Farmers Join Occupy Wall Street, Calling for Food Justice

By Mel Fabrikant

As Wall Street's corrupt influence on the economy has grown, the corporate ownership of our food system has hurt the health and livelihood's of some of our most vulnerable communities. This Sunday, December 4th food justice activists and occupiers will be travelling from as far as Colorado, Iowa, Maine and Upstate New York to join together for the Occupy Wall Street FARMERS' MARCH.

Through a day of dialogue, musical performances, and a march, farmers and their urban allies working for food justice in their communities will form alliances to fight and expose corporate control of the food supply. Events throughout the day will call and inspire participants to fight against the corporate manipulation of the agriculture system. An industry that is responsible for using chemical toxins tied to soaring obesity rates, heart disease and diabetes and limiting access to affordable, wholesome food to the country's poorest citizens.

The event will kick off at 2pm at La Plaza Cultural Community Garden with a musical performance followed by remarks from food justice activists and occupiers. They will share their stories and listen to their peers as they highlight the role of urban-rural solidarity in building a sustainable food system as well as challenges of family-scale farmers in a culture of corporate dominance. March Begins at 4pm from La Plaza Cultural Community Garden

At 4pm, musicians will be among those leading the Farmers' March in a colorful parade from La Plaza to Zuccotti Park/Liberty Plaza, the site of a Solidarity Circle at 5pm. Stories of struggle, triumph and ruminations about the role OWS might assume in the food justice movement will help form the circle. The circle will close with a Seed Exchange.


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Fukushima Farmers Keep Calm and Carry On

By Ed M. Koziarski
Round, rough-skinned pears fill our Fukushima City apartment. Before the pears it was enormous, impossibly succulent peaches. Apples will be next.

Prior to the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant six months ago, people all across Japan would send seasonal Fukushima-grown fruit to their relatives and neighbors. But now those outside Fukushima are too wary of possible radioactive contamination in produce grown here -- and the fruit piles up.

The locals live with the risk. With a surplus of crops growing in the adjacent countryside, the fruits circulate in Fukushima like proverbial American fruitcakes at Christmas. We conspired to regift a box of pears to one neighbor, but they beat us to it and gave us another box. So we eat them all.

Since May, my partner Junko Kajino and I have been filming organic farmers who search for solutions to protect the Japanese food supply and recover their land and livelihoods from the nuclear fallout. Our days revolve around exploring the impact of food contamination. But we still have to eat. We drink bottled water and avoid the most notoriously contaminated items -- beef, milk, green tea, mushrooms. And we assume that everything we eat contains some radionuclides. We estimate our internal exposure based on levels reported for similar products, combined with our exposure to background contamination.

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Nepal's Women Farmers Discard Imported Hybrid Seeds and Husband Local Varieties in Co-Op Seed Banks

By Sudeshna Sarkar
Kathmandu - Learning a lesson from crop failures attributed to climate change, Nepal's women farmers are discarding imported hybrid seeds and husbanding hardier local varieties in cooperative seed banks.

"I had a crop failure two years ago," says Shobha Devkota, 32, from Jibjibe village in Rasuwa, a hilly district in central Nepal which is part of the Langtang National Park, a protected area encompassing two more districts, Nuwakot and Sindhupalchowk.

"The maize was attacked by pests, the paddy had no grain and the soil grew hard. I had a tough time trying to feed my three daughters and sending them to school."

Since her marriage 17 years ago, Shobha had been sharing farming chores with her husband Ram Krishna. However, when he left for Dubai four years ago to work as a security guard, farming became her responsibility entirely.

Though she has never been to school and can only scrawl her name, Shobha and other women in the village who share similar backgrounds, are keenly aware of changing climate and its adverse impact on livelihoods.

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Too Many Farmers Markets or Not Enough Farmers?

By Tom Laskawy
On the heels of the USDA announcement that farmers markets are sprouting up at a swift pace comes a contrarian article in The New York Times suggesting that this phenomenal growth might represent too much of a good thing:

 Farmers in pockets of the country say the number of farmers' markets has outstripped demand, a consequence of a clamor for markets that are closer to customers and communities that want multiple markets.

 Some farmers say small new markets have lured away loyal customers and cut into profits. Other farmers say they must add markets to their weekly rotation to earn the same money they did a few years ago, reducing their time in the field and adding employee hours.

Blogger Matt Yglesias -- tempted to dismiss these farmers' concerns -- invokes Adam Smith to suggest that this is a case not of "supply outstripping demand" but of incumbent players wishing to reduce competition.

As someone who has recently lauded the growth of farmers markets as well as their job-creating potential, I'm certainly not inclined to assert that there are indeed too many of them. Yet there are issues worth exploring here. The prime complaint -- that farmers find themselves spending too much time driving from market to market -- suggests that some areas may be saturated with true farmers markets. One sign of this would be a spate of "counterfeit" farmers trying to get in to these new markets, i.e. resellers offering wholesale produce as their own. A dead giveaway is typically farm stands featuring out-of-season vegetables and tropical fruits.

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Organic Farmers Can Sue Conventional, GMO Farmers whose Pesticides 'Trespass' and Contaminate Their Fields

By Ethan A. Huff
Purveyors of conventional and genetically-modified (GM) crops -- and the pesticides and herbicides that accompany them -- are finally getting a taste of their own legal medicine. Minnesota's Star Tribune has reported that the Minnesota Court of Appeals recently ruled that a large organic farm surrounded by chemical-laden conventional farms can seek damages for lost crops, as well as lost profits, caused by the illegal trespassing of pesticides and herbicides on its property.

Oluf and Debra Johnson's 1,500-acre organic farm in Stearns County, Minn., has repeatedly been contaminated by nearby conventional and GMO farms since the couple started it in the 1990s. A local pesticide cooperative known as Paynesville Farmers Union (PFU), which is near the farm, has been cited at least four times for violating pesticide laws, and inadvertently causing damage to the Johnson's farm.

The first time it was realized that pesticides had drifted onto the Johnson's farm in 1998, PFU apologized, but did not agree to pay for damages. As anyone with an understanding of organic practices knows, even a small bit of contamination can result in having to plow under that season's crops, forget profits, and even lose the ability to grow organic crops in the same field for at least a couple years.

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Organic Farmers vs Monsanto

While a cow or goat may respect a property fence, pollen knows no such boundaries. Even if a farmer plants a field of non-GMO (not genetically modified) corn, she may still end up with some genetically engineered material on her farm if GMO pollen "drifts" over from a neighbor's field. Monsanto has a history of taking farmers to court if they're found to be in possession of patented plant material without permission, even if the plant material came to their fields inadvertently.

But now, tired of living in fear of lawsuits that they claim are unjust, a group of farmers, seed savers, and farm advocates is challenging the agribusiness giant's right to continue the practice.

We're inspired by this landmark case and today we're happy to have more background and perspective to share with you from one of the plaintiffs, Tom Willey. Tom is an organic farmer in Madera, California and a Slow Food USA regional governor.  Here are some highlights from our conversation about why this case matters to him, to his fellow farmers, and to consumers in general.

What is your role in the lawsuit? Why did you decide to get involved?

There are too many people in the agricultural community being picked off one by one over this issue of their crops being contaminated by genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Everyone on the suit is potentially liable to be sued by Monsanto. The Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) initiated this suit to deny Monsanto the right to sue farmers for being inadvertently contaminated with GMO genes.

If you stand by and watch your neighbors being abused and don't do anything to back them up, there may not be anyone there to help you.  It's very difficult for individual farmers to defend themselves from legal onslaughts from Monsanto so we thought we best go after defending the whole farming community as a group.  Luckily PUPBAT has the resources to help us make that happen and hopefully we'll prevail. 

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Family Farmers Amplify Legal Complaint Against Monsanto's GMOs

New York: New threats by Monsanto have led to the filing of an amended complaint by the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) in its suit on behalf of family farmers, seed businesses, and organic agricultural organizations challenging Monsanto's patents on genetically modified seed.

"Our clients don't want a fight with Monsanto, they merely want to be protected from the threat that they will be contaminated by Monsanto's genetically modified seed and then accused of patent infringement," said PUBPAT Executive Director Daniel B. Ravicher. "We asked Monsanto to give our clients reassurances they wouldn't do such a thing, and in response Monsanto chose to instead reiterate the same implicit threat to organic agriculture that it has made in the past."

Over the years Monsanto has sued farmers alleging they have stolen the corporation's intellectual property by saving their proprietary seed rather than purchasing new seed each year that would include a "technology fee." Because pollen, and genetics, can be spread through the wind, or by insects, farmers are vulnerable to having their crops contaminated and then subsequently being sued by Monsanto.

Soon after the March filing of the lawsuit, Monsanto issued a statement saying that they would not assert their patents against farmers who suffer "trace" amounts of transgenic contamination. In response, and in the hope that the matter could be resolved out of court, PUBPAT attorneys wrote Monsanto's attorneys asking the company to make its promise legally binding.

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Creating Food Sovereignty for Small-Scale Farmers

By Ronit Ridberg
World Watch Institute, July 7, 2010
Straight to the Source

Affiliation: Visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for African Studies, Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First.

Location: San Francisco

Bio: Raj Patel has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee and is an Advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, he regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to the LA Times, NYTimes.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and most recently, The Value of Nothing.

Photo credit: Andrea Ismert, www.rajpatel.org

Can you please explain the concept of food sovereignty, and what policies and programs will help encourage it?

Food sovereignty is about communities', states' and unions' rights to shape their own food and agricultural policy. Now that may sound like a whole lot of nothing, because you're actually not making a policy demand, you're just saying that people need to be able to make their own decisions. But, actually, that's a huge thing. Because in general, particularly for smaller farmers in developing countries, and particularly for women, decisions about food and agricultural policy have never been made by them. They've always been imposed.

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The Ploy to Promote Genetically Engineered Seeds and Pesticides to Poor Mexican Farmers Is Impoverishing Their Communities

By Jill Richardson
Alternet, August 06, 2010
Straight to the Source

The Obama administration's Feed the Future initiative promises a second Green Revolution that will feed a planet of nine billion people by doubling crop yields by 2050. But considering that we produce enough food to feed the planet today and a billion people still go hungry, are yields really the problem? And if they are, are providing Green Revolution technologies like hybrid and genetically engineered seeds, chemical fertilizer and pesticides to subsistence farmers the best way to achieve them? I visited subsistence farmers in Mexico to find out.

The homes of campesinos, peasant farmers, in the rural areas surrounding Cuquio, Mexico (about an hour from Guadalajara) no longer have dirt floors. The Mexican government initiated a program to replace them with cement floors in 2008 and now most homes sport a plaque celebrating their new piso firmes. Electricity came about 20 years ago. For many, running water and bathroom facilities are modern conveniences they do not yet have. The government has recently distributed composting toilets to many, but not all, families.

One of the tiny adobe homes is decorated by flowers growing in upside-down Coca-Cola bottles turned into flower pots. Another is located next to a fencepost sporting an empty bag of Monsanto corn seeds -- seeds presumably planted in the adjoining cornfield, or milpa. This little corner of the world and the people who live here seem to be forgotten by everyone except for Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and multinational agribusiness corporations like Monsanto and DuPont. 

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