Organic Consumers Association

OCA often talks about our long term goal: making organic and regenerative food, farming, and land use (and natural health) the norm, rather than just the alternative. As our longtime ally Vandana Shiva points out, this would be “the solution to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the climate crisis, and the crisis of democracy.”

OCA and its allies worldwide are dedicated to addressing critical issues of climate change, soil health, biodiversity, water pollution and scarcity, nutrition, environmental contamination, deteriorating public health, forced migration, economic justice, and rural economic development. But what do we need to do to make this goal a practical reality? What would an “Organic Greater Reset” look like.

We need to stop corrupt politicians and the global elite from subsidizing chemical and fossil fuel-intensive agriculture, GMOs, lab food, and factory farms. We need to pay organic farmers and ranchers, not only a fair price for the food and products they produce, but we need to pay them for sequestering excess atmospheric carbon in soils and above ground plants and trees, as well as providing other key environmental services such as preserving clean water, improving soil fertility, protecting biodiversity, wetlands, and wildlife habitat, and rehydrating and reforesting parched landscapes.

The Organic Consumers Association, in conjunction with our sister organization, Regeneration International, and other partners, held the People's Food Summit on Sunday, October 16, 2022.

This was the second time this world event was held - a major 24-hour event on World Food day on Oct 16, featuring speakers from every region of our planet. Last year was a spectacularly successful event, with over 522,000 people from all regions of our world tuning in to watch and listen to our numerous topics.

Because we reached so many people, this event had a very high impact.

This year’s event was a 24-hour global, participatory, virtual summit starting in Oceania and moving westwards through the time zones of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America. Each region was self-organized, so they were empowered to present the messages and issues that are their priorities.

The People’s Food Summit is a truly participatory summit that empowers the majority of the world's food producers: the small-holder family farmers, pastoralists, and foresters who produce 70% of the food we eat.

In addition to highlighting positive solutions, it is important to keep in mind that people’s situations and perspectives are different. We all have different passions or priorities. One size or one approach does not fit all. Therefore, we need to integrate our green justice and Regeneration messages with the specific issues and concerns that are most important to grassroots constituencies, and then lay out, in everyday language, a strategy that makes people understand that we can actually solve the problems they care about the most, while also solving a host of other pressing problems at the same time. Only by starting from where people are at, and then connecting the dots, can we capture the attention and imagination of a critical mass of the global grassroots and get them to start thinking about how they can participate in our new Movement and new economy.

Objective and subjective conditions for change are different in every country in the world, and to some extent differ as well in the sub-regions and local communities of these 195 countries. Everyday people everywhere, including the most impoverished and vulnerable communities, have their burning issues as well as their secondary issues, and an inherent desire to alleviate and, if possible, solve the problems that are pressing down on them, in many cases threatening their very survival. In the activist community, major focus areas, in most cases reflecting the concerns of everyday people, include inflation and the high cost of living, freedom of choice and Constitutional liberties, climate change, environmental pollution, health, social justice, jobs and economic justice, peace, and democracy. Unfortunately, campaigners, both on the local and national/international levels, often work in isolation from other sectors, each in their own separate silos. This perpetuates tunnel vision in the body politic, parochial or sectarian attitudes, political polarization, and an overall weakness in global civil society.