only fifty cents, it takes a lot of bushels — and thus a lot of land plus high levels of fertilizer and other inputs — to earn a living. A farmer with 100 acres competes with farms of 10,000 acres and up.

The majority of the poor people in this world are subsistence farmers who grow most of what they eat plus a small surplus to sell. They compete with the over-production of the developed countries and often that just doesn’t work for them. After the implementation of the North American Free Trade Act, which opened Mexican markets to US farm products, corn prices in Mexico plummeted. As a result many rural farmers lost their farms and this helped swell the flood of migrants to the United States or to the slums that ring the large cities south of the border. Yet, there was no discernible decline in the retail price of tortillas in Mexican cities so there was no benefit to the urban residents from the destruction of Mexico’s rural corn growers.

Children go hungry in poor nations, while land that once grew food for their communities now grows food for export so that we in the wealthy countries can have strawberries and fresh greens in the midst of our January snows. Be wary of that nice strawberry snack during the winter, for nothing we do is without consequence, as permaculture constantly reminds us. It comes to you at the cost of hunger elsewhere and when you buy that tasty winter strawberry, you enable injustice. And if its not an organic strawberry, it comes packaged with a heavy load of pesticides and herbicides.

The impact of the financial stress on farmers in this country can be seen in the production practices of conventional agriculture. Fence row to fence row planting is the rule. Farmers strive to produce at maximum levels all the time. This isn’t just to the farmer, or to his or her land, or to the ecosystem in farm country.

When it comes to the price for their food, farmers are at the mercy of the world market. Farmers competing in the international food market do not set the price that they receive for their production. They take what the aggregator corporations offer who buy up the products of farm country and funnel that bounty into the maws of the transnational processors. By the time a wheat crop makes it to the supermarket, the farmer will receive less than a dime for the wheat in a loaf of bread out of a total purchase price upwards of three US dollars.

Justice in the Cities

The situation doesn’t get much better when we get to the city. Customers are at the mercy of whatever the market decides to give them. Consolidation in the retail grocery market rapidly diminishes the number of choices for customers. Only four companies control half of all retail grocery sales — Wal Mart, Kroger, Costco, and Supervalu. In the 100 largest metropolitan areas, these four corporations control 72% of the grocery market. Consolidations boost the profits of grocery corporations. They do not produce price relief for customers.

Retail pricing schemes encourage customers to spend excessively on groceries and not get much in return. A stew of additives whose safety is at best dubious, whatever the various politicized government science agencies may say, drench the products of supermarkets. Processing drains nutritional value from our food and replaces it with high fructose corn syrup, flavors concocted in laboratories, and clever advertising schemes that make us think that drinking a sugared and caffeinated beverage is world peace and justice. Then we and our insurance companies spend piles of money to deal with chronic illnesses brought on by the unhealthy, denatured, and dumbed-down foods we eat.

Because access to food is a matter of access to money, many people cannot purchase a healthy and nutritious diet for their family. Cities are full of food deserts, where fast food and convenience stores are the only access to food for the residents. The reason that convenience stores sell a selection of regular grocery items is because that’s where some people buy most of their family’s food. That is a scary thought, in this land of abundance.

How shall we then live?

In a world of injustice, how shall we restore justice?

The journey to justice begins one decision at a time, as we always seek to be just in our relationships throughout the food chain.

Buying food directly, or “closely”, from its producers is without a doubt the best choice. By spending our money with the farmers, we short-cut the expensive production chain, avoid processing tricks and pollutions with our food, and move towards a more just, resilient, and sustainable food system — one meal at a time. This is true when we buy as individuals, or when we buy as customers of restaurants or institutions such as schools. The customer receives a just, safe, nutritious, and non-adulterated product and the farmer receives a just price for his or her labor and investment.

If we can't make all best choices all the time, we can try to make as many best choices as we can.

Growing some of our own food, even if it is simply some herbs and tomatoes on the balcony or in a sunny window of a high rise apartment, contributes to food justice. The more access to land that we have, the more we can grow and that benefits everybody. At schools, students can operate community gardens.

We must not leave anyone behind for the wolves to devour. If you garden, grow a row for the hungry, and support charities and organizations that work in food security for the poor with your time, talents, creativity, and financial and in-kind donations. To rephrase the common maxim, it’s fine to give hungry people fish to eat. We also need to teach them how to fish — and help them find or make their own fishing equipment and build ponds for them to fish in. Food security is certainly a matter of actually giving people food. It is equally certainly a matter of empowering them to be in control of their own food destiny.

Support social, educational, economic, and political initiatives that promote justice in the food systems. Oppose economic and political initiatives that drive the present system of food injustice.

Succession works in our work for justice, just as it does everywhere else. No one should expect a mature canopy tree to spring into full grown glory overnight. Pioneer plants are species that grow quickly, often fix nitrogen, and produce seed profusely that spring up on disturbed and damaged lands . Other plants grow from deep roots of existing species, or seeds long dormant in the soil. All plants devote a lot of energy to reproduction. The various traits of the pioneer/surviving plants in the area greatly influence the path a succession process takes. Useful features include hardiness, ability to fix nitrogen and concentrate other nutrients, size, reproductive ability, longevity, etc.

This works for invisible structures also. For example, we could start by working on projects to get people to donate food to give to the poor. That’s not really controversial. People can get into that. It makes them feel good and connected with their neighbors.

Over time, the activities could evolve a bit and include helping people plant gardens to feed themselves and to grow food to give to others. People who start by simply receiving food or donating food might be tempted to join in some kind of food production.

As this progresses, a cooperative might be organized to link the urban customers with rural producers. The process would go on, one incremental step at a time building on previous successes.

Observing nature gives us ideas for the present.

Many species have evolved traits that make them resilient in the face of disturbance. Redwood trees, for example, shed lower limbs as they grow, thus making them more resistant to fire and they can regrow from stumps. They have a thick and spongy bark that protects them from fire damage. In areas subject to periodic drought, frogs adapted so that as the drought progresses and water sources dry up, they find shelter and hibernate until the rains return. These adaptions help species survive through time. In human culture, we can think of ways to make our communities and cultural systems more resilient and adaptable in the face of rapidly changing circumstances.

Three factors govern the amount of disturbance a particular eco-system can absorb: — resilience (ability to restore itself after being damaged), — persistence (its ability to resist damage), and — constancy (the ability to maintain itself without declining below an unsustainable minimum). A particular concern at present is the resilience of our existing communal and economic structures, their persistence in the face of serious problems, and how far we can go into devolution without falling into catastrophic collapse. What do structures and systems look like that would be more resilient in the face of the problems of peak oil, climate instability, political criminality, and economic irrationality?

“New species” can take root and grow, and those that fertilize their area (nitrogen fixers, nutrient accumulators) will be more successful. In human culture, we can think of new ideas, new structures, filling niches in the disturbed cultural ecology and influencing/strengthening the areas around them.

New growth comes from previous stages, e.g. trees growing from stumps, seeds sprouting after going through fire (think pine cones), mulberries sending up sprouts from wide-spreading roots. In human culture, we can think of new twists on old ideas. The Oklahoma Food Cooperative, for example, is a hybrid of several old ideas/structures, adapted with new twists for the present situation. It helps move economic activity (nutrients) in ways that benefit the direct-marketing producers (pioneer species and legacy species re-growth).

As the situation develops, stronger manifestations of plant growth appear — woody shrubs, under-story trees, which themselves turn out to be the nurseries of the canopy trees. Many new producers stay in business, feeding ever-more people in cities, resulting in even more economic activity back and forth, leading to the development of new and even more creative forms of mutual and cooperative economic activity.

So we should not lose heart if it seems that goodness, beauty, and wisdom seems in short supply in the midst of the terribly disturbed social and cultural ecology which is “even as we speak” deteriorating daily. What we do here, and what goes on in a hundred thousand other places that we don’t even know about, develops the adaptable structures, functions, and systems we need (on one hand) to bolster the resilience, persistence, and constancy of our local communities. It lays the groundwork for a regrowth of justice for all the earth and its creatures and people.

And so it comes about that a significant amount of progress can be made in your own personal food system as part of the lifestyle design for your life. That’s how you do your part for a future of justice, beauty, resilience, and safety.