The objective of much of our industrial food system is to provide a profit to shareholders and CEOs. Coca-Cola’s advertising budget was over $2.9 billion dollars in 2010, money well spent from a stockholder’s point of view: profits that year were $11.8 billion.

The current system, however, was not built only to amass wealth. Many policymakers and supporters, historically as today, have been driven by the conviction that industrial agriculture is the best way to produce massive amounts of affordable food. And in some ways it has accomplished this. People in the U.S. spend relatively little on food – about 7 percent of their total spending, as compared to 13 percent in France, 23 percent in Mexico, and 38 percent in Vietnam. Most individuals in the U.S. devote less time, energy, and money to feeding ourselves than they ever have historically.

The Federation of Southern Cooperatives grew out of the civil rights movement. We are probably 90 percent African American, but we have white, Native American, and Hispanic farmers. Racism is still here in the marketplace and in credit, but we have learned to deal with it and not give up on changing the system. We struggle every day to bring about a change.

We work with co-ops in 16 Southern states. Everything we’re about is food sovereignty, though I don’t think that many farmers in Mississippi really know the term. It’s the right of every individual on earth to wholesome food, clean water, clean air, clean land, and the self-determination of a local community to their rights of intellectual property to grow and to do what they want.

By Beverly Bell, Tory Field, and Deepa Panchang

A shovel overturned can flip so much more than soil, worms, and weeds. Structural racism - the ways in which social systems and institutions promote and perpetuate the oppression of people of color – manifests at all points in the food system. It emerges as barriers to land ownership and credit access for farmers of color, as wage discrimination and poor working conditions for food and farmworkers of color, and as lack of healthy food in neighborhoods of color. It shows up as discrimination in housing, employment, redlining, and other elements which impact food access and food justice.

“We, women from more than 40 countries, from different indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, Europe, Asia and Oceania, have gathered together to participate in the creation of a new right: the right to food sovereignty. We reaffirm our will to act to change the capitalist and patriarchal world which puts the interests of the market before the rights of people. We will find the energy to establish our right to food sovereignty, carrier of hope in constructing another world. We will carry this message to women all over the world.”

Part 3 of the Harvesting Justice Series
By Tory Field and Beverly Bell

Agricultural economist Peter Rosset is with the Center for the Study of Rural Change in Mexico
and the Land Research Action Network. He is also a member of the technical support team of
Via Campesina. Beverly Bell talked with Peter Rosset in Havana in 2009; they updated the
interview in 2012.

There are several fundamental pillars that are necessary to take control over food and agricultural
systems. One is to force even reluctant or reactionary governments to regain control over their
national borders from the flow of imported food. That means canceling free trade agreements
and not signing WTO agreements. It means stopping the import either of incredibly cheap,
subsidized food from agro-export countries which drives local producers out of business, or of
food made ridiculously expensive by food speculation.

“Over a half-century ago, Mahatma Gandhi led a multitude of Indians to the sea to make salt in defiance of the British Empire’s monopoly on this resource critical to people’s diet. The action catalyzed the fragmented movement for Indian independence and was the beginning of the end for Britain’s rule over India. The act of ‘making salt’ has since been repeated many times in many forms by people’s movements seeking liberation, justice and sovereignty: César Chávez, Nelson Mandela, and the Zapatistas are just a few of the most prominent examples. Our food movement – one that spans the globe – seeks food sovereignty from the monopolies that dominate our food systems, with the complicity of our governments. We are powerful, creative, committed and diverse. It is our time to make salt.”

By Tory Field and Beverly Bell

The first group of protestors at Occupy Wall Street publically delivered 23 complaints, outlining the ways in which corporations control our daily lives. Number four asserted, “They have poisoned the food supply through negligence and undermined the farming system through monopolization.”

By Tory Field and Beverly Bell

“Over a half-century ago, Mahatma Gandhi led a multitude of Indians to the sea to make salt in defiance of the British Empire’s monopoly on this resource critical to people’s diet. The action catalyzed the fragmented movement for Indian independence and was the beginning of the end for Britain’s rule over India. The act of ‘making salt’ has since been repeated many times in many forms by people’s movements seeking liberation, justice and sovereignty: César Chávez, Nelson Mandela, and the Zapatistas are just a few of the most prominent examples. Our food movement – one that spans the globe – seeks food sovereignty from the monopolies that dominate our food systems, with the complicity of our governments. We are powerful, creative, committed and diverse. It is our time to make salt.”

By Beverly Bell
January 7, 2013

In the high desert outside Taos, New Mexico, I drove down a dirt road that parallels the Rio Grande and saw the thick haze of a forest fire. To see the spectacle, I quickly reversed my planned course and drove as close as I was able. Across a long line of mountains, red flames flicked up like snake’s tongues amongst dense black ropes of smoke. Where the blaze had worn down, thinner smoke wisps arose above charred, black land.

By Beverly Bell
December 10, 2012

Larry Cohen has headed the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America (CWA), under the banner of “Fight Back,” since 2005. Prior to that, he headed up CWA organizing for twenty years. He is also founder of Jobs with Justice.

Given the path we’ve been on in this country, the American dream is in tatters. Whether it’s a voice on the job or our standard of living or health care or education, all are being destroyed on our watch. But we can stand up and fight back. Not only through the kind of spontaneous movement that people saw with Occupy, but a more sustained and broad-based movement that can work for constitutional change as well as protect people’s houses; secure, sustainable jobs; health care; our retirement, whether it’s social security or pensions; and on and on.