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NEW YORK – Today family farmers from across the U.S. will participate in the Occupy Wall Street Farmers March to join in solidarity with efforts to expose corporate control of our food supply.

The event begins at 2 p.m. at La Plaza Cultural Community Garden with remarks about the growing inequity in our food system from farmers and food workers followed by a 4 p.m. Farmers March to Zuccotti Park, where farmers, activists and ranchers, who have travelled from as far as Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Upstate New York, will march to ground zero of the growing Occupy Wall Street movement to curtail excessive corporate influence.

“The Farmer’s March is a celebration of community power to regain control over the most basic element to human well-being: food. The food system has been taken over by multinational corporations to the detriment of communities, ecosystems, local economies, and soil all over the world,” said Paula Winograd and Seth Wulsin, members of the Occupy Wall Street Food Justice committee. “We march for urban/rural solidarity, to share the solutions that are already happening, and to strengthen our regional food networks based on the basic principle of food justice: that access to fresh, healthy, affordable food is a human right,” proclaimed Winograd and Wulsin.

Over the past three decades, the U.S. has adopted economic policies promoted by Wall Street investment banks and agribusiness monopolies that have led to massive consolidation in food and agricultural sectors. Today market concentration is so great that only four firms control 84 percent of beef packing and 66 percent of pork production, which has resulted in forcing more than 1.1 million independent livestock producers out of business since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.