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You depend on your local farmers for the healthy food you buy at your community’s natural food store and farmers’ market.
Unfortunately, many small family farms struggle to succeed financially. That’s because farm policies favor big farms and multinational agribusiness corporations, not your local farmers.
It’s time to change that. And the best way to do it is to unite farmers from all over the country around efforts to rewrite U.S. food and farming policies.
Amidst all the bad news, scandals and neo-fascist machinations in Washington, there is some good news on the political front: A number of leading Democratic Party candidates for president, including U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), emboldened by a wave of grassroots action on the part of the youth-powered Sunrise Movement and Student Strike for the Climate, and bolstered by a group of recently elected members of Congress led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), are putting forth bold proposals that could actually solve the climate crisis.
“Cook Organic, not the Planet.” - Banner of the Organic Consumers Association at the mass climate march in New York City, September 21, 2014.
Before we talk about the future of food and farming and the crisis of organic standards, here’s some good news: Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), a leading contender for the White House in 2020, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and several other presidential candidates have just come out strongly against Monsanto and factory farming and in favor of fundamental change in our agricultural policies. (Sign this petition to thank Sanders and Warren for taking on Big Ag).
Sanders and more than 100 members of Congress, supported by millions of Americans--including leading farmers and ranchers— are now calling for a Green New Deal that encompasses both urban and rural America. A Green New Deal that will scale up fundamental change, not only in our energy and economic policies, but also in the food and farming policies that have devastated our landscape, public health and rural communities.
Could the dismal state of the U.S. food & farming system finally be getting the attention it deserves? From high-profile politicians?
In the last two months, as they hit the campaign trail, two presidential candidates—Sens. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—have floated proposals to take on Big Agribusiness and start rallying support for America’s small family farmers.
If we let Sens. Warren and Sanders know that we approve, maybe other presidential candidates will start talking about food & farming.
"Because of the Green New Deal, entirely new thinkers are now at the policy table instead of just Big Ag and Monsanto writing our public policy for us—from regenerative agriculture experts and family farmers, to indigenous leaders with intergenerational knowledge." - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Instagram post April 7, 2019
The audacious, game-changing Green New Deal (GND) Resolution, backed by the youth-powered Sunrise Movement, introduced in Congress on February 7, by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), has ignited a long-overdue debate on federal policy, including fundamental energy, infrastructure, food, farming and land-management policies.
The words “consumer” and “choice” are often strung together, implying that as individual consumers, we have power.
It’s true that as consumers, we do—to some extent—have the power to choose what, how much and how often we consume.
Yet our choices are often defined and/or limited by the corporations and politicians who control the markets and the regulations governing products and entire industries.
Thankfully, as consumers shopping in a $200-billion organic and natural food sector, we also have political power. And there’s never been a better time to exercise that power than now.
Industrial agriculture is perpetuating one of the greatest threats to mankind. From the rampant overuse of antibiotics in factory farm animals to the heavy spraying of pesticides on food crops, industrial agriculture has given rise to deadly antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
The germs are multiplying so rapidly that the number of deaths caused by drug-resistant infections could outpace those caused by cancer in the next three decades, according to a study funded by the British government. More than 10 million people worldwide could die from drug-resistant infections in 2050, surpassing the eight million projected to die from cancer, the study found.
Antibiotic resistance is sometimes attributed to the over prescription of antibiotics in hospitals and clinics. But the main driver is the use of human drugs in livestock raised on factory farms. Nearly 80 percent of antibiotics in the U.S. are administered to conventionally raised cows, pigs and chickens to promote growth and treat disease. This means exposing healthy animals to antibiotics over long periods of time.
U.S. food, farming, environmental and climate policies are working just fine for giant corporations and their shareholders.
But these policies aren’t working for family farmers. And they sure as heck aren’t working for you.
Change won’t come from the top. It will have to come from people like you. The best place to start? In your own community, by building support for a Green New Deal (GND).
Can you attend or host a Green New Deal Town Hall in your community? Or if you live in one of these cities, can you participate in the Green New Deal Tour?
The Green New Deal (GND) twin resolutions, introduced February 7, 2019, call for all Americans to have access to healthy food, clean water and clean air. The GND also proposes to provide “economic security,” jobs and good wages to all who want to participate in the new green economy.
For consumers, healthy food (and clean water and clean air, for that matter) mean transitioning away from an industrial agriculture model that poisons our food and pollutes our environment.
For farmers, any promise of “economic security” must include the return to an economic agriculture model based on providing farmers a fair price for the products they produce—or as the agriculture industry calls it, “parity pricing.” Only then, will the GND fulfill its promise to clean up our food system, clean up our environment and provide a “fair and just transition for all communities and workers.”
The GND twin resolutions were unveiled yesterday. Already, some lawmakers and media outlets are calling the GND “unrealistic” and “unaffordable,” despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
Powerful corporations—especially the fossil fuel, agribusiness, chemical and pharmaceutical industries—want to kill the GND before it can get off the ground.
The only way the GND will fly, is if we build a powerful social movement to lift it up.
So far criticism of the GND has focused not on whether we need a GND to head off our climate crisis, but whether it’s possible to do what global scientists agree we must do to avoid catastrophe: reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 45-percent within 12 years, and by 100-percent by 2050. Some critics don't think we can do it.
Those critics are right—if all we focus on is reducing emissions.
That’s why it’s critical, especially in this early stage, to get the word out that in addition to reducing emissions, we must draw down and sequester the carbon already in the atmosphere.
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