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.

Sodbusters and the 'native' gaze - Part IV

Devolution or revolution of the soiled?

The headquarters of our family’s "Rancho Dos Acequias" is housed in an adobe-brick, territorial-style home rebuilt over the burned-out ruins of the first homestead in the 1920s. The home was expanded in the 1940s and again in the 1960s. We are currently renovating the infrastructure and converting to a hybrid solar-wind-hydronic energy and water heating system that will take us off the grid. The Institute oversees the agricultural and restoration ecology programs on a historic acequia farm in San Acacio, Colorado. The 200-acre parcel is a classic riparian long-lot traversing the Rio Culebra bottomlands within the 1844 Sangre de Cristo Land Grant. Our irrigation water comes from La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis de la Culebra (a.k.a. San Luis Peoples’ Ditch), the oldest adjudicated water right in the state (1852 decree). A smaller portion issues from La Acequia de Roberto Allen, pronounced, Ah-YEN, a junior 1957 decree under Colorado’s prior appropriation law.

The Sangre de Cristo Land Grant includes uplands that were springtime hunting grounds for the Tabehuache and Weminuche clans of the Mountain Ute first nation well into the mid-1800s. When Chicano land grant activists filed a lawsuit in 1979 to reverse Taylor’s 1960 private enclosure of the commons of the land grant, the Ute people, now living west of Durango, gave this struggle their blessing as a form of resistance by indigenous peoples. (Frank White, Ute-xicano elder, personal communication, June 1988)

The farm came with an unexpected gift, the kind I am sure archivists dream about: A primary original document in the form of a 300+ page deed that presents a detailed history of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant, legal descriptions for various vara strips or long-lots apportioned, and the water rights pertaining to these lands. The deed traces the changing ownership of the land between 1851 and 2006. Some of the documents pertain to the original decrees and the adjudication and re-adjudication of the water rights vested in both of the acequias.

I have learned from reading this document that “our” land was originally deeded by Carlos Beaubien to Diego Gallegos, the younger and more obscure brother of Dario, who is recognized as the founder of La Plaza de San Luis de la Culebra, established in 1851. This happened a bit before the time when Kit Carson was assigned to retire from a notorious “Indian-fighting” career at Fort Massachusetts, located near today’s town of Fort Garland about 20 miles north of our farm. He died not too close to destitute in the shadow of Changing Woman, Sisnaajini, Mother Mountain of the Dine Twins, Monster Slayer and Water Giver.

The deed shows that the farm came into new ownership several times before my sister and I purchased it in February 2006. Two of the previous owners were Anglo American families. One involved two generations of a family that established a successful wool and mutton operation and sustained a commercial cauliflower and later beer hops operation over a period of about four decades (1946-82). The other involved a retired Air Force colonel who was seen locally as a curmudgeon. He was a widely disliked sheep and alfalfa-hay producer with a reputation for stubbornly challenging acequia customary practices in the allocation of irrigation water within the community ditch (1982-1998).

I knew this retired colonel rather well and interacted with him almost on a daily basis for more than five years when we both lived in the area. He once told me during an informal chat something that just now reminds me of the sodbuster’s attitude: “These damn farmers. They have got to modernize. They are pretty backward or maybe just plain lazy...These ditches? Hell, they date back to medieval times!” [How little he knew to appreciate the deep history of acequias as rooted in antiquity when al Andalus was the heart of a multicultural Islamic Spain, 711-1492.] He went on: “They should convert to sprinklers. Get more efficient. Save water by, you know, paving the canals. It’s all about becoming more modern… It’s not about race like you were asking earlier” [I had used the term, culture not race.]

I won’t dwell on the retired colonel’s obvious racial prejudices toward lazy Hispanic [sic] farmers. I have an even more practical and pressing problem now that he is gone but left a heavy imprint on the land. My sister asnd I inherited this curmudgeon’s 1970s-styled 75 yard-long center-pivot mechanical irrigation sprinkler. We acquired the land from a multigenerational Hispano farmer from down in the Española Valley who had bought it in 1999. We irrigated with the center-pivot that first season (2006) and had significant diesel fuel, labor, and maintenance costs. We stopped using the sprinkler last year (2007) during our annual May to October irrigation cycle. Instead, we did the best we could with the damaged acequia network. I spent a lot of time ‘changing water’ on those large meadows and this has become an activity I cherish.

We plan on dismantling the three-ton mechanical centipede-on-wheels this summer. Then, in 2009, we plan to restore the use of acequia gravity-driven flood irrigation to this middle vega after we re-seed with native grasses and sedges and add some permaculture features to slow the movement of water over the land and reduce the effects of wind erosion.

This acequia farmland is very resilient. It still has fairly deep soil horizons, and soil formation is evident since the bottomlands receive regenerative dustings from the mesa tops and from the fine sediment transported by the acequias through flood irrigated practice. There is little evidence of compacted clay lens, tepetate. I don’t have any gullies. The main problems on this northern and upper elevation half of the farm are the concentric grooves produced by the wheels of the center-pivot sprinkler and the state of the acequia network for that vega with potential for arroyo-cutting given the decades of inattentiveness and disrepair. This was definitely the wrong site for a mechanical irrigation sprinkler (although I don’t believe there is a “good” site anywhere on earth).

The myriad problems with center-pivot agricultural sprinklers are legendary but the one that reminds me the most about the foolish arrogance of the farmer in the sodbuster joke is the fact that the sprinkler encourages prairie dogs to burrow more profusely in the sprinkler irrigated fields. Flood irrigation by acequia techniques keeps the burrows to a minimum. The critters tend not to locate in flood-irrigated fields because the flooding of the burrows makes them uninhabitable. The sprinkler irrigation is more like a long and steady rain. I can just see the prairie dogs showering under the evaporating mists; studies show that mechanical sprinklers are less efficient than acequias at delivering water to the crops because of aerial evaporation. The difference for soil erosion control and the effectiveness of getting water to the crop is rather striking.

Yet, the retired colonel kept insisting that sprinklers were superior to acequias. Maybe he was just too old and worn out and could not invest the long and hard labor it takes to master the art of flood irrigating. In any event, he was quick to belittle the acequia parciantes. Yet, as soon as he lauded the superiority of the center-pivot he was complaining about the rising fossil fuel costs to operate the sprinkler machine. He lamented the fact that he had to run the sprinkler a lot longer than it takes for an acequia to irrigate a comparable field and how this created scheduling conflicts with other irrigators. He complained mightily about the high cost of maintenance and the many hours spent driving long distances to acquire expensive parts for repair jobs. Sometimes he couldn’t do the job himself and then had trouble getting the right mechanic to do the job for him.

The sprinkler became his personal maintenance nightmare and this caused all kinds of misery on the community ditch since these breakdowns upset the timing of allocations to different irrigators. One time he claimed that the sprinklers were better because they reduced soil erosion and compaction. However, in the next breath he complained that the sprinkler, circling the field on large tractor-like wheels was producing a series of concentric grooves of furrowed and compacted soil where the wheels met the ground. Repairing this damage is a major task before me as I work to restore more healthy soil conditions before reintroducing acequia flood irrigation to this meadow.

These men were classic sod busting monoculture farmers and both abused the land. The results are apparent everywhere. One can see this in the barrancos along the Culebra River where the sheep and cattle over the decades cleared the banks of native vegetation and then trampled the edges, collapsing the banks in chunks of lost topsoil and rootstocks from willows and alders long ago washed out toward the Rio Bravo del Norte (aka Rio Grande). Or one can see the effects in the hummocks (cespedes or mogotes) that mark the transition from the riparian zone to las vegas de en medio, the once deeply flowered wet meadows that result from the sub-irrigation flow of the upstream acequias. I am newly engaged in a practical battle with the ghosts of these sodbusters in my efforts to repair the damaged riverbanks and to restore the native plant associations in the hummocky meadows for now still deprived of their perennial Native polyculture.

This is Part 4 of 8 of an original as yet unpubished essay prepared by invitation for the Department of Anthropology, Spring 2008 Colloquium, “Epistemologies of Anthropological Research,” University of Washington, May 23, 2008. It is presented here free of the footnotes in the original. Sources cited in the text will be posted at the end of the series of 8.

This is a work in progress; please do not quote, cite, or circulate without the author’s permission. Send inquiries to: dpena@u.washington.edu. The author thanks Elaine H. Peña and Mario Montaño for comments on earlier drafts.

The four food groups of the apocalypse

What are Americans still buying? Big Macs, Campbell's soup, Hershey's chocolate, and Spam - the four food groups of the apocalypse.

-Frank Rich, New York Times (Feb 1, 2009)

Shoreline, WA. Throngs of cold, hungry working-class men and women waiting in soup lines were commonplace during the Great Depression. Now, during the "Derivatives Depression," plenty of people are going hungry. Many are turning to stressed-out food banks that are distributing grocery bags not quite filled with dwindling foodstuffs of lower nutritional value. Indeed, those bags are now more likely filled with Spam, Campbell's soups, which I like to call "sodium in a can," and Hershey's chocolate bars.

Yet, there are also more creative and collective responses to hunger including "freegan" emergency kitchens in some communities that recycle dumpster food to help homeless people feed themselves (see the blog of June 4, 2008).

Some pundits see "hungry people" as merely "unfortunate" souls, as if this were simply a matter of "bad luck" and all it takes is a few donations to the food bank and we will all have met our responsibilities as a "public." Or, the "hungry other" is simply viewed as a casualty of needed "structural adjustments" that must take place on the "high road" to some imagined future free trade nirvana.

The public invisibility of neoliberal hunger

So far, during the early onset of the Derivatives Depression, we are seeing "less hunger" in the "public sphere." This, despite the fact that we are in the midst of actually spreading hunger. But the media present this ultimately as a condition of individual experiences, the "private" and "hidden" stories of food deprivation. This line of thinking is compatible with the bureaucratic mindset that gave us the substitute term, "food insecurity," as a stand-in for the more visceral term, "hunger."

Just because fewer people appear to be waiting in soup lines out on our streets and sidewalks, does not mean that hunger is decreasing. Hunger, and our inadequate public response to it, is rendered invisible, opaque, and undifferentiated as a pure form of structural violence.

Emergency food systems and informal practices are thus forced to adapt to the new political economic and symbolic structures and discourses that are mediating the struggle for food sovereignty.

The hungry are disappearing, at least symbolically. Urban policing makes certain the hungry are not out there on the streets where they get in our faces. I am compelled to ask, rhetorically and sardonically: Did hungry people suddenly just become autotrophs, self-nurturing organisms?

The apparent invisibility of hungry people is one result of an ill-advised tendency toward exaggerated self-reliance as a quality of public perceptions of the American "individual." Too many of us don't know how to be "we." This is definitely an "I" society, as Richard Rodriguez has observed. I am not demeaning "identity" politics as such. Indeed, the most ubiquitous identity politics in America, since at least the "rugged individualist" days of Manifest Destiny, are the politics of the cult of "individualism." Everyone is supposed to be a fully-functioning, self-provisioning automaton. This is sometimes even said to be God's gift to the self-destructive.

Self-reliance, especially community-based autonomy and resilience, is certainly a virtue. But I draw an exception when structural violence has robbed persons of capacities to exercise such freedoms. Instead, those many Americans who are unprepared to engage in cooperative efforts to avoid hunger cannot but flail about all alone, with no communal, kin, or friendship supports.

This is not self-reliance, it is isolation and deprivation. People too often go at it alone: they borrow, beg, steal, or line up at the food bank. Increasingly, they turn to their reserves of the four food groups of the apocalypse, which they may have accumulated over the years, in anticipation of economic displacement and hardship.

In more inspired cases, hungry persons grow their own food or dumpster dive with a collective sense of purpose. We should not forget that the emergence of organizations like the South Central Farmers Feeding Families occurred as a community-based and collective response to hunger and malnutrition.

Around the Puget Sound, despite the fact that this is the heart of Pacific Northwest urban farming, CSAs, and food system councils, I am more likely to see hungry people going at it alone. It is almost as if accepting handouts is considered a sin or a sign of the failure of the individual self, and that organizing oneself along with the others who are the growing ranks of the unemployed and displaced is something only the homeless and mentally infirm might do. I long for the days when the unorganized folks in soup lines understood the importance of organizing themselves to demand and create justice.

Instead, while the government may be thinking about going Keynesian, a large sector of the public is still versed in the neoliberal ethics that gave us the "Age of Individual Responsibility" to go along with our "Ownership Society." This neoliberal ideology is finally revealed to have a banal and morally bankrupt core. Sadly, people are somehow motivated to be patriotic individualists and go hungry on their own, lest they be accused of lacking personal responsibility, forsaking the iconic core American virtue of individualism, which is actually a misperception and projection of selfish atavism. You're on your own, buddy.

Shopping for apocalypse comfort foods

Observing grocery shopping patterns in the north-end neighborhood surrounding our Seattle-area home is not exactly one of my more pronounced habits. Nonetheless, as an anthropologist, I am prone to "observe" my surroundings. That said, I have noticed a trend of late involving a growing number of consumers purchasing, not fresh fruits and vegetables, but canned and processed foods. The ubiquitous Spam, bought in quantities of a dozen or more at a time, seems to be making a serious comeback as a favored "comfort" food in distressed economic times.

This is how the neoliberal individual responds to the crisis, by turning to familiar "comfort" foods that represent a grander, more secure past. It seems pointless, then, to deconstruct each spritely-colored tin of Spam, without also understanding why contemporary consumer identities fetishize a processed food product that is not really nutritious or healthy "good eats." Of course, the symbolic regime of the food system renders these "consumer choices" sacred and inviolable.

Various studies of patterns in the consumption of processed foods, undertaken for American grocers, show that uncertain economic conditions, with growing unemployment and lost wages, are associated with growing consumer demand for "comfort foods" such as Spam, Hershey's chocolate, Campbell's soup, and Mac-and-cheese.

Why do so many consumers purchase highly processed food or for that matter, fast food? [Sales of fast food, the ubiquitous $1 cheeseburger, also increase during recessions.] Desperate people turn to the four food groups of the apocalypse. That much is clear, and why they feel compelled to make choices that harm their well-being is also not really a mystery.

The neoliberal individualist does not go hungry. She maintains personal esteem by going "retro" and finding the 20 best recipes for Spam casserole spiked with Campbell's Cream of Mushroom. This is both "creativity" and "acquiescence."

The question is: What will she do to transform the energy invested into culinary creativity, undertaken to adapt to deprivation, into conscious political resistance to the circumstances that forced her, in the first place, into marginality as inventive force in the face of hunger?