Asserting Democratic Control
of Food and Agriculture

The corporate media have been filled with opinions in recent months saying the same thing about the current famine in southern Africa: technology can save the day if those ill-informed opponents of progress would just get out of the way.

But despite intense promotion of industrial-scale and chemical-intensive agriculture by the U.S., the World Bank and large corporations, landlessness, poverty, and hunger all have increased worldwide over the past four decades. The "Green Revolution" has failed to deliver on the promise of increased yield and reduced hunger through industrialization. For example, between 1945 and 1993 pesticide use in the U.S. increased by 3,300% while crop loss due to pests increased by 20%.

Perhaps we should learn from African farmers rather than issuing condescending accusations of irrational technophobia. In Nigeria, many farmers use parasitic wasps rather than toxins to fight infestation by the Cassava Mealy bug, a persistent nemesis of crop farmers. Each dollar they've invested in wasps decreases crop losses by $178.

Industrial agriculture has separated people from the land, their food, and understanding of the natural systems on which our lives depend. Independent family farmers have been driven from their livelihoods, unable to compete with vertically-integrated agribusiness giants. Over the past century, the number of U.S. farmers as a percentage of the population has crashed from 40% in 1900 to 1% in 2000. Rural communities are collapsing in the wake, and with them often their seeds, biodiversity and culture.

Moving Beyond Damage Control
While the trends are bleak, a small but growing movement for truly sustainable agriculture is emerging. How can this movement use better strategies to overcome corporate control of the food system and regain food security.

The U.S. sustainable farming and environmental movements have long relied on regulatory laws to limit the environmental and human harms caused by industrial agriculture. Citizens' organizations have focused on tactics such as getting relief for small farmers in the latest farm bill, limiting the levels of pesticides that can be put in our water tables and rivers and limiting corporate mergers to prevent outright monopolies.

These strategies for merely regulating corporate harms ultimately have failed to protect our health and quality of life. For example, since 1972, 56 pesticides have been banned or their use greatly restricted in the U.S. Can there be any doubt that we ingest many other dangerous toxins simply because their threat has not been proven conclusively? Meanwhile, we continue to permit U.S.-based chemical corporations to manufacture and export most of those pesticides banned domestically.

Instead of solving structural problems, our regulations have licensed an unsustainable level of ecological destruction and the ongoing elimination of family farmers while failing to protect rural communities and adequate guarantees for safe food. As activists resist corporate assaults against nature and communities one by one, corporations focus their attention on consolidating control over Congress and the agencies that supposedly control agriculture businesses. It is agribusiness that frames the arena of struggle and the terms of the debate, 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. It proposed that the U.S. certify as "organic" products with genetically altered ingredients, food grown with toxic sewage sludge used as fertilizer, and irradiated products.

It took almost two years of mass mobilization and a record 275,000 letters to the USDA to expose this outrage and force the adoption of a meaningful definition for "organic."Did citizens "win?" What could have been done in two years with 275,000 people mobilized to eliminate carcinogenic pesticides or eliminate taxpayer subsidies to giant food corporations? What can we do to stop fighting these defensive battles where a victory means merely maintaining the status quo?

Challenging Corporate Control of Food and Agriculture
Industrial agriculture corporations control the food system through massive corporate subsidies and make the public pay (monetarily and otherwise) for the damages they inflict on the environment and our health through routine use of carcinogenic pesticides. They are enabled through the power of money in our political system and the revolving door between agribusiness corporations and the government agencies that design and enforce regulations.

To effectively challenge corporate agriculture's control of the global food system, ownership of life, and influence on economic decision making, our movements must rapidly evolve new and more complex strategies. We need to act in three realms simultaneously:

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 clearcut 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 take advantage of a lull in our vigilance. We have to resist their 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 are likely just to chase the corporation to another community.

Create Alternatives: The ecological farming movement has grown steadily for the past 30 years. We now 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 redefine who's in charge and to claim our rightful sovereignty as citizens over corporations, 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 what corporations may do. In other words, we need to promote real democracy.

How can we succeed in these three realms?

Taking Local Action
To succeed in rolling back the corporatization of our food supply, we'll need to build strategic alliances to address questions of scale, not just practices, i.e. how big or how integrated should we permit corporations to be?

Health advocates and environmentalists may disagree with small farmers on pesticide use or animal welfare practices, for example, but we can work together on those issues over time if we maintain a united stand against the greater common threat of democracy-destroying corporate control.

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:

* Keep your community free of plantings of genetically altered crops. While many cities - including Cleveland, Boston, San Francisco, Austin, and Minneapolis - have passed resolutions against GE crops, they are largely non-binding. Boulder, Colorado has a policy that bans GE crops from city-owned land.

* Pass a new or rewrite an existing "Right to Farm" ordinance, as many rural and semi-rural areas have done. It should define agriculture in sustainable terms,mandating that subsidies and tax credits only go to non-toxic agriculture and that agriculture that harms public commons should be discouraged through market disincentives or disallowed.

* Pass a local anti-corporate farm ordinance. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund has helped 10 townships in Pennsylvania pass these ordinances in recent years. They now are working on a statewide Family Farm Protection Act.

* Get elected to your local resource conservation district, water board, city council or school board. As one example of what can be accomplished through local political efforts, Sebastopol's city council in Northern California 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 to promote the purchase of safe, sustainable, locally-farmed or produced food in municipal institutions like schools, hospitals and jails. The Berkeley Food Policy Council has pioneered much of this work.

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 varying degrees in seven other U.S. states (see newrules.org/agri/banning.html).

Other future state initiatives or legislation might include 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 challenging corporate rule on the local levels, we will face legal attacks and economic threats. Corporate attorneys will say our measures violate their corporate "free speech" and their "private property rights," trying to associate genuine rights of real people with fictitious rights for something that merely is property. Corporations will take their case to the WTO, asserting that our new local laws are protectionist and barriers to trade They will say our local government is violating the U.S. Constitution's "commerce clause" and Constitutional guarantees to equal protection and due process for all persons.

These corporate attacks can create a crisis of jurisdiction, pitting one level of government against another. This can be a deliberate strategy on our part if we 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 agitate, educate and mobilize disregarded citizens. At that point the essential question of our struggle is made clear to all: "Who is in charge of making the decisions in a democracy, and in whose interest? Is it transnational corporations and financial institutions or people and the common good?

The writer is the director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center and is a principal member of the Program on Corporations Law and Democracy, a close ally of ReclaimDemocracy.org.