Food justice and the Obama Administration

DEFINING FOOD JUSTICE PRINCIPLES FOR A POST-NEOLIBERAL WORLD

Shoreline, WA. On October 15, 2008 (World Food Day), the U.S. Working Group on the Food Crisis sent then candidate Barack Obama an Open Letter. Candidate Obama had just declared that as President he would seek to end childhood hunger by 2015.

The Working Group is a coalition of progressive food, farm, labor, and justice organizations from across the United States. The coalition offered its advice in the form of five principles the new Administration should follow in pursuit of sustainable food justice policies:

• Stabilize and guarantee fair prices for farmers and consumers globally;
  
• Rebalance power in the food system;
  
• Make agriculture environmentally sustainable;
  
• Respect, protect and fulfill human rights of farmworkers and other food system workers; and
• Guarantee the right to food.

We do not yet have a complete picture of the direction the Obama Administration will adopt with respect to food, nutrition, and agriculture policy. The appointment of former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack as Secretary was not an encouraging sign to be sure. On issues related to biosafety, to cite but one key example, the former governor, seems too mainstream and unreflexive in his support of the biotechnology sector.

Will Obama abide by the food justice principles of fair trade, local empowerment, ecological soundness, attainment of labor and social justice, and guarantees for the right to be free of hunger through access to wholesome, healthy, and culturally-appropriate foods?

These principles are a tall order. How exactly does one go about the process of re-balancing power in a corporate-dominated global food system? How does one define "fair" trade in a world still dominated by market fundamentalists? How does ecological agriculture become the "norm" in the face of the agri-genomics revolution? What are the rights to be granted to farmworkers and other food system workers who are, from their own vantage point, more than just "cheap" seasonal or casual labor? Who grants such rights and will these include the right to organize a union regardless of one's immigration status?

Is this progressive agenda still bound to a type of top-down "decentralization" logic at a time when what we need and indeed are starting to create through social movements is bottom-up self-mobilizing or "decentralism"?

In the end, one could argue that even these progressive principles reflect a top-down logic especially on issues of "workers' rights." The progressive agenda invests too much trust in what might turn out to be a neo-Keynesian state strategy to "save capitalism from the capitalists" and that basically invites the state to grant extension of civil and equal treatment to various categories of peoples that have been kept down and out; locked-up in detention; exposed to death and violence not just in pesticide-ridden fields but on treacherous hot desert sojourns; or recycled through the revolving doors of diaspora "cheap" labor. This granting of "rights" to our brothers and sisters who have been subject to marginality for so long they are sure this is what it actually means to become "Americanized."

Our proposals for environmental and food justice require a more radical set of practices that lead not so much to a re-structuring as a sublation of the dominant global food system. To end hunger and malnutrition we need to simultaneously challenge the avarice-driven hunger for profit of transnational agribusiness corporations while consciously rebuilding our place-based local food systems.

De-commodify food to challenge globalization?

The spaces of autonomy dedicated to local food sovereignty are opening in thousands of localities across the world. We only need recognize and nurture these impulses. The alterNative institutions for local food sovereignty that grassroots social movements are creating can bridge the divide separating producer from consumer while relying on the collective intellectual, material, and cultural assets of the community in order to de-commodify food.

This might be the first demand of the food justice movement: Make food a right not a commodity. Even better if this "right" can be thought of us something not so much pertaining to the "individual." Instead, the alterNative vantage might embrace a right to self-provisioning of food through locally-grounded cooperative union and mutual aid.

Moreover, we are asserting these types of freedoms now and are not waiting for the state to deliver justice. Don't wait; act now. This is the path of movements like Via Campesina, the South Central Farmers, and the acequia farmers of the Rio Arriba bioregion. We don't ask permission from the state to be "free" and instead create our own freedoms through direct organizing and community-based action. If the state, on notice, decides to support these struggles I am certain most of us would not reject assistance if it did not tie us down to "reformist reforms."

The demands of the food justice movement incorporate principles of the anti-globalization movement since the emphasis remains on place-based self-provisioning and demands to restore more "autarkic" forms of food sovereignty. Also, the role of fair trade demands becomes less important since a return to heritage agroecosystems implies a reduction in the production of exotic crops for cash-export markets and a focus first on local food self-sufficiency.

The de-commodification and re-localization of food systems are two critical elements of any truly just and sustainable agriculture and food policy. Of course, this will require that we punch deep holes in the arguments of the naysayers who claim we cannot feed the world without a reliance on industrial mass production of food. Local food systems are attacked for being incompatible with the economies of scale [sic] it presumably takes to feed an ever-growing human population.

But these are indeed unproven assumptions and the corporate take-over of "organics" serves to clearly illustrate that we can actually produce mass quantities of food without pesticides or herbicides. Unfortunately, this also means that the social justice issues of workers' control and right livelihood are brushed aside as the "backward" annoyances of an earlier era superseded by corporate organic producers that feign themselves lords of a New Age of non-adversarial capitalism. But this is a subject best left to a future blog.

Food sovereignty and the return of the social wage

We need to recall that the Keynesian programs of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s were the albeit co-opted results of hard fought for victories through decades of struggle since well before the 1929 Crash. Over time, working-class struggles sought to create a "social wage" in the form of food stamps, unemployment checks, school lunch programs, student grants and subsidized loans, and pension and retirement funds.

We should be proud of any accomplishment that moves a people closer to a world where we "work to live" and do not "live to work." Where the hell did this notion of the "welfare" state as some "liberal" anomaly or evil vampire-sucking creation come from? That is a rhetorical question. It is capital that sucks the blood out of listless proletarian bodies.

The food stamp and school lunch programs are the only true remnants of the massive programs conceded to the power of 20th century working-class struggle and organization during those heady pre-Reagan days when the "welfare" state, despite is contradictions and limitations, was able to define and provide for a real social wage or "floor" under which no one was to fall. We had in effect succeeded in de-commodifying our own relationship to waged-labor or income. It was a brilliant victory if we want to work to live and not live to work. Stop apologizing for the social wage and demand that a bigger cut of the "stimulus" go toward a refurbishing of the so-called "social safety net." In other words, divorce work from the reproduction of your body's species-life, or "working-class self-valorization," to borrow an old, out of fashion phrase by Toni Negri.

This concept of the social wage basically involves the idea that the common wealth produced by generalized labor power means no one goes homeless, hungry, or lacking for health and educational resources or environmental amenities like clean air and water. If biopolitics means anything worthwhile or interesting it is this idea of how we have come to resist capital's efforts not just to exploit our bodies but to regulate the contingencies that affect, limit, or even diminish the life-giving capacities of our bodies. As Sylvia Federici says, "The body had to die so that labor power could live" in service to capital.

The social wage becomes a way of re-appropriating some of our common wealth and food is part of this social wage.

Re-balancing power in the global food system?

It may be that the only enduring way to re-balance power in the global food system is by introducing the concept of the social wage into the discourse on food sovereignty. This allows us to de-link demands for food sovereignty from demands for "fair" trade with its continued faith in the "market."

However, this also requires shift toward the "local" - in the sense of a spatial re-orientation of the food system from global commodity chains toward local, more autarkic, bioregional food systems. Think globally, eat locally.

Directing major investments into the ecological and cultural restoration of local food systems could be the best practice frontier of any truly just and sustainable Obama Administration "Green Jobs" strategy for the 21st century.

I invite my readers and followers to think about how we can go about making resistance against global food systems a principal investment of US efforts to re-balance power and combining this with the proactive forces that are already rebuilding local food systems. Local food needs to become one of three keystones of any "progressive" food and agriculture policy for the United States. Support for a transition to local food systems, along with renewable energy and sensible climate change policies, could become the defining hallmarks of progressive policy in the Obama Administration.

We will be watching and reporting on developments as they occur in the critical months that lay ahead as we witness the start of the unfolding of this Administration's food and agriculture policies.