At the turn of the millennium,
we are witnessing a relatively small, but growing movement for sustainable
agriculture.
The U.S. sustainable farming and environmental movements have for
decades used a strategy of regulatory and administrative law to
address the environmental and human harms caused by industrial agriculture.
Organizations have focused on getting relief for small and organic
farmers in the latest farm bill, limiting the levels of pesticides
that can be put in our water tables and rivers, and facing the latest
assault from the giant chemical and seed companies.
The environmental movement has won some major legislative victories,
but the national and global environment remains in a state of severe
crisis due to industrial agriculture: worldwide poisoning and endocrine
system; disruption by chemical pesticides; catastrophic losses of
biodiversity; widespread soil salinization and desertification of
farmlands; and much more.
Today less than 1% of Americans are farmers, down from nearly 50%
a century ago. With global corporatization, we are witnessing the
worldwide collapse of many traditional farming communities, and
with them their seeds, cultures and biodiversity.
The strategy of regulating corporate harms has ultimately licensed
an unsustainable and unacceptable level of ecological and cultural
destruction, and has marginalized our most fundamental concerns.
As activists resist corporate assaults against nature and communities
one-by-one, corporations become ever more powerful under the regulatory
regime, framing the arena of struggle and the terms of the debate,
and limiting us to incremental compromises.
Corporate vs. Democratic Decision-Making
Consider the national struggle around federal organic standards
at the end of the 1990s. Congress appointed a blue ribbon panel
of organic farmers, nutritionists, scientists, organic product manufacturers,
and retailers to propose a new law. After several years of research
and hearings, the panel presented comprehensive recommendations
to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
In 1999, however, the USDA, rejected these and substituted draft
"organic standards" proposed by corporate agribusiness
and the "life science" corporations and written largely
by Monsanto Corporation lawyers. It proposed that the U.S. certify
as "organic" products with genetically engineered ingredients,
food grown with toxic sewage sludge used as fertilizer, and products
that have been irradiated.
It took almost two years of mass mobilization, including a record
275,000 letters to the USDA, to expose this hypocrisy and force
the USDA to retreat from the worst aspects of their industrial agriculture
agenda for organics. Did we "win"? What could we have
done in two years with 275,000 people mobilized to further the sustainable
agriculture agenda, if we had not had to confront the corporate
takeover of organics?
The fundamental issue here is about public, democratic decision-making
versus private, corporate decision-making on issues of food and
agriculture. This is just one among hundreds of examples of legislatures,
courts and regulatory agencies elevating corporate decision-making
and corporate private property rights supreme over individual or
communal property, human and environmental rights.
Challenging Corporate Control
of Food and Agriculture
The strategy of the industrial agriculture corporations is to establish
their authority to control the food system through massive "corporate
welfare" which enables them to under-price smaller scale agriculture,
and by using a revolving door of corruption between corporate management
and the very government agencies charged with enforcing regulations.
Through vertical integration from controlling farm credit, seed
patents, chemical inputs and farm production to monopolizing product
distribution, marketing and retail sales this corporate strategy
has enforced farmer-dependency worldwide.
Furthermore, these corporations have appropriated our public educational
and research resources, crafting so-called "private-public
partnerships" with universities, governments and even the United
Nations. Through immense influence on the TRIPS treaty (the Agreement
on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) and the
WTO negotiations, multinational corporations have gained intellectual
property rights for owning life forms, and denationalized trade
regulation and dispute resolution.
Developing Effective Strategies
To effectively challenge corporate agriculture's control of the
global food system, ownership of life, and control of economic decision-making,
our movements must rapidly evolve new and more complex strategies.
We need to do three kinds of activism at once:
FIGHT FIRES:
For the past 30 years our sustainable farming and environmental
movements have focused on "fighting fires." We have built
thousands of local and national groups to challenge thousands of
corporate assaults on nature and people. After a long campaign,
we may stop a clear cut or dam, but the corporation will be back
to retake the trees or river as soon as it can maneuver a change
of judge or politician, or a lull in our vigilance. We have to resist
harms forever; they have to win just once.
Of course we have to fight fires people's lives and critical ecosystems
are at stake. However, since this form of struggle alone rarely
addresses root causes of ongoing corporate destruction, we will
likely just chase the corporation to another community.
CREATE ALTERNATIVES:
The ecological farming movement has grown steadily for the past
30 years. We have many models that provide vision and practices
reflecting the values of ecological, economic and cultural sustainability.
But in building alternatives which model "how it can be,"
we must remember that corporations can and will buy-out, make illegal,
marginalize or destroy people's most successful efforts to get off
the corporate treadmill.
DISMANTLE THE MECHANISMS OF CORPORATE
RULE:
While we fight the fires forced upon us, let's not confuse reaction
to a problem with proactive strategy. And while we build sustainable
alternatives, we will create space for sustainable practices to
become the norm only if we dismantle the mechanisms of corporate
rule.
To change in law and culture the definition of who's in charge
and to claim our rightful sovereignty over economic activity, we
must choose appropriate arenas of struggle. Our most effective campaigns
will be about what we put in our state constitutions, corporate
codes and corporate charters, and about the laws we pass at the
state, county, city and town council levels to define and enforce
limits to corporate authority. In other words, about practicing
democracy.
Taking Local Action
At the local level, we need to reassess the "us" and
"them"; to create new alliances. With regards to food
and agriculture, we need to broaden "us" to include many
local, appropriate scale, family-owned or privately held farms and
businesses, with local people at the helm. Conversely, "them"
will most often be the large, non-local, corporate monocropping
resource extractors (mislabeled as "farmers") who structurally
can have little concern for local human, ecological, economic, or
cultural health, or for democratic process.
Building new strategic alliances means addressing on appropriate
scale, not just appropriate practices. Let's focus on local community,
economy and culture.
We may strongly disagree on pesticide use or farm animal practices,
for example, but we can solve those issues over time, based on a
united stand against the greater common threat of democracy-destroying
corporate control. Such a strategy also helps dismantle the corporate-cultivated
illusion that all "farmers" should be allied as a single
class, and that "environmentalists" are the enemies of
farmers.
To build organizing capacity for long-term work, we must address
issues important to local people. Here are examples of city, township
or county resolutions and initiatives that assert local democracy:
• Ban genetically
engineered (GE) crops from being planted in your community. While
many cities including Cleveland, Boston, San Francisco, Austin,
and Minneapolis have passed resolutions against GE crops, they are
largely non-binding. Boulder, CO has a policy that bans GE crops
from city-owned land (www.mindfully.org/GE/Boulder-AntiGE-Policy.htm).
• Pass a new
or re-write an existing "Right to Farm" ordinance, which
many rural and semi-rural areas have. It should define agriculture
in sustainable terms, mandating that subsidies and tax credits only
go to ecological agriculture, and that unsustainable agriculture
be taxed or disallowed.
• Pass a local
Anti-Corporate Farm ordinance. The Community Environmental Legal
Defense Fund (www.celdf.org)
has helped eight townships in Pennsylvania pass these ordinances
in recent years. They are now working on a statewide Family Farm
Protection Act.
• Get elected
to your local Resource Conservation District, water board, city
council or school board. Sebastopol's city council in Northern California,
with a Green Party majority, has banned all pesticide use on city-owned
land.
• Organize local
Food Policy Councils forums for farmers and environmentalists to
craft new policies that use local government resources to support
sustainable agriculture. Pass directives at city councils and school
boards mandating the purchase of ecologically farmed food in municipal
institutions, like schools, hospitals and jails. The Berkeley Food
Policy Council has pioneered much of this work (www.berkeleyfood.org).
Ultimately, we need to take our campaigns to the state level, including
changes to our state constitutions-- the most defining statements
a people can make. For starters, we can ban non-family owned corporations
from owning farmland. It's been done in Nebraska (Initiative 300
in 1982), South Dakota (Amendment E in 1998), and to some degree
in seven other U.S. states (www.newrules.org/agri/banning.html).
Other future state initiatives or legislation might include: declaring
that a corporation is not a person; prohibiting patents on life
forms; instituting the "polluter pays" principle (100%
corporate liability for long-term costs of corporate harm) and the
"precautionary principle" (no public release of new technology
until it has been independently proven safe); and reviving defining
language in corporate charters and corporation codes.
When significantly challenging corporate rule on the local level,
we will face legal attacks and economic threats. Corporate attorneys
will say our measures violate their corporate "free speech"
and their "property rights to do business". They will
take their case to the WTO, asserting that our new local laws are
"protectionist" and "unfair trade barriers"
WTO no-nos. They will say our local government is violating the
U.S. Constitution's interstate commerce clause and constitutional
guarantees to equal protection and due process for all persons.
These corporate attacks can create a crisis or jurisdiction, pitting
one level of government against another. When this is our strategy,
we must rethink our notion of "victory". If a federal
court or WTO tribunal overrules our well-thought, democratically
produced local ordinance, it gives us an opportunity to educate
and mobilize a disregarded public. At that point the essence of
our struggle is made clear to all: "Who is in charge of making
the decisions in a democracy, and in whose interest? transnational
corporations and the economic elite? or people and the common good?"
Dave Henson is the director of the Occidental
Arts and Ecology Center, an organic farm and education center in
Northern California, and an activist with the Program on Corporations,
Law and Democracy. You can reach Dave at OAEC, 15290 Coleman Valley
Road, Occidental, CA, 95465; (707) 874-1557 x204; dhenson@oaec.org.
First printed in the Fall 2001 issue (Vol. 3,
No. 4) of By What Authority, the quarterly publication of the Program
on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD). A much longer piece
will be included in the anthology Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of
Industrial Agriculture. Available at bookstores everywhere in June
or by calling Island Press at 1-800-828-1302, www.islandpress.org.
See review on page 64.
