2004 Food First Progress Report

Number 96

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Photo courtesy of Jennifer Tong (c)2004.
From the documentary photography project: "Growing Hunger: The Struggle of Small Farmers in the 21st Century."

This has been an historic year. Grassroots groups around the world are continuing their organizing to pressure for changes to bring about greater equity, and we at Food First are proud to partner with some of these movements.

If we are to restore the health of our global environment and the people who depend upon it for safe food and clean water, it’s time to act. Both environmental and human services advocates are embracing the realization that we can’t preserve the environment without the cooperation of the world’s majority. At the same time, we can’t eliminate hunger unless we preserve the health of our global environment. In the words of Wangari Maathai, Kenya’s Deputy Environment Minister and recipient of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, “Let us embrace democratic governance, protect human rights, and protect our environment.” These goals are inextricably linked

Never has it been truer than today that we live on a small planet. The year ended with an immense natural disaster, the Indian Ocean tsunami. Millions of people around the world responded, proving that our community is truly global.

There is cause for hope that the sustained efforts of millions of concerned citizens worldwide will finally bring a greater measure of balance so that all people can strive to realize their basic economic right to food and food-producing resources.

When Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins founded Food First thirty years ago, the Malthusian theory of population expansion was dominant and many people shared the belief that there was little hope of ever ending hunger. But the problem, then as now, is been food distribution, not food production—a rich man seldom goes hungry. Food First’s early work, including the books Food First and World Hunger: Ten Myths (later World Hunger: Twelve Myths), began to have an exponential influence on several generations of activists and policy makers both here in the U.S. and globally. The hope of ending hunger became an achievable possibility.

That we have not yet ended hunger in no way detracts from the fact that we are well along the path to finally making the changes necessary to do so. As a member of Food First, I hope you share in my pride at how far we have come. Yes, it is taking longer than we had hoped, but your loyal and sustained support has sustained our vision that we can and will find a way for all people to share the world’s limited resources and live in harmony with nature.

As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Today there are many small, determined groups ringing the globe who are changing the world.

Our current global, industrialized production and transport of food is simply unsustainable. The U.S. government continues to pay enormous subsidies to allow industrial farmers to make a profit. Cheap, surplus grain continues to be dumped as food aid abroad—and marketed to U.S. consumers as soda and snacks.

The good news is that every day people are making changes, from the ground up, to build a better world. Food First is proud to be part of this global movement taking place here in the U.S. and in communities everywhere. I thank you for doing your part.

This was a year of transition for Food First. Peter Rosset, who was executive director and then co-director for ten years, and Anuradha Mittal, staff member and co-director for nine years, have moved on. New staff members Kirsten Schwind, who is program director, Karl Beitel, policy analyst, and Melissa Moore, internet and outreach coordinator, have joined the rest of the staff in moving the Food First agenda forward as we search for our next executive director. We will continue to focus on agricultural trade policy, land reform, and alternative farming systems, working in coalition with our traditional partners, especially groups such as Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the larger network of farmers and peasant leaders, Via Campesina. Your continuing support will be critical to our success in the coming year. We appreciate the trust you have placed in our ability to point the way to a day when all people have what they need to survive and contribute to a healthy global community.

Marilyn Borchardt

Interim Executive Director

Food First in the News

Agence France Presse, Asia Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, San Francisco Chronicle. Recognized and published in some of the best known newspapers and magazines in the country, in 2004 Food First brought forward issues of hunger, trade policy, and genetically modified crops in a clear, articulate, and convincing manner. Food First staff members have also appeared on numerous radio interview programs around the country, commenting on Food First publications, hunger, and current agricultural issues.

Media opportunities are flourishing outside the mainstream as well. As the internet has become an important source of information for people who seldom watch TV news or read newspapers, Food First has published numerous articles and opinion pieces on popular progressive websites. Our articles and commentary have been posted on Alternet, Common Dreams, Guerrilla News Service, New Farm, and The Grist, to name a few.

Media highlights over the past year include Food First Fellow Christine Ahn’s articles on North Korea’s hunger crisis, some of which were distributed through the Knight-Ridder wire service. This work, often overlooked by a mainstream press more interested in a nuclear showdown with the United States, has grown into a 2005 development report.

Another Food First report, “Shining India?: Economic Liberalization and Rural Poverty in the 1990s,” debunked the notion that India’s rising economy was lifting many boats—instead it’s sinking quite a few. This was picked up by the United Press International wire service and appeared nationally and internationally.

BIO 2004, the biggest biotech convention in the United States, was hosted in San Francisco. Food First took that opportunity to get the San Francisco Chronicle to publish a Food First op-ed critically examining the crop biotech industry and pointing out that many of the much-heralded feats of crop biotech have neither helped poor farmers nor fed the hungry, but instead have simply boosted profits for the biotech industry.

To Inherit the Earth, an in-depth study of the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil—more commonly known as the MST—by former Food First board member Angus Wright and University of North Carolina professor Wendy Wolford, published by Food First Books in 2003, was reviewed in The Economist.

Food First’s op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle at Thanksgiving discussed the values behind the Bush administration’s policy of relying on the overtaxed system of food banks and soup kitchens to handle skyrocketing hunger in the United States and calling for more proactive, locally based federal policies and support.

On two occasions Food First staff had letters published in the Financial Times. One letter, in response to a commentary column, pointed out the Bush administration’s habit of lying to fight a war and shredding the Bill of Rights along the way. The other commented on an article about the Food and Agriculture Organization’s annual food security report, pointing out that, while the FAO has the numbers right, it just needs the political will to press for policies that would feed the world’s burgeoning hungry.

As a food policy think tank, it is gratifying to see Food First get its message into the media and out to the general public. With new staff members, new program directions, and a new enthusiasm for our mission, we look forward to contributing more to the public debate on food and agriculture policy, hunger, and social and economic human rights in 2005.

Food First Program Highlights

As Food First enters its thirtieth year as an organization on the forefront of the struggle for global justice and a world free from hunger, we are confronted with new challenges and opportunities. Within the U.S., we have witnessed the political ascendancy of the right wing and an aggressive reorientation of U.S. foreign policy strategy around a doctrine of unilateralism and preemptive use of military force. On the domestic front, the Bush administration has successfully passed major cuts in taxes for the wealthy, and has made partial privatization of social security the centerpiece of its domestic agenda. In this climate, the progress of food justice and the elimination of hunger will require a redoubling of our efforts to oppose the present course of U.S. policy and reorient our nation’s political priorities around a program of peace, social justice, and equitable international trade.

At the same time, there are victories upon which we can build in the period ahead. Today, as never before, the WTO is in crisis, due in no small measure to the struggles of global civil society—including Food First—in blocking the progress of negotiations in Cancún in September 2003. Recognition is growing that the struggles against war and for food rights and social justice are two aspects of the same fight. And more and more, the deleterious effects of the corporate takeover of our food system are being challenged, and agroecological principles pervade discussions over how to reform the food system to insure long-term environmental sustainability.

In 2004, Food First staff members wrote, spoke, debated, demonstrated, organized, and worked to support some of the world’s many movements for global justice. In 2005, Food First will continue our long-standing commitment to developing informed, cutting-edge analyses of critical issues facing the U.S. and global farm reform movement, and will broaden our alliances with groups working on human rights, farmer rights, worker rights, and food sovereignty, and with groups struggling against urban poverty and hunger in the U.S. Three program themes define our work in the period ahead.

I. Democratizing Markets to Achieve Fair and Equitable Food Systems

Challenging Free Trade and Corporate Concentration

Food First has solidly documented that the rush to open markets worldwide has failed to provide the promised benefits to billions of people, especially in rural areas. With crop prices driven lower and lower, fully 50 percent of people in the world who suffer hunger are small-scale farmers. Meanwhile, the benefits of free trade accrue to increasingly consolidated agricultural corporations. Highlights of our work in this program area in 2004 included:

• Co-hosting the Genetic Engineering Activist Network (GEAN) national conference at UC Berkeley
• Publishing research on the impact of economic liberalization on the poor in India
• Speaking and publishing on behalf of the successful Yes on Measure H Campaign in Mendocino County, the first county to ban the planting and cultivation of genetically modified organisms
• Working in coalition with Reclaim the Commons to oppose the myths of corporate agricultural biotechnology at the June BIO gathering of 18,000 biotechnology industry representatives
• Giving media support to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in their March 2004 Taco Bell Truth Tour
• Supporting pioneering agroecologist Ignacio Chapela, who discovered the GMO contamination of corn in Mexico, in his struggles at UC Berkeley, where corporate influence from biotech giant Novartis may have cost Chapela tenure.

Our next phase of research and education will focus on mapping and documenting the impacts of corporate concentration in agriculture. We’ll continue to uncover the role of international financial institutions as well in promoting destructive trade practices.

Food First is a proud partner of Via Campesina, the world’s first global farmers’ coalition, in declaring “WTO Out of Agriculture!” As opposition to the WTO keeps building, it’s time to focus on developing alternative global trade structures. Food First is a founding member of Via Campesina’s Food Sovereignty Network, dedicated to researching and developing international agricultural trade regimes based on the concept of food sovereignty. We’re collectively building the vision of agricultural trade that will finally benefit the majority of the world’s farmers. As part of this effort, we’re collaborating with our U.S.–based partners to transform the next U.S. Farm Bill from corporate welfare to legislation that truly supports fair prices, sustainable agriculture, and the basic human right to food. We'll also organize events to popularize the concept of food sovereignty in the United States

Ending Poverty and Hunger in Our Cities

Despite claims that the U.S. economy has returned to health, the fact is that poverty rates have risen in the U.S. since 2000. Hunger remains a feature of U.S. urban life: the USDA estimates that nearly one-sixth of U.S. households will experience some degree of food insecurity in the course of a given year. Highlights of our work in this program area in 2004 included:

• Publishing a Backgrounder on the flaws in the U.S. food safety net, and another on the burgeoning U.S. community food security movement
• Hosting a forum on local food in the Bay Area.

In 2005, Food First will be broadening our U.S. urban program work. On the research front, we will be publishing a series of studies on the prevalence, origins, and consequences of urban poverty and hunger in the U.S. We will begin developing a series of social and economic indexes that will measure economic hardship in the U.S., and reframe the debate on what constitutes an adequate living standard and the barriers to the full eradication of poverty in the U.S. To develop a broad-based campaign strategy, Food First will be partnering with other organizations working on urban food security, urban poverty, and immigration and human rights issues. We will continue our participation in local food security work in Oakland.

II. Land Reform

Food First has long argued that land reform is a key component of ensuring people’s right to feed themselves and build more equitable and sustainable local, national, and international economies. In 2004, Food First’s work on land reform included:

• Publishing research on Philippines land reform
• Building and maintaining a website (www.landaction.org), in coalition with Focus on the Global South (based in Thailand) and the Social Network for Justice and Human Rights (based in Brazil), for the Land Research Action Network, linking land movements worldwide with academic and activist researchers .

This year we’ll focus on land reform developments in Venezuela, which has one of the most robust and radical land reform policies and movements in the world. The Venezuelan people and their government are modeling economic and social policy trends that offer real alternatives to the free trade paradigm. Food First will sponsor a campus tour of Venezuelan experts featuring debates, panel discussions, and multimedia presentations. We’ll also publish a fact sheet and Backgrounder to help educate Americans about what’s happening with the food system and the political system in Venezuela.

We will continue our solidarity work with Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) by participating in and educating about their April 2005 march on Brasilia. Food First will also continue to collaborate with the Land Research Action Network (LRAN), publishing an upcoming volume on past and present land reform efforts.

III. Ecological and Socially Just Farming Systems

For years Food First has been a leader in promoting independent, sustainable agriculture, and the message is being heard. Highlights of our work in this area in 2004 included:
Leading a delegation of U.S. farmers and scientists on a tour of Cuba’s agroecological farms and gardens, to learn first hand how Cubans are feeding themselves despite the U.S. trade embargo
Publishing Backgrounders on the organic agriculture movement sweeping Europe and on the plight of US farmworkers.

This year we’re proud to announce a collaboration with the Organic Consumers’ Union to widely distribute our documentary The Greening of Cuba, which highlights Cuba’s amazing progress in organic and sustainable agriculture since the collapse of the Soviet bloc. We’re uncovering the story of Monsanto’s persecution of farmers, and will launch a blogspace on our website for farmers to speak out. Our Winter 2005 Backgrounder reveals how rural towns in Pennsylvania are already taking back their communities by banning corporate farms. In April, we will publish a ground-breaking report by Food First Fellow Christine Ahn on the state of the food system in North Korea, pointing a way forward to food sovereignty and ecological sustainability for North Korean agriculture.

As we move into the twenty-first century, agriculture faces unforetold ecological challenges. Farmers in many parts of the globe are already facing changing patterns in climate and rainfall. Food First is embarking on cutting-edge research on the impacts of climate change on agriculture.

Grants, Collaborating Organizations, and Coalitions

Grants

Asplundh Foundation

Barbara and Victor Ulmer Fund of the Agape Foundation

Bernice Jenkins Foundation

C.S. Mott Foundation

Clermont Foundation

The Feinstein Foundation

Gaia Foundation

The Glickenhaus Foundation

Harold K. Raisler Foundation

Hill-Snowdon Foundation

Joseph Rosen Foundation

Kurz Family Foundation

Lifework Foundation

Meshewa Farm Foundation

Muse Family Foundation

New Society Fund

New World Foundation

Pax Christi New Orleans

Philanthropic Ventures Foundation

The RMF Foundation Inc

Solidago Foundation

Tides Foundation

The Winky Foundation

Collaborating Organizations and Coalitions

United States


Alameda County Community Food Bank

The Bioneers

Black Farmers and Agriculturists Association

Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Congressional Progressive Caucus

Ecology Center

Genetic Engineering Action Network

Global Exchange

Korea Solidarity Committee

National Radio Project

Organic Consumers Association

People’s Grocery

Pesticide Action Network

Public Citizen

Reclaim the Commons

Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights

Small World Institute

World Watch Institute

Abroad


Agricultura Urbana de la Ciudad de la Habana, Cuba

Department of Agriculture, Laos

ETC Group, Canada

Focus on the Global South, Thailand

Food First Information and Action Network International, Germany

Land Research Action Network

National Land Committee, South Africa

Our World Is Not For Sale

Oxfam, Belgium and Laos

Social Network for Justice and Human Rights, Brazil

Universidad Agraria de la Habana, Cuba

Via Campesina, Honduras

World Social Forum

Speaking engagements


UC Berkeley

UC Santa Barbara/INCITE the Revolution Will Not Be Funded

Eastside Arts Alliance

Ecology Center

Compasspoint

Idealist.org (Portland)

South Korea National Human Rights Commission

West Coast Student Summit on Hunger and Homelessness

Thank you for your loyal and generous support in 2004. We don’t have the space to list every one of you, but please understand that we couldn’t do all that we do without your financial and moral support. We are proud of the many activist donors who support our work.

Financial Report

Support the right to food and human dignity for all

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Help us secure a future of food for all

Member support is the foundation upon which food first builds consistent action, allowing our work to continue until all people have attained basic economic and social human rights. In addition to your generous continuing donations, please consider planning for the future.

• Remember the Institute for Food and Development Policy in your will. For suggested language, check the box below and we will send you information.
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