2006 Annual Report

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Food Sovereignty Tops Food First's Agenda

This year Food First dug in its heels for Food Sovereignty defined as people's right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through equitable, ecologically sound and sustainable methods. Food sovereignty is our right to determine our own food systems. It puts people - not international markets or corporate megaprofits - at the heart of food and development policies.

In 2006 we launched Building Local Agri-Foods Systems, a new program to highlight and support food justice groups in the U.S. that are fighting for healthy, affordable food in low-income communities and communities of color. Our work focuses on building local food systems that reinvest the food dollar in the community. Food First's "added value" is our ability to produce information that helps farmers and consumers overcome the "industrial agri-foods divide" by building and managing their own food systems. This year we worked with food activists to establish a Food Policy Council in Oakland, California, a Food and Fitness Collaborative, and a Food System Assessment research group in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Our Farmers Forging Food Sovereignty program - also new this year - supports farmer-driven agroecological alternatives worldwide. This program engages with farmers movements for food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture. This year, we worked with the Campesino a Campesino Movement of Latin America to bring their successes in sustainable agriculture to worldwide attention. We also worked with the National Family Farm Coalition and the Community Food Security Coalition to educate the public on the 2007 U.S. Farm Bill.

Food First supporters will recognize Democratizing Development: Land, Resources, and Markets, a long-standing program area focusing on the structural causes of hunger and poverty. This program builds bridges between transnational and local advocates who are democratizing food systems. This year, we continued work on land reform, fair prices, trade, and getting agriculture out of the WTO. We also addressed the role of immigrants in the U.S. food system, and focused on the root causes of migration. We initiated research on the "Biofuels Boom" and its corporate impact on food and fuel systems in the U.S. and the Global South.

Letter from Eric Holt-Giménez

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

2006 has been a pivotal year for food and environmental justice, and for Food First. The massive human and economic costs of the Bush administration's disastrous war in Iraq has divided the U.S. at home and isolated it abroad. The urgent national issues of immigration, the nation's 38 million hungry and food insecure, the crisis of rural livelihoods, and the continuing neglect of victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita demand compassion as our national resources and political attention is focused on this ever-deepening war.

Internationally, the unregulated corporate globalization of the world's food system continued with the felling of forests and the spread of genetically-engineered monocultures in the Global South, the destruction of local production systems by the multinational grain companies including Cargill and ADM, and the displacement of local distribution systems by giant retail stores, including Wal-Mart. Taking advantage of the growing fuel crisis, the world's grain, petroleum, and genetic engineering industries began consolidating their hold over biofuel production, displacing farmer co-ops in the U.S. and unleashing food vs. fuel wars with peasants and environmentalists in South America and Southeast Asia.

After four years of militarily-enforced privatization of Iraq, public opinion is tipping against the war and the Bush administration. Globally, communities and social movements are stepping forward, organizing and carrying out direct actions. Peasants and environmentalists from the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil have occupied illegal fields of Syngenta and Monsanto in defense of biodiversity. Farmers, fishers, pastoralists and forest peoples in the international Via Campesina movement have mobilized against the WTO, and the North and Central American Free Trade Agreements with cries of "Globalize Hope! Globalize Struggle!" Underserved, lowincome communities of color in the U.S., family farmers, and social justice activists have stepped up efforts to take back their local food systems, forming food policy councils, drafting legislation, and lobbying for a fair 2007 Farm - and Food - Bill.

At Food First, we have accompanied these struggles, researching and writing on key topics, amplifying the voices of women and men from social movements, and focusing our efforts on food sovereignty - rural and urban, locally and globally. Thank you for your continuing support in this endeavor.

- Eric Holt-Giménez, Executive Director

2006 Research, Analysis and Publications

In 2006 Food First released two new books, Campesino a Campesino: Voices from Latin America's Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture by Eric Holt-Giménez (soon to be published in Spanish and Portuguese), and Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform edited by Peter Rosset, Raj Patel, and Michael Courville. Eric Holt- Giménez' Territorial Restructuring and the Grounding of Agrarian Reform: Indigenous Communities, Gold Mining and the World Bank was published as a chapter in Capturando a Terra (Capturing the Land), edited by Sergio Sauer and João Mendes Pereira of Brazil.

In September, $150 million in funding for AGRA - the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa was announced by the Bill & Melinda Gates and the Rockefeller Foundations. In response to this misguided initiative, Food First published Policy Brief #12 titled Ten Reasons why the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations' Alliance for Another Green Revolution will not solve the problems of poverty and hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa. The report has been translated into Spanish, French and Portuguese and widely distributed throughout Africa, Europe and the Americas.

Food First Backgrounders published in 2006 included Movimiento Campesino a Campesino: Linking Sustainable Agriculture and Social Change; 12 Myths About Hunger (a revision based on our classic book World Hunger: Twelve Myths), The 2007 Farm - and Food - Bill, and Indian Farmer Suicides: A Lesson for Africa's Farmers. In 2007 we look forward to two new books, Ecological Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture (tentative title) by Miguel Altieri and the 12th edition of Alternatives to the Peace Corps: A Guide to Global Volunteer Opportunities.

Media, Outreach and Education

2006 was a year of major changes in the media, with more news moving to the internet and more reporters locating news sources on the World Wide Web. Thus, much of the focus of our media work this past year has been to post content on our web site. This allows reporters and activists worldwide to integrate Food First's perspective with their own. Articles on Eric's blog: The Gates-Rockefeller Green Revolution for Africa: still ignoring the root causes of hunger? and Colonizing the immigrant dream: the agri-foods industry's deadly cycle of dispossession, appropriation and substitution were picked up by news services and circulated worldwide. U.S. Biofuels eating into Mexican Tortillas? was published as an Op-Ed in La Jornada of Mexico City. Other Food First Op-eds included Another Green Revolution will not solve hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Biofuels: Who wins? Who loses? Both were published in the Des Moines Register - located in the cradle of the Green Revolution and the U.S. Biofuels industry.

Newspapers that have picked up stories in 2006 include the New York Times, the Des Moines Register, the Seattle Intelligencer, the Denver Post, the Saint Louis Post- Dispatch, the Birmingham News, and the Columbia Tribune, along with international papers; La Jornada of Mexico City, the Taipei Times and the Times of India, among others. Web news sources picking up stories included International Resource Center, One World, alainet.org, foodnews, irc-online, chechkiotech, counterpunch, policyinnovations, other-news, gmopundit.blogspot, bioseguridad. blogspot, gmwatch, organic consumers, saynotogmos, and toward freedom.

2006 Radio interviews included NPR's Talk of the Nation, WBAI, KPFA, UC Irvine Campus radio and a syndicated program with Dr. Gabriel Cousens. Food First publishes the twice-monthly e-mail newsletter, People Putting Food First (formerly, We Are Fighting Back). The new format includes more U.S. features and personal interviews, allowing our interns to obtain valuable reporting experience.

Building up to the 2007 Farm Bill, Food First sponsored two forums in the San Francisco Bay Area publicizing the fact that the farm bill affects our entire food system in both the U.S. and internationally. Food First has subsequently endorsed the Food for Family Farms Act of the National Family Farm Coalition (www.nffc.net).

You ask, "What more can i do?"

Your generous support of Food First's work allows Food First to question conventional wisdom, monitor government and corporate actions, and promote new ways of building local food systems that meet local needs. We are proud to partner with you and so many other activists who share our vision of the day when every man, woman and child will eat healthy food produced by farmers who are paid enough to support their own families.

We can't make this happen alone. Here are some simple ways that you can help: