Communique from the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee, General Command of the EZLN
December 21, 2012

Are you all listening?
It is the sound of your world collapsing.
The sound of our uprising.
The day that was has turned to night.
And, night shall be the day that dawns.

Democracy!
Freedom!
Justice!

From the Southeastern mountains of Mexico.
For the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee, General Command of the EZLN.
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
Mexico, December 2012

via In These Times

By Andrea Plaid

Like I mentioned at the Facing Race roundtable yesterday, the “No Justice, No Peas” panel left a deep impression on me because it addresses what otherwise great food-movement documentaries like Food, Inc. and Forks Over Knives sometimes touch on but tend to erase entirely: the food workers of color who do the incredible work of bringing the food–both organic and non-organic–to USians’ palettes and gullets and how deeply economic exploitation and racial injustice not only affects their lives but the lives of their families and neighborhoods. (The Storified version of the panel is here.)

Pretty prescient and very relevant, considering the current fast-food workers strikes.

I just had to vibe with the panel’s brilliant and passionate facilitator, Yvonne Yen Liu, who’s the outgoing Senior Research Associate at the Applied Research Center (the people who bring you the Facing Race conference and Colorlines) and the incoming Director of the Global Movements at WhyHunger. We chatted about not only how she found her way to food justice but also how that issue intertwines with race, racism, sexism, and labor justice, and how one journalist cluelessly said that the food movement isn’t a social justice issue.

I know. I know. Read on…

Food justice is your passion. How and why did you gravitate to that?

I see food as a portal to addressing a host of social ills.  I am pretty transparent about the fact that I don’t have food politics per se—obviously, I like to eat, and I think that everyone should have access to healthy and affordable food—but, I see the growing interest in local food systems, organic food, slow food, etc. as an opportunity to bring people into the fold of racial justice.  Because we all need to eat, food is something that universally touches all of us, we all enter the food chain at one point or another, whether as a consumer, a worker, or grower.  How can we shift people from a particular position to recognize that we’re all interlinked, whether we be a small family farmer, a restaurant worker, or an artisanal goat cheese maker.

The food justice movement itself is rather young, but we are informed by other struggles, as I wrote in the Good Food and Good Jobs for All[1] report published by the Applied Research Center this past summer.  The food movement has its roots in the back-to-land movement in the 1960s, the environmental justice turn with the People of Color Summit in the 1990s, and even the self-described “survival pending revolution” breakfast programs by the Black Panthers.  How can we, the nascent food movement, learn lessons from other struggles, work in conjunction within multiracial coalitions, to build power?

My entry point to food is through labor.  Three years ago, I was working on green jobs for the Applied Research Center.  We focused on the need for racial equity in crafting green jobs and a renewable energy economy, one that is inclusive and emboldens communities of color.  One of the case studies we pursued was of the central coast of California, in partnership with a farmworker women organization Lideres Campesinas.[2]  Many groups focused on the urban manifestation of the green economy, but what about rural communities?  And, what about agriculture and food production, the first green job, to some extent?

The initial conversations that we had with the leaders at Lideres Campesinas led to a three-year trust building process, which other partners such as the Data Center and the Center for Race, Poverty, and Environment later joined, to craft a participant action research project for campesinas to define a green economy for themselves and their families.  I reached out to other farmworker organizations, which led me to connect with a new national network representing workers across the food chain, the Food Chain Workers Alliance.

The network was still in the process of mapping out the landscape of who food chain workers were.  We supported them in those efforts with our research, later published in The Color of Food[3], which outlined the composition of the food workforce by race, class, and gender.  We found shocking disparities in wages; for example, for every dollar that a white man earns in the food system, a Black woman makes almost half of that, 53 cents.  Latinas make 50 cents.

Unfortunately, labor is often ignored in the public discourse.  It’s no different in the food movement.  I interviewed a well-known food journalist for the Good Food and Good Jobs for All report, who told me, “I don’t know if it’s smart politics for the food movement to take a social justice role.  We need to have positions, but if we devolve, we’ll lose our specificity and attraction for people who can deal with food, but not economic systems.”

Now, that’s just sad.  To me, it seems self-evident that in order to eat and to eat well, you need a good job that pays living wages.  Food and labor are interconnected.  But, unfortunately, the majority of good food advocates are wary of collaborating with the labor movement for fear of diluting their mission. Similarly, proponents for good jobs typically focus solely on serving the interests of workers and are generally uninterested in tackling the structural problems in industrial agriculture and the production of food.

Who gets hurt, because of this disconnect?  Low-income people and people of color suffer disproportionately from food inequities, as I outlined in Good Food and Good jobs for All, such as obesity, hunger, and earning below minimum wage as a food worker. Therefore, a divide between the struggle for good food and good jobs is an issue of racial and economic justice, because it sharpens socioeconomic disparities for communities of color. Being separated in issue silos also serves the interests of the food and agricultural corporations operated by a minority of white men who dominate both domestic and global markets, thus creating the conditions for these disparities across the world.

Yes, it’s an image problem and I think it’s important for communities of color to see themselves reflected in public images associated with sustainability, be it green energy or urban agriculture.  But, beyond representation, we need genuine engagement and leadership of people of color in these movements.  Which is part of the work being done in Oakland with community-owned solar projects[4] and in the Navajo Nation.[5]

—

In a remote village in the state of Maharashtra in India, a cotton farmer named Ram Krishna Kopulnar struggled to stay one step ahead of his creditors.  Like many of his peers, Kopulnar was forced to adopt the Green Revolution program, to toss traditional seeds aside for genetically modified varieties.  After introducing a genetically modified breed of wheat to Mexico, Norman Borlaug (the father of the Green Revolution) and the Rockefeller Foundation took their seed experiments on the road, bringing GMO technology to India and Africa, leaving a trail of farmers crippled by debt, forced to borrow money to purchase seeds and the inputs (fertilizer, water, and pesticides) necessary to grow them.  Debt and the flooding of cheap, imported commodities (due to free trade agreements) has meant the financial ruin for many formerly subsistence farmers.

Kopulnar and his family live in Maharashtra, home to the Mumbai Stock Exchange and the Indian state with the highest suicide rate by farmers, over 41,000 between 1997 and 2008.  A 2009 report by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU found that 17,638 farmers in India committed suicide that year; that’s one death every 30 minutes.  Many end their lives by drinking pesticides, a grim but apt metaphor for the cause of death.  The documentary Bitter Seeds followed Kopulnar to see if he will be the next casualty in the GMO Genocide.  Kopulnar mortgaged his house in order to buy modified cotton seeds from Monsanto.  Everything depended on the harvest from the crop, which a stroke of fate in the form of a drought or pestilence could destroy.

Author Raj Patel of Stuffed and Starved explained to me that the motivations for Borlaug and company were not humanitarian.  “The Green Revolution was originally intended to boost food production,” Patel said, “So poor people living in the cities of the Global South would have enough in their bellies that they wouldn’t rebel and become communist.”  This was encapsulated into an aid workers’ catchphrase, described in Nick Cullather’s book The Hungry World, “Where hunger goes, Communism follows.”

The consequences of the Mean Green Revolution are devastating for peasants and landless workers globally.  Farmers are pushed off their land, moving into urban areas to join the global class of low wage workers.  The United Nations estimates that over 67% of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050, because of migration from rural communities, most in the concentrated poverty of slums.  Meanwhile, global hunger continued to rise under the regime of the Green Revolution.  Nearly 870 million are chronically undernourished, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, one in eight persons.  The numbers of hungry have been rising in the Third World, particularly in Africa, with 20 million joining the ranks of the hungry in four years.

Farmworkers suffer higher rate of toxic chemical injuries than workers in any other sector of the U.S. economy, because of pesticides usage with GMO seeds.  According to the Pesticide Action Network, farmworkers, and often their children, are regularly exposed to pesticides in many ways: mixing or applying pesticides; planting, weeding, thinning, irrigating, pruning, harvesting, and processing crops; or living in or near treated fields.  Studies show that pesticides carried from field to home on parents’ clothing and skin put farmworker children at risk.

Although Norman Borlaug was deified for his efforts, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, people across the global south are rejecting the Mean Green Revolution.  In northern India, farmers held protests to hold a local university accountable to a recent Supreme Court decision to halt GMO field trials for the next 10 years.  Hundreds held signs that read “Monsanto GM Corn Quit India”.  The field of corn engineered by Monsanto was burned down.

A similar initiative is afoot in the U.S., a ballot measure Prop 37 to label GMOs will be voted on by Californians this month.  If the proposition passes, California would join more than 40 countries, including Britain, Russia, and China, in requiring GMO foods to be labeled.  A study published in peer-reviewed journal Food and Chemical Toxicology by French scientist Gilles-Eric Seralini raised serious questions about the long-term impact of consuming genetically modified food.  Rats who were fed a diet of Monsanto corn or the pesticide Roundup were at increased risk of developing tumors and premature death.

“Across the world, there are heightening concerns about the health risks of eating genetically engineered foods,” said Proposition 37 Campaign Manager Gary Ruskin.  “There is a giant question mark hanging over these foods and their health risks.  For those of us in California, the case for labeling of genetically engineered foods has never been stronger.”

Art by Favianna Rodriguez.

Take the Dime A Day Pledge – http://bit.ly/DimeADay – and tell Congress as a consumer, you are willing to pay an extra dime a day in food costs to raise the minimum wage, impacting 29 million low wage workers, 8 million of which are food workers, struggling to get by.

A recent report released by the Labor Food Research Center at UC Berkeley (http://www.rocunited.org/dime-a-day) shows that even if business owners transferred the entire cost of raising workers’ wages onto consumers, raising the minimum wage from $7.50 to $9.80 and the tipped minimum wage from $2.13 to 70% of the regular minimum wage would only cost consumers at most a dime a day in extra food costs.