Occupy for the Love of Food!

Tom Philpott has written a great article on why food movement actors should support Occupy Wall Street. He makes the argument that the occupations (which have spread across the world, starting today!) challenge the concentration of power in the hands of the elite, and the agrifood industry is a prime example of this concentration, elite control, and marginalization of the consumer and small producer.

I thought I'd take three of Tom's key points, which use American examples, and make the case for his argument applying to Canada. (Of course, many of his examples of multinational corporations apply to us here as well.)

1. The food industry is a big fat monopoly

• The top five food retailers in Canada account for 60% of sales (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada)
• Nilsson Bros. Inc. is Canada’s largest beef packing corporation, owning nearly half of Canadian capacity. In addition to its packing plants, holdings of the Nilsson Bros. conglomerate also include (wholly-owned or in partnership) feedlots, most of western Canada’s large auction facilities. ('Losing Our Grip', 2010)
• Three companies -- Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Cargill -- control an estimated 90% of the world's grain trade (USA Today) and the prairies export 80% of the grain they grow.
• The largest 5% of food manufacturing establishments accounted for over 50% of sales in 2003 whereas the smallest 80% of establishments accounted for only 15% of sales. (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada)
• And, since transnational corporations sell the majority of Canadian farmers' inputs, some global stats are relevant: the top 10 seed companies account for 67% of the global proprietary seed market (Monsanto is 23% of that number); the top 10 pesticide firms (the six largest of which are also in the top 10 seed companies) control 89% of the global agrochemical market. (ETC)

2. Wall Street's greed leaves millions to starve—literally. 

• "In recent years, the financial markets have discovered the huge opportunities presented by agricultural commodities. The consequences are devastating, as speculators drive up food prices and plunge millions of people into poverty... Since last June alone, higher food prices have driven another 44 million people below the poverty line, reports the World Bank. These are people who must survive on less than $1.25 (€0.87) a day." (Der Spiegel, trans.)
• "Holdings in commodity index funds ballooned from US$ 13 billion in 2003 to US$ 317 billion by 2008...The promotion of biofuels and other supply shocks were relatively minor catalysts, but they set off a giant speculative bubble in a strained and desperate global financial environment. These factors were then blown out of all proportion by large institutional investors who, faced with the drying up of other financial markets, entered commodity futures markets on a massive scale." (De Schutter briefing note, 2010)
•  Some advice from a Canadian investment advisor: "the biggest and most worrisome near-term crisis of all, is a food crisis; and you will have the opportunity to make a ton of money from it. Speculators love crises as well, and only add fuel to the fire, which multiplies your gains. The writing is already all over the wall for a pending food crisis; the west just hasn’t seen it on a domestic level yet, but believe me, we will. It’s time to get ahead of this trade." 
•  The extension of food speculation, as you know from reading this blog, is speculation in land. "Bay Street investors like Sprott Resources and Lawrence Asset Management have been buying into farmland in Uruguay and the Democratic Republic of the Congo." (Canadian Dimension)

3. Our politicians are in bed with agribusiness.

• A homegrown prairies example: Assiniboia Capital Corp, "the largest farmland investment management company in Canada, with almost 100,000 acres under management" (from its website). Organization includes: Co-founder Brad Farquhar, who is the former Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Party and former Executive Assistant to Sask. Party leader Elwin Hermanson; Gord Nystuen—General Manager of Assiniboia’s farm input financing division, Input Capital—is former Saskatchewan Deputy Minister of Agriculture, former Chief of Staff to the Premier, and former Chair of Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation; Advisory Board member Lorne Hepworth is President of Croplife Canada and former
  Saskatchewan Minister of Agriculture, Minister of Energy and Mines, Minister of Education,
  and Minister of Finance. (Assiniboia Capital website)
• Assiniboia Capital has tripled its land base over the past two years.  In light of this, it is interesting that Assiniboia’s primary capital source is taxpayer-owned and federal-government-controlled Farm Credit Canada (FCC).  ('Losing Our Grip', 2010)
• Five of the 100 lobbyists named in the Top 100 Lobbyists list compiled annually by the Parliament Hill insider newspaper The Hill Times have agriculture or food sector clients. (Western Producer)

To borrow a phrase from Dave Oswald Mitchell's excellent essay,

Occupy the market. Occupy the commons. Occupy the future.

Inspiration

from Frances Moore Lappe writing in The Nation:

"[T]he global food movement challenges a failing frame: one that defines successful agriculture and the solution to hunger as better technologies increasing yields of specific crops. This is typically called “industrial agriculture,” but a better description might be “productivist,” because it fixates on production, or “reductivist,” because it narrows our focus to a single element.

"This rising global food movement taps universal human sensibilities—expressed in Hindu farmers in India saving seeds, Muslim farmers in Niger turning back the desert and Christian farmers in the United States practicing biblically inspired Creation Care. In these movements lies the revolutionary power of the food movement: its capacity to upend a life-destroying belief system that has brought us power-concentrating corporatism.

"Corporatism, after all, depends on our belief in the fairy tale that market “magic” (Ronald Reagan’s unforgettable term) works on its own without us.

"Food can break that spell. For the food movement’s power is that it can shift our sense of self: from passive, disconnected consumers in a magical market to active, richly connected co-producers in societies we are creating—as share owners in a CSA farm or purchasers of fair-trade products or actors in public life shaping the next farm bill.

"The food movement’s power is connection itself. Corporatism distances us from one another, from the earth—and even from our own bodies, tricking them to crave that which destroys them—while the food movement celebrates our reconnection.

"As the food movement stirs, as well as meets, deep human needs for connection, power and fairness, let’s shed any notion that it’s simply “nice” and seize its true potential to break the spell of our disempowerment."

Dietary Regimes, Obesity, and the Tough Fix

I'm frustrated when I hear, "Gee, I know it sucks that small farmers can't make a go of it, but with today's input and capital costs you have to be big to stay in farming." That's why I really like Tony Winson's work. Faced with that assertion, he'd get to the root of it. He'd ask why the input and capital costs have increased so much, and what the returns really are for economies of scale, and what externalities are being sloughed off by large farms, and by gum, he'd have some answers. He knows that there are structural and systemic forces that are producing the agri-food system we have.

At the AFHVS conference in Missoula, I got to hear Winson present on his latest theoretical innovation - dietary regimes, building on Friedmann and McMichael's work on food regimes. Winson's thesis is that rather than just being products of idiosyncracy or cultural preference, diets are created and reproduced by specific material conditions, socio-economic-political climate, and technical developments. Okay, I'll be specific at the risk of jargon turning you off: he attributes them as well to "distinct phases of capital accumulation". But the argument still makes sense without an understanding of that.

Therefore, diets can be divided into distinct eras (regimes) based on elements of their production. For example, with the neolithic revolution, diets started to take on a class character. The second industrial diet regime, which Winson dates from 1950-1980, is probably the most apparent to us: the degradation of food intensifies with the trends of suburbanization, mass marketing, convenience foods, a car culture of fast food, women working out of the home, and a decline of farms and self-provisioning. This is not to say that those things are unequivocally bad, but that they had definite effects on shaping diet in a certain direction. They have lead today to the expansion of this diet to developing countries and a shift from state to capital as the dominating structural force. They have also lead to food that Winson describes with the absolute best use of language I have heard in a while:

 “nutritionally compromised edible commodities”.

Excuse me while I fan myself vigorously. 

The importance of framing dietary changes in terms of a dietary regimes approach is that this approach gets at what is behind these changes. And if we can get at the root of them, we can more effectively shape what is happening in a healthy way.

Here's an example. In this light, although choice of course plays a role, obesity is not merely "taking in more calories than one expends" - something one could easily choose not to do. It is a result of a complex web of factors including the aforementioned growth in mass marketing and convenience foods; the increase in sedentary work and a longer work day; the inaccessibility (due to price, location, or culinary knowledge) of healthy foods; unwalkable neighbourhoods; and even psychological factors, such as a tendency to self-medicate with food, that are socially influenced. While an individual may choose to eat unhealthy food, that choice is easier, and far more likely to be made, in the food system we have now.

Society-wide obesity cannot be solved by educating obese people about nutrition and promoting exercise. But that focus on individual responsibility and choice does "serve to shift our gaze from the social conditions that produce [obesity], to pathologizing the individual that carries the weight (literally) of our social plight. The advantage of this shift in focus is that it dilutes attention from the structural change that would be needed to actually make a difference."* And that structural change is not only difficult, but challenges some pretty powerful interests.

* Russell-Mayhew, Shelly. Eating Disorders and Obesity as Social Justice Issues. Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology, Volume 1, Number 1 Spring 2007.

You kids get off my lawn!

I ate some ice cream tonight and didn't really enjoy it. This isn't because my palate has matured. It's because they just don't make it like they used to.

Growing up, we ate what I later realized, dining at friends', were giant bowls of ice cream. We bought the gallon bucket of Lucerne vanilla and dressed it up with raspberries or granola or apple butter or chokecherry syrup. It was creamy, smooth, and rich.

The Lucerne ice cream I ate tonight was slightly grainy and full of air. Okay, it's a cheap brand. But it's not the cheapest. Should I have to pay $8 a pint to get decent ice cream?

In The End of Food, Paul Roberts describes a visit to Nestle's headquarters, where scientists were experimenting to create ice cream with the perfect "mouthfeel". You know the mouthfeel I mean. That mouthfeel I was missing when I ate ice cream tonight.

Are they keeping all the good ice cream for the Swiss? "Those North Americans and their plebeian tastes. Let them eat junk."

Reframing the Debate

I've had more than a few experiences that show that it's pretty difficult to get people to 'think outside the box'. I used to enjoy trying when I taught high school, but it seems to me that the students were more receptive than many of the adults I run across.

In response to my post "Ugliness", a discussion on another forum resulted. It began with the question, "Does this person understand it costs money to produce food". My response: "Of course I know it takes money to produce food in high-input Saskatchewan agriculture; I come from a conventional farm background. But if you think about it, it doesn't take money to produce food. It takes land, seeds, and water. Under capitalism, you need money for these things, but in many other systems, you don't - water, for example, often falls from the sky, and seeds come from plants, not Monsanto. The idea of buying and selling land is also historically recent. Until someone takes them from you and charges you for them, you don't have to pay money for these things. In other words, there is room to question the system that usually goes unquestioned, and I think it is necessary that we do so."

Well, that sure didn't work. The followup question was, "Who pays for the land, equipment and labour required to produce food?"


If I wanted to accept the questioner's premise that we have to deal with the system we're in, I could respond that there are many options, such as communit-based financing, machinery coops, community land trusts, or government funding such as with the Land Bank. But I was trying to reframe the question.

I once gave a twenty-minute presentation based on the idea that land should be decommodified, just to have someone ask at the end why I thought farming should be different from any other business. I was so flabbergasted that I started my response with "You seem to have missed the entire point of my presentation." I try not to give into the temptation to be plainspoken, but occasionally succumb. However, I have nothing on Coline Serreau.

A Globe and Mail food reporter interviewed her on her film about food production, Local Solutions for a Global Myth. Some excerpts:

 The experts and activists you interview say the big problem with agriculture today is that it focuses on making profit, not food. Is there a way to make both?  

To make both? What do you mean? We have to get out of this system, and profit is not the aim. Ever. It should never be the aim. Period. Profit has nothing to do with happiness. So if food is linked to profit, food is going to be bad.  

Do you think farmers can be convinced to grow food without profit though? 

It’s not without profits. They will have to make an honest, good living. It’s the whole system that has to be changed. It’s not about the farmers. If you make organic food, you’re not allowed to use the seeds that are produced by the right people [i.e. seeds that are not officially registered]. The whole system, it’s messed up, you know? So the people, they cannot make profit and do good things at the same time. You have 15 per cent of the big farmers who make all the big profit, but the others are ruined. Have you heard of agricultures? Have you heard of agricultures that have been ruined? Do you know it’s, like, millions of people affected? Why do you ask me those questions? I think you are – are you not aware?  

I think it’s a legitimate question. Because how would you be able to …
I wouldn’t be able. It’s the system. If you stop giving money to the people who put crap in the food, they won’t be able to put crap any more. They put it in because they get money from it, because they want to give money to the multinationals who produce the crap. It’s very well explained in the movie.

I wish I were French.

Homespun Wisdom

In December, I was very fortunate to interview an amazing 69-year-old farmer from Manitoba with an incredible knack for turning a phrase. Fred is erudite and down-to-earth, humourous and sober, gentle and passionate. You can hear an interview with him on Shaking the Tree Radio, but these quotes are from my interview with him. We talked about the demise of the family farm, the loss of rural communities, the future of agriculture, and public consciousness. Fred explained how the logic of the capitalist marketplace means that wealth and knowledge are transferred out of rural areas into the hands of monopolistic corporations as citizens' democratic control over the economy weakens.

"I remember when my dad first sprayed a field for yellow mustard. This was such a novelty I rode on the tractor with him to watch him apply 24D to a field, which now is total lunacy. But all of a sudden it changed the way we farm.It created a dependency where the benefit of the technology was all captured by the price of the technology. And then because prior to that the knowledge was passed from generation to generation when I was probably at maybe preschool I can remember my grandfather taking me by the hand and showing me things. You see, that was that intergenerational transfer of agricultural knowledge that goes back right to the Euphrates valley 10000 years ago. All that linkage and all of a sudden, when my dad hooked on that sprayer, that knowledge was not important anymore...The transfer of knowledge from community to a place where community rents and buys knowledge from a knowledge supplier is not a sustainable system."

Fred contrasted our situation on the Prairies to the situation he saw in the Philippines a decade ago, where politicians were eager to embrace - and to force people to adapt to - the industrial farming that we model, with all the losses that would entail.

"There's another thing that I didn't realize we'd lost until I'd done that trip to the Philippines. In the evening, because of their poverty to a degree, the community there functioned as a community. They got together, and adults sat around talking about the problems of agriculture. Which never ends, it's universal. And on the outside of the circle, the children were sitting listening in. I thought, “I've been there.” But it's a long time ago, and we don't have that anymore. We come in off the long day and we turn on the idiot box or we pick up the paper and the nodding heads and the golden hands direct the conversation. Because you know, it's got to a degree that a lot of people in social circles think that it's impolite to initiate a conversation about the social and economic problems of our community. They just want you to go away, don't bother me with that. I want to turn on something like Dancing With the Stars. And there I get to participate 'cause I can vote! That's democracy!"

And finally, on community:

"I always look towards the collective way to do things, because I desire my neighbour more than his land. Because without my neighbour, the land isn't much good to me, because an agricultural desert is not the place I want to live."