National Sustainable Agriculture
Only once every 5 years do you have the opportunity to truly transform our food and farm system through the federal farm bill.

On Monday the Agriculture Committee leadership proposed to rewrite the food and farm bill in 2 weeks from today – yes you heard that right, 2 weeks – this is usually a year plus process and they want to do it in 2 weeks?! This would be the fastest food and farm bill decision-making process in history.

Please act today for a chance you have only once every 5 years to reform our food and farming system and protect our natural resources.

If you care about the health of America’s soil, water, and land; promoting organic practices and conservation; helping a new generation of struggling small and mid-sized farmers get their start; rebuilding local and regional food systems; or developing new markets and healthy food access – now is the time to speak up. If you want to see a healthier, more secure, environmentally sustainable, and prosperous America – now is the time to speak up.

This proposal would wipe out over 40 percent of the funding increases for conservation and environmental initiatives achieved in the 2002 and 2008 food and farm bills, setting the clock back and “un-greening” the farm bill. Moreover, it is unclear what the proposal would do to the fair and healthy farm and food system programs won in 2008 with your help, but in need of being renewed in the new farm bill. It could potentially wipe out all of those gains as well.

It just takes a minute to call:
• First check if your Senator and/or Representative sits on the Senate Agriculture or House Agriculture Committee
• If your Senator or Representative sits on either of these three committees: call the Capitol Switchboard and ask to be directly connected to your Senators’ and Member of Congress’s office: 202-224-3121. Or go to Congress.org and type in your zip code, then click on your Senators and Member of Congress’s name and the contact tab for their phone number.
• If the line is busy, please leave a brief message on the voicemail.

The Message: I am a constituent, calling Senator/Representative _____ to deliver this message (use one or more of these talking points):

• The proposed farm conservation cuts are too big and should be reduced. In particular, the Conservation Stewardship Program funding should be retained and Wetlands Reserve Program funding should be restored.
• Farm commodity program reform should include caps on the amount of subsidy any one farm can receive. Loopholes allowing multiple subsidy payments to single farms should be closed. Conservation requirements should be attached to all forms of revenue and crop insurance subsidies.
• The farm bill must reinvest at least $1 billion a year in innovative, job-creating programs for rural economic development, local and regional food systems, renewable energy, organic farming, and young and beginning farmers.

*According to published accounts, the leaders of the Agriculture Committees are proposing cuts of $6.5 billion to conservation programs, $5 billion to nutrition programs, and $15 billion to commodity subsidy programs. The conservation cuts would be on top of the $2 billion already made by Congress in the appropriations process.

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From Hunger Action Network

Call you Congress member today (202 224-3121) and tell them:

No deficit reduction plan can work if it does not rebuild our economy by protecting Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance and other basic safety net programs. And it must create jobs. Such a plan must have increased revenues from upper-income households and profitable corporations, and savings from cutting unneeded military spending.

The Senate is about to take up a Agriculture Appropriations bill, in which the Republicans will seek to make cuts to the food stamp / SNAP program. Senator Gillibrand, whom we talked to last week, is leading the fight nationally to protect SNAP, so all she needs is a call to thank her (202 224-4451). Sen. Schumer, whose staff we met with this week, says he is also opposed, but a call to him would help convince him to take more of a leadership role. He is not signing onto a letter that Gillibrand is circulating to protect SNAP(202 224-6542)

The tougher fight is expected in the House, where the House leadership supports steep cuts in food stamps and other low-income programs.

You could also include in your message support for a Farm Bill that invests in healthy food, strong conservation programs and family farms, not corporate agribusiness.

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The Farm Bill Is a Food Bill

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-narayan/the-farm-bill-is-a-food-b_b_1020469.html

Where the farm bill allocates resources to funding food stamps on one hand, it also incentivizes the purchase of unhealthy foods. In the most recent farm bill updates, it appears as though the back-room appropriations are moving in the favor of subsidies. While both direct payment programs and nutrition programs are looking at cuts, a mechanism for replacing subsidy cuts with a new funding regime has already surfaced. Unfortunately for the food side of the farm bill, it’s become increasingly difficult to advocate for change. In the past, the farm bill has been traditionally held to industry interests. Now, the super committee process may shut out democratic input altogether if the bill is written in the coming weeks by a handful of legislators for the purpose of bypassing floor debate.

Because the farm bill is so rarely written, it becomes important to reclaim its status as a food bill. Even if parts of the package are at odds with the part of the bill that works to create a healthy food system, the latter still comprises 70 percent of the legislation. It remains to be seen whether the super committee process will allow some food for thought.

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Farm Bill Battle Heats Up

http://www.kfgo.com/agri-business-news.php?ID=9424

WASHINGTON (DTN) – Fights began breaking out Tuesday among agriculture interests over what the super committee might do with the farm bill, even though no one knows how the leaders of the House and Senate agriculture committees are planning to move ahead with the proposal that they sent to the super committee on Monday.

One of the fights over super committee ag cuts and farm bill plans is whether to cut spending on food programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., Senate Agriculture ranking member Pat Roberts, R-Kans., House Agriculture Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla., and House Agriculture ranking member Collin Peterson, D-Minn., sent the super committee a letter Monday saying they would agree to up to $23 billion in farm program cuts over 10 years, and that they will send the super committee a more detailed proposal by Nov. 1 on what they are seeking.

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Key farm groups back revenue plan

DANIEL LOOKER 10/19/2011 @ 4:58pm Business Editor

http://www.agriculture.com/news/policy/key-farm-groups-back-revenue-pl_4-ar20037

Three influential farm groups Wednesday urged the House and Senate agriculture committees to replace the main existing commodity programs with a revenue-based risk management plan that would pay for some losses not covered by crop insurance.

Today’s letter to the chairs and ranking minority members of the ag committees was signed by the American Soybean Association, National Corn Growers Association and National Farmers Union.

All three have their own farm bill proposals but they’ve united behind the idea of replacing existing farm programs, including the often criticized direct payments, with a program helps farmers only when they have losses in revenue.

The groups said that federal budget realities “make it imperative to find a viable risk management approach that can replace several existing programs, including Direct Payments, Countercyclical Payments, SURE, and the ACRE program.”

“…under a revenue-based program, compensation for losses that exceed a certain threshold would only be made as they are incurred, on all production, and only on a portion of the loss,” the groups point out. “This stands in contrast with the current Direct Payment program under which farmers receive payments regardless of whether they produce a crop or incur a loss. Also, many producers participate in the crop insurance program at levels that require losses of 30 percent or more before they are compensated. With the elimination of other elements of the farm safety net, a program is needed to offset part of these losses should they occur.”

They also voiced “strong support” for keeping the existing crop insurance program. Any revenue program “should be designed to complement rather than overlap or replace this key part of the farm program safety net,” they said.

If you’ve ever picked up a head of lettuce or a package of chicken and wondered who worked to get that food on your supermarket shelf, Gabriel Thompson’s new book, Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs [Most] Americans Won’t Do is the big reveal.

Thompson spent a year working alongside some of the most invisible workers in our food chain: lettuce pickers in Arizona, chicken cutters in an industrial slaughterhouse in rural Alabama, bicycle delivery workers at an upscale Manhattan restaurant.

Thompson writes with compassion and grace. His detailed descriptions of his co-workers, many of whom work while exhausted and injured for little money and few (if any) benefits are a heartbreaking reminder of the plight of so many food workers.

This book is a rare read: a page-turner, with dashes of humor, as well as an insightful critique of a food system that shuts out so many eaters, and workers. It’s the story of our food through the eyes of the hard-working men and women who bring it to our tables.

– Kate & Anna

Join the Voices From Africa community today.

Members will be able to create their own account, access articles and documents on these issues, participate in forums, and strategize with policy-makers, activists and other stakeholders from all over the globe. Make your voice heard in this critical debate.

–Deepa

According WorldWatch, “The questions addressed in the State of the World 2009 are many: how do we adapt- not just as communities and nations, but as a species-to the warming that is headed our way, no matter what we do now? How will the world deal with the fact that the climate burden will fall heaviest on countries whose contributions to climate change have been the most modest? And even as we struggle to adapt, how does society maintain focus on slashing emissions to a pale shadow of their current levels?”

The report selects specific challenges (land use, energy, emissions, etc.) and proposes innovative alternatives. Some of the Innovations highlighted in the Land Use section are:
>> In Parana, Brazil, farmers have developed organic management systems combined with no-till. No-till plots yielded a third more wheat and soybean than conventional plowed plots and reduced soil erosion by up to 90 percent. (p. 36)
>> In 2005, a Pennsylvania dairy farm invested $1.14 million in a project to process the manure from 800 cows, using a digester and a combined heat and power unit. Now the farm makes a profit using biogas to generate 120 kilowatt-hours of electricity to sell back to the local utility. (p. 41)
>> Both India and China have large national programs to revegetate millions of hectares of forest and grasslands-seen as investments to reduce poverty and protect watersheds. (p. 44)
>> In Morocco, 34 pastoral cooperatives with more than 8,000 members rehabilitated and manage some 450,000 hectares of grazing reserves. (p. 44)
>> In Rajasthan, India, community-led watershed restoration programs have reinstated more than 5,000 traditional johads (rainwater storage tanks) in over 1,000 villages. (p. 44)
>> Some countries are redirecting subsidy payments to agri-environmental payments for ecosystem services, some of which explicitly include carbon storage and emissions reduction. (p. 46)

If you’re interested in reading more, download chapters or purchase a copy of this critical report here.

– Deepa

With this spirit in mind, I have added my name to a letter to the President-Elect framing the values we share about food and farming in this country and offering the names of candidates who would be wonderful leaders at the USDA.

If you haven’t already, take a look at the Food Democracy letter to the Obama administration. We have already tallied 48,000 signatures. If we could top 100,000 that would certainly put us on the map!

The climate change connection? The push for palm is encroaching on some of the world’s most important rainforests. Most of the palm oil in the U.S. is importted from Indonesia and Malaysia, where burning of forests to make way for plantations is commonplace. This deforestation, and the release of stored carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is one of the main reasons Indonesia is among the worst contributors to the manmade global warming effect.

The Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace International, Friends of the Earth and the Center for Science in the Public Interest are all campaigning to increase public awareness of the environmental impact of current palm oil production.

Leila Salazar-Lopez, who leads Rainforest Action network’s agribusiness campaign says, “There’s currently no palm oil in the world that can be proven to be sustainable.”

These groups are building a coalition of concerned citizens and food companies to advocate for sustainable palm oil. Get involved!

Learn more about palm oil and how you are affected here.

The state’s governor recently launched Garden for Growth which allows residents to use “tax-reverted” (aka, unusued, abandoned, overgrown) properties to create community gardens–bringing crunchy, fresh, organic, healthy foods into the heart of the state’s urban communities. Gardeners and curious urbanites can lease vacant lots without the cost burden, and if they are successful, they can decide to purchase their plot to create a permanent garden.

Maybe other states will get inspired by this creative idea for re-zoning urban areas, to ensure greater community access to fresh, healthy foods.

To learn more click here.

Among the people profiled (including Bryant and me) are my dear friends who started Maverick Farms in North Carolina. The crew of Maverick Farms have created one of the most special spots in the country, and the weekend I spent there on the Grub tour was one of the highlights of my whole book jaunt. After a delicious dinner made with freshly picked everything, a reading from passages in Grub, and a rousing tour de force by Molly on the old baby grand in the corner of hte living room, we all nestled down to watch Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers on a sheet hanging down the wall. I remember falling asleep full of wine, good conversation, and sore muscles from time down on the farm: a formula for a good night’s rest.

Other profiles include workers from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers who we’re excited to be bringing to New York City for our special end-of-the-year fundraiser on the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights.

Also, Severine, the awesome force behind Greenhorns, has a great pic and the most impressive fridge.

Check them all out here.

An outtake from our photo shoot on Added Value’s Community Farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Says research director and friend to Take a Bite, Roni Neff, PhD:

Greater public awareness could lead to consumer demand for food with lower greenhouse gas emissions. Greater awareness could also spur action from policy makers and the food and agriculture sectors toward reducing food and agriculture-related emissions. The more we know about climate change news coverage, the more effectively we can help to ensure the important facts regarding the food systems’ contribution receive the attention they deserve.

See the full press release and link to the report Yesterday’s dinner, tomorrow’s weather, today’s news? US newspaper coverage of food system contributions to climate change.

The Case for Slow Food

Thanks for your coverage of the Slow Food Movement [Sept. 15]. It is misleading, though, to claim that industrialized food “is the only way to economically feed a global population.” There is nothing economical about a system contributing a big chunk of our greenhouse-gas emissions. The drivers of global deforestation are large-scale agribusiness–not Sunshine heirloom-tomato farmers from Sonoma.

Anna Lappe, Brooklyn, NY

What I sent:

Dear Editor,

Thanks for your coverage of the 50,000-person strong Slow Food Nation pow-wow in San Francisco (“Can Slow Food Feed the World?” September 4, 2008), but let’s be clear: with all of the evidence about the environmental and human consequences of industrial farming, it is dangerously misleading to claim that industrialized food “is the only way to economically feed a global population nearing 7 billion.” There is nothing “economical” about a food system that is contributing to one-third of the devastating – and did I mention costly? – greenhouse gas emissions driving the climate crisis. Nor is there anything “economical” about the polluted waterways and impacted lives from the chemical contamination of the billions of pounds of active ingredient pesticides used every year in the United States and abroad.

Furthermore, Walsh takes another disingenuous jab at organic farming by claiming that the “Slow Food initiative might lead to turning more forests into farmland.” The drivers behind deforestation are large-scale agribusiness pushing into wetlands in Indonesia and rainforests in the Amazon, not Sunshine heirloom tomato farmers from Sonoma.

Anna Lappé
Take a Bite out of Climate Change
Brooklyn, NY
www.takeabite.cc

This may seem a little unexpected from an organization that thrives online, but Cultivating the Web: High Tech Tools for the Sustainable Food Movement brings the online bounty of the sustainable food movement into your hands.

Always with a finger on the pulse, our trusted friends over at Eat Well have pulled together a compendium of go-to resources, whether you’re a city dweller or a country mouse.

Consult Cultivating the Web for blogs for your daily digest, websites for organizations to watch, even strategies for mapping your local food route for your next road trip. For those looking to dive into the local food movement, there’s an inviting section on how to make the most of social networking sites, infiltrate the masses with homemade web videos, start a blog, or create a Flickr account to draw your audience into the movement. And, for those who are daunted by tech tools and gadgets, there’s a glossary.

We’re in this work to fix a broken food system together, and thanks to the Eat Well team, movers and shakers all of them, our voice just got a little louder. You’re just a click away. Move your mouse to www.eatwellguide.org to download your copy today.

–Jeanne and Anna

And, just in case you thought the global food crisis should be blamed on Big Ag making billions while the poor starve, or on the speculators who have flooded commodities markets with capital seeking refuge from the deluge of housing bubbles bursting, or on the industrial farmers in the U.S. who have converted 33 percent of their corn production to biofuels, the Journal has finally put blame where blame is due: squarely on the shoulders of small farmers.

(I’m hoping the sarcasm in that last sentence breaks through the blogosphere).

Yes, small farmers in New Zealand, who are so old fashioned they would like to hang onto local ownership instead of opening up their cooperative to foreign control, are now among the culprits for a global food crisis, according to the paper.

The irony is that the countries facing the worst food riots, and feeling the crisis most acutely, are those that have lost the local control of their food systems these New Zealand farmers are trying to hold on to. But these countries have lost that local control, not necessarily because they willingly turned it over to outside power, but often because they were required to do so in response to international loans contingent on market liberalization.

I just finished an advance copy of Paul Roberts new book, The End of Food, and he writes about some of the policies, forced on countries worldwide, that created such food vulnerability. Remember the East Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s? When that region reached out to the International Monetary Fund for assistance, the agency extended a $120 billion rescue package, with strings attached: The offer was tied to a requirement that the countries slash their tariffs on imported rice, as well as sugar, flour, soybeans, and corn. They did; they got the loan; the rest is history.

The vivid images of food riots dotting the planet have shown us the fragility of food systems that are so intricately tied to a global market with its wild speculation and extreme price volatility.

And now we have articles telling us we should really blame small farmers in New Zealand?

I’ve been on radio, TV, and quoted in some papers about the roots of the crisis and have been scouring the news outlets for other views that help us make sense of it.

To date, one of the best pieces I’ve read is by John Nichols of The Nation magazine.

This morning, NPR’s Marketplace had an excellent segment about the food crisis in Haiti as part of a series they’re doing all week.

As I say at the end of the segment, the global food crisis should be a wakeup call that business as usual has not been working. Even before this crisis, the global food system was shutting out 850 million people who were going hungry globally, despite the fact that we were producing enough food for everyone to be fed.

What are the solutions? Raj and I share some in this segment. I also suggest taking a look at the work of the National Family Farm Coalition in sharing ideas for how we can learn lessons from the crisis.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but notice which agribusiness company has just reported an 86 percent jump in its quarterly earnings. Cargill, one of the world’s largest private companies said that these strong earnings have been driven mainly by its commodities division and primarily because of the booming demand for biofuels and increasing demand in new markets, especially Asia.

Last year this global company posted a net profit of $2.34 billion. (They’re total sales last year were $88.3 billion). Just to put that in some context: $2.3 billion is the GDP of Belize.