The Weak Strategy of Sustainble Food and Farming
The US farm and food movement has made some strategic mistakes in recent years, because we haven’t worked together well enough. The main food movement has worked quite well with sustainable/stewardship farmers in the movement, but not well with the family-farm/justice sector, as I’ve written elsewhere.
One consequence is that the food movement (from books, blogs and films to conferences, to action alerts) has missed a chance to utilize powerful movement strategies.
For example, following the 2008 farm bill, (around which the food movement usually did not correctly understand the Commodity Title/farm price and subsidy issues) we had a major economic crisis. Inside the beltway, our NGO staff worked hard to get us a piece of the economic stimulus pie, to get Democratic leaders to include us in the stimulus checks being written out. Our issues got some money FROM the government. Our DC organizational staff did not, however, have enough of the family farm justice, grassroots historical perspective to also offer a stimulus TO the government.
(Of course, the power to do that also requires influencing the broader food movement to fully bring a justice perspective in as a major set of priorities. We also didn’t get that done before and/or after the 2008 Farm Bill.)
Now we have a new political climate and the focus is on hacking away at the budget. Once again this is a great time to be proactive and beat the Republicans and the Tea Party at their own game, by offering a stimulus TO the government, but that is still not understood. So here we are, we got some money here and there in the stimulus, and now we’re begging to keep government spending, across the various titles of the farm bill, for example. We were gimme, gimme gimme before, and we’re gimme gimme gimme again. “Write us checks! Write us checks! Write us checks.” That’s our only strategy for this time of economic crisis and balancing the budgets, because we don’t know that anything else exists.