Living Democracy, Feeding Hope

This is the first of a five-part, weekly series celebrating Earth Day. David Pogue in the New York Times not long ago extolled the wonders of LED lights , but lamented that the all-too-human weakness for “instant gratification” — killed by LEDs’ higher price tag — will prevent them taking off. Pogue’s piece got me thinking. What is instant gratification, and has it changed for me? One way of conceiving environmental awareness is that it’s all about fighting our desire for instant gratification. It’s about sacrificing now — whether convenience or money or both — so that in a future, which we might not live to see, this beautiful earth won’t be destroyed. But there is another way to think about instant gratification that an ecological worldview opens to us. If we “think like an ecosystem” — with what I like to call our “eco-mind,” the first thing we’re aware of is connectedness. Maybe this changes everything. Growing up, a light bulb was a light bulb. A car was a car. A new dress was a new dress. Their “meaning” to me, the reward I got — instant or not — boiled down to their usefulness, their aesthetics (were they cool?) and, yes, also their capacity to “up” my standing in my crowd. But something about the LED article triggered a realization that something big has changed. My instant gratification is everywhere and happening often. Here’s what I mean: To use less electricity — from fossil fuels and nuclear — a couple of years ago, I stopped using our clothes dryer. In summer, I use a clothesline on a pulley between a big tree and my deck. In the winter, I use a wooden clothes rack set up next to the washing machine. Now, by my prior way of thinking and being, I might have thought: I’ve forced myself to give up the instant gratification of having quickly dried clothes because I am worried about our earth. But I’d be kidding myself! A moment’s reflection and I realize that I get immediate gratification in many instants every time I use my system. My gratification comes in feeling a bit smug (maybe not anything to boast about), smart for saving money, clever for rigging up a convenient system, and pride, if it comes up in conversation (God forbid I should brag about my laundry). Oh, and then there’s the gentle roughness of a line-dried towel that feels a bit like an invigorating loofah against my skin, and seems more absorbent, too. Yes, I do think about the long-term, but the gratification feels pretty immediate. Or, that new dress I mentioned. When I was younger, the meaning of a new dress was only about how it made me look and feel. But I recently shifted almost all my clothes shopping to a consignment shop a few blocks from home. Talk about gratifications! My purchases cost a fraction of what I used to spend. So I feel prudently frugal. I also feel great about not having to use fossil fuel to travel to distant stores. I’ve gotten friendly with the owners, so I feel more connected to my town. And all this is happening before I also register that, in buying a used item, I’ve triggered less resource use. And those LED lights? A problem solved! Pogue led me to a perfect birthday gift for my son Anthony, whose super-high ceiling in Manhattan means that changing a light bulb requires waiting for a building maintenance guy with an extension ladder. Since LEDs last 25 times longer than incandescents, I was able to make that hassle history. And, I got a big kick out of realizing that over 25 years, according to Pogue, my gift could save his family $200 in replacement bulbs and electricity. And, for me? Hey, I’ve saved myself ever worrying about my son or daughter-in-law atop a wobbly ladder. You see? Gratifications everywhere. My point is really simple. If we environmentalists stay locked in the frame that environmentalism has to fight human nature to win, we’ll lose. Instead, we can celebrate human nature — our desire for more meaning, power, and connection. With an eco-mind, we increasingly see the connectedness of all life, and thus endless opportunities for gratifying those needs and more. Lappé explores these ideas further in EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want , new April 23, 2013 in paperback from Nation Books. Originally published by Huffington Post on 04/04/2013

Originally published by Common Dreams on 04/01/2013 In the summer of 2010, Robert DuBois and Aaron Zueck headed out on a 100 day bike trip across the country to document the thriving local foods movement. In the YouTube video of this “potluck across America,” the two seem genuinely passionate about farmers and healthy food—and the movement they’re documenting. As the screen goes black, a voiceover says: “Every time you drink Pepsi you support the Pepsi Refresh project. Every Pepsi refreshes the world.” What’s one of the world’s biggest soda companies got to do with a local foods bike trek? Turns out Aaron and Robert had gotten enough votes on Pepsi’s website to earn $5,000 from the company’s Pepsi Refresh campaign. In return, the two gave the multinational corporation the right to use their story to burnish their brand. Launched in 2010, Pepsi Refresh was a brilliant new marketing strategy that drew millions to the company’s Web site to “vote” on community-based projects to win grants between $5,000 and $50,000. It’s one of the best examples of a new corporate PR strategy that hides marketing beneath the cover of philanthropy. In a fabulous new report “ Selfish Giving: How the Soda Industry Uses Philanthropy to Sweeten Its Profits ,” researchers at the Center for Science in the Public Interest call it “philanthro-marketing.” I remember that summer of 2010 being bombarded with pleas from friends and colleagues to vote for worthy projects in the running for Pepsi Refresh, projects like Aaron and Robert’s. At the time, I heard few people being publicly critical of Pepsi Refresh. In fact, one community activist from the Bronx even described Pepsi Refresh as “democracy in action.” But what was Pepsi Refresh really? It was a cleverly structured marketing campaign that drew people close to the brand while bringing heavy traffic to the company’s Web site—you could vote once a day, but as many times as you wanted. Thousands of projects jockeyed for grants; only 32 were given every month. And while $50,000, even $5,000, is a significant contribution to a community project, it’s a tiny fraction of the company’s marketing budget. (Each month about $1 million was given away; consider that the CEO of Pepsi herself brought home $1.3 million a month ). As the CSPI report makes clear, this isn’t charity. “PepsiCo’s annual contributions to human sustainability programs, $2.3 million in 2011,” the authors write, “were… dwarfed by the company’s $60 million sponsorship of just one television show—The X Factor.” My Coke Rewards is Coca-Cola’s equivalent. Through purchases of Coke products, consumers earn points to redeem for prizes. The program has developed an interface specifically for schools and Parent-Teacher Associations across the country bill My Coke Rewards as a great fundraising tool for schools. Like this Chicago-area PTA that encouraged participation in My Coke Rewards: Our school has “joined the My Coke Rewards program,” said the PTA’s Web site. “That means by drinking Coca-Cola products your family can get My Coke Rewards points and donate them to help our school.” Nevermind the questionable practice of aligning with a company whose products are linked to the obesity crisis. Or, that as far as fundraising goes, it’s not such a great bang for your buck. We did the math: To earn just one physical activity pack for your school, you’d need to buy 55,440 cans of Coke, which would cost $11,550. Seems like there’s a more effective way to get your school 350 bucks worth of jump ropes, balls, cones, and basic gym supplies. In tough economic times, communities are particularly vulnerable to getting co-opted by programs like My Coke Rewards or Pepsi Refresh where they become de facto marketers for the companies. But as the CSPI report makes clear: Public policy solutions could garner as much or more revenue without sacrificing our power, and handing over goodwill, to the companies whose products—like Coke and Pepsi—are at the center of our healthcare crisis. Soda taxes, for instance, could be a powerful mechanism for raising much-needed public funds, especially for health promotion and physical activity programs for youth, CSPI notes. In fact, the report claims that one proposed soda tax in Philadelphia could have raised $77 million a year for the city, with $20 million specifically earmarked for obesity prevention programs. But the food industry fought hard against Philadelphia’s proposed tax, as they have everywhere such taxes have been proposed. And in 2011, after the city’s Mayor proposed the two-cent-per-ounce excise tax on sugary drinks, Philadelphia’s City Council rejected it. “Perhaps to celebrate the demise of the tax bill or to inoculate against a future tax proposal,” said CSPI . “In 2011 the beverage industry funneled a $10 million donation to CHOP by creating a new non-profit organization, the Foundation for a Healthy America.” Back in 2010 at the height of the Pepsi Refresh campaign, the executive director of a girls club in New York City publicly drew her line in the sand, in a blog called “ Pimping for Pepsi? I’d Rather Sell Cupcakes! ” “It feels so schizophrenic,” she wrote, “to promote products and ideas we spend our working days challenging.” She’s right: I urge you to read CSPI’s whole report here and then let’s get back to the work of challenging companies that are making our communities sick.

Don’t laugh. It’s true, and it’s serious business. Today is the world’s first International Happiness Day, declared by the UN to signal the importance of going beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of progress. We need, says the UN, better measures of society’s real wellbeing — including happiness. GDP was never meant for the job. In 1934, Harvard economist and Nobel Laureate Simon Kuznets devised the measure to help the U.S. climb out of the Great Depression, but he was clear about GDP’s limits, warning congress that “the welfare of a nation can...scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income...” How right he was. Since the 1960s, U.S. GDP per capita has doubled , but average happiness? It hasn’t budged . Finally, people are starting to pay attention. Noting what a poor guide GDP has been, an international movement is underway to create metrics of progress that incorporate multi-faceted wellbeing. And, it could be game changer, if you consider this finding of the Gallup Millennium World Survey: Polling almost 60,000 people in 60 countries, Gallup ranked ten things that matter most to people. At the top were health, a happy family life, and a job, while “Standard of Living” — what the GDP supposedly captures — was one of the least important. Leading the movement to remake what we measure has been the tiny, mountainous Asian nation of Bhutan, population of 740,000. Its goal is “Gross National Happiness.” Six weeks ago, as a member of a UN-promoted International Expert Group for a New Development Paradigm, I traveled to Bhutan where, with a couple dozen others invited from around the world, I deliberated on how to measure wellbeing. Why Bhutan? In 2005, after the Fourth King relinquished the throne to his son and instituted a British-style parliamentary democracy, Bhutan began in earnest to build the world’s first Gross National Happiness Index — a comprehensive approach to measuring well-being that includes not only psychological well-being (life satisfaction, emotions, and spirituality) but also subjective assessments in eight other “domains” that include health, education, good governance, and ecological diversity and resilience. Five years later a Bhutan survey found 41 percent of its people happy, meaning they’d attained “sufficiency” in two-thirds of (weighted) indicators, such as work, literacy and housing. Only 10 percent were “unhappy.” Then, in 2011, Bhutan took leadership on the world stage. In July it sponsored, with 68 co-sponsors, UN resolution 65/309, “Happiness: Towards a Holistic Approach to Development,” which flatly stated that GDP doesn’t reflect the goal of “happiness” and declares that a “more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach is needed...” UN General Assembly adopted the resolution by consensus and invited member states to take action. So in New York City last spring Bhutan hosted a meeting on new wellbeing indicators, attracting 800 enthusiastic attendees and exceeding all expectations. Already, a number of countries , including Canada, France and Britain “have added measures of citizen happiness to their official national statistics.” Just one year ago, Japan launched its first Quality of Life Survey that leads off with “a sense of happiness.” Italy is also a leader, in part using online consultations with citizens to develop twelve domains for measuring well-being, including health and the environment, along with specific indicators like “quality of urban air.” Here in the U.S., two state governments, Maryland and Minnesota, have gotten serious about happiness — generating more realistic, comprehensive measures of progress. Maryland’s Genuine Progress Indicator both subtracts and adds about two dozen things that GDP doesn’t capture: from, on the negative side, the costs of lost leisure time (as much as $12.5 billion a year), pollution clean-up and crime to, on the positive side, the value of volunteer work. And in 2011 the city of Somerville in Greater Boston became the first U.S. metropolitan to survey its residents on their happiness and wellbeing — finding, among many discoveries, that the city’s “beauty and physical setting” are “relatively important” in how residents value Somerville. On the first International Day of Happiness, just knowing these initiatives are getting underway and taken seriously by the United Nations, makes me happy. Originally published by the Huffington Post on March 9, 2013

In Paris, sixty years ago today, the U.N. General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Access to food is the right of “everyone,” says its Article 25. Yet, a new World Public Opinion poll reports that one in four Americans still rejects its premise — that it is government’s responsibility to protect citizens’ right to eat. The extent of America’s depend-on-yourself-or-die stance may be unique: In eighteen of the twenty-one nations surveyed, at most one in ten respondents shares this view. Cliches abound as to why the U.S. stands alone. The positive spin chalks it up to the “rugged individualism” of our “frontier spirit.” I’m not so sure. Consider the less romantic, more recent power of the steady drip, drip, drip of market ideology from the Reagan era onward, telling us to shrink government’s responsibilities. But then, in 2008, the drip suddenly stopped and that ideology seemed to be spiraling down the drain. When the depth of our financial crisis began sinking in, even a dazed Alan Greenspan acknowledged that his self-regulating market may require public action. As the crisis spreads hunger at unprecedented speed, an estimated one in ten Americans now depends on food stamps, and the number of hungry people world wide jumped by 40 million just this year, the U.N. said this week. So nearly a billion people face hunger today — roughly twice as many as the early 70s when hunger first hit the international marquee. And in a time when there is no shortage of food, period. If citizens’ having real choice is the heart of democracy — and no human being chooses to go hungry — we might ponder: Isn’t hunger’s very existence proof of a deficit of democracy? If so, this anniversary day might be a perfect moment to rethink what it could mean to shift the frame to food as a human right. Consider what difference it made in Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, when a new administration was elected there in 1993 on a food-as-a-right platform. Drawing diverse sectors into common problem-solving, that new administration’s stance spawned dozens of innovations: Farm stands on public plots linking local growers and inner-city consumers. (With middlemen removed, farmers’ profits grew even though the government capped prices.) Two huge public restaurants daily serving 12,000 people nutritious meals for the equivalent of less than 50 cents each; bus stop announcements alerting citizens where to find their best basic-food buys; produce markets where prices for twenty-five items sell for a third less than the market price; nutritious “waste,” including egg shells, ground into flour for school kids’ daily bread; extensive community gardens, and more. Within a decade Belo Horizonte had cut its infant death rate — the best measure of hunger — in half. And the cost? Less than 2 percent of the city budget, or roughly one penny a city-resident per day. Like the citizens of Belo, Americans can come to see that access to food as a right does not necessarily mean more public handouts. It can mean redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to participate in it and the freedom of new businesses to enter, unblocked by global oligopolies now dominating every major sector. It might mean, as in Belo, citizen-government partnerships driven by values of inclusion and mutual respect. To move toward that possibility, we Americans can seize this historic shift in presidential philosophy to recommit to democracy by removing the power of private wealth over public decision making — consider the $16 million a day spent last year lobbying Congress — and opening new avenues for the voices of millions of citizens to be heard. Only then will new rules emerging from today’s economic ruins get shaped in the interests of all, including our interest in eating. In imagining food as a right of citizenship, please note: No change in human nature is required! Through most of human evolution — except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years — Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm. As food sharers, “especially among unrelated individuals,” humans are unique, writes authority on hunter-gatherer food transfers, Michael Gurven. Except in times of extreme privation, when some eat, all eat. In that spirit, I’m happy to report a victory last week for those who harvest our food but often go without themselves: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers — farmworkers in Florida — reached an agreement with Subway, the third largest fast-food chain in the world and the biggest fast-food buyer of Florida tomatoes. Subway agreed to help improve wages and working conditions. When these farmworkers began organizing in the 90s, their wages had not increased in twenty years. (I’ll be saluting their victory at our Small Planet Fund Gala Wednesday night in NYC, where the Immokalee Worker’s Lucas Benitez will be our guest of honor. To join us, visit the site .) In 1948 Eleanor Roosevelt led the charge for universal recognition of essential human rights. Let us now, finally, catch up with our ancestors, both recent and ancient. Frances Moore Lappe, of the Cambridge-based Small Planet Institute , is the author or co-author of sixteen books, including World Hunger: Twelve Myths and Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad. Originally published by Huffington Post on 9/01/09

Originally published by Al Jazeera on 11/23/2015 On a drizzly April day in Washington, D.C., 60 food workers and labor organizers from across the country gathered in an office building downtown. There was an African immigrant street vendor from New York City; a black apple picker from upstate New York; a white, 20-something former bartender from Cincinnati. There were Latino farmworkers from California’s Central Valley; Walmart workers from Oakland; a food-processing worker from Brooklyn. The diversity of the workers gathered for the fifth annual summit of the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) reflected the diversity of food workers nationwide. The “food movement” is complex and often misunderstood. Read snarky Slate articles and you might be led to believe the movement is a white, elitist phenomenon whose poster child is a Lululemon-wearing, latte-sipping Whole Foods shopper and whose de facto guru is Michael Pollan. In other words: out of touch with working Americans. But the people on the frontlines of the struggle to make healthy, sustainable, local food accessible to all Americans defy this stereotype. At its heart, the movement includes the workers who harvest the peppers, raise the chickens, process the pork, bus the dishes, take the orders, check out the groceries, truck the wares and more. These food workers now have a unified voice through the growing FCWA. Started in 2009 by nine organizations to unite workers across the food sector, the FCWA has since expanded to 25 member groups, representing over 300,000 workers. “What is exciting is seeing all these groups come together to fight for a shared vision,” says Diana Robinson, the FCWA’s campaign and education coordinator. The FCWA is based on the principle that a farmworker picking apples and a clerk stocking shelves at Walmart share many of the same struggles. The 20 million workers in the U.S. food sector are disproportionately poor. Food workers use food stamps at a rate more than 50 percent higher than the average American worker, according to FCWA research, and food workers suffer food insecurity at almost twice the national rate. Workers in this sector, encompassing production, processing, distribution, retail and food service, not only face low wages, but also hardships such as a lack of paid sick days. “In our national survey of food workers,” says FCWA Co-Director Joann Lo, “we found a full four out of five workers who harvest, process, distribute, sell or cook our food don’t have paid sick days or don’t know if they do, which most likely means they don’t.” Building up the power of these workers is what inspired the founders of FCWA. The food industry has long understood the benefits of vertical integration — the wonky term for owning enterprises up and down the supply chain. In the chicken business, for example, vertical integration means control over not just the raising of chickens, but also the production of their feed and the processing needed to get them to market. In 2008, food worker organizers started to have a conversation about what it would look like to have vertical integration in worker power: connections between the formerly disparate elements of worker organizing across the food chain. The FCWA was born a year later. Since then, the group has contributed to big victories, including an increase in the minimum wage for tipped workers in New York State and paid sick days for workers in New York City. “One of our biggest victories,” Lo says, “is the leadership role we played in the development and adoption of the Good Food Purchasing Policy in Los Angeles and getting Mayor [Rahm] Emanuel to endorse the policy for Chicago.” The policy in L.A. is translating into over $130 million in annual municipal and school food purchases made with workers and sustainability in mind. At the summit in Washington D.C., the FCWA was coming together to decide on joint campaigns and policy priorities for the coming year, and to join in solidarity rallies, such as a demonstration outside a Walmart store near Union Station. I’d come with a recording team from StoryCorps to capture one-on-one worker conversations for Voices of the Food Chain , an initiative recently launched with the FCWA. Most of these workers were only just meeting each other at the summit, but all of them would come out of the small recording room with big smiles. “I had no idea,” Ruth Faircloth said to me, wiping away her tears, “that our struggle was the same.” Faircloth, a former farmworker from upstate New York who works with the Rural and Migrant Ministry, draped her arm around Velia Perez, a former farmworker and current food processing worker, and said, “This is my sister.” Again and again, I would hear these workers express a sense of connection and an understanding of their shared fate. In these conversations, it was also clear that the workers were coming together not only to secure better wages and conditions for themselves, but also to promote greater sustainability, animal welfare and resilience across the food system for all of us. These workers were as passionate about fighting for humane, local, sustainable food as anyone with a dog-eared copy of “ The Omnivore’s Dilemma ” on their bookshelf. As for the stereotypes of foodies? We hear they don’t care about workers like these; that they care more about the terroir of their turnips or the heritage of their turkey than the workers who harvest their vegetables or slaughter their livestock. But what I have seen on the frontlines of the food movement is a different story: The foodies I know care as deeply about protecting food workers as they do about the provenance of their vegetables or their meat. All across the country, I’ve been hearing a call for better wages and better food — from eaters and from workers. It’s getting harder and harder to write off foodies as uncaring fancy fennel lovers and food workers as only caring about their paycheck. In this we’re-in-it-together spirit, there is real power. Uniting eaters with workers holds enormous potential to shift the food system toward what we all want to see: greater sustainability, animal welfare and better working conditions. Of course, it won’t happen overnight, but I’m thrilled to report the conversation has started.

Originally published by Civil Eats on 11/18/2015 When Eric Schlosser pitched Fast Food Nation to publishers in 1999, they balked. No one would buy a food book that didn’t include recipes, they said. Schlosser eventually found a publisher willing to take the leap and today, 15 years and more than two million copies later, Fast Food Nation has proven that there’s an appetite for powerful investigative reporting about the journey our food takes to get to our plates. Schlosser, who has since published three nonfiction books and has been working on a book about the American prison system for over a decade, remains connected to the food world. He continues to speak on the issue, and just last year he served as an executive producer of the documentaries Food Chains and Hannah Ranch . I spoke with Schlosser recently by phone about food workers and the movement for fairness in the food chain. Tonight, he will join Joann Lo from the Food Chain Workers Alliance and food worker leaders in a conversation as part of the Voices of the Food Chain launch at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, California. You’ve spent a lot of your career focused on labor issues. Is there one front where you feel like food workers are winning? Alternately, where are they losing? I got involved with labor issues in the food system in 1994—that was my introduction to America’s industrialized food system. That was when I followed workers through the strawberry harvest in California. It was my interest in labor issues that lead me to write Fast Food Nation a few years later. I’m most encouraged by the victories of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Florida. Because as bad as things were in the strawberry fields of California, what’s been going on in Florida is as bad as anywhere in the United States in terms of the low wages and working conditions, including sexual harassment, and even slavery , in Central Florida. The ability of this one small farmworker organization to force the food corporations of the U.S. to adopt an enforceable code of conduct has been amazing and encouraging to watch. The CIW is incredibly disciplined, sticks to the facts, and is willing to tolerate defeat after defeat in order to eventually gain victory. What I am most discouraged about is the exploitation of meat packing workers. I’ve seen no improvement whatsoever in the years since Fast Food Nation came out: the job is much more dangerous. The crackdown on immigrants in the U.S. has only made it more difficult and has only increased the risks for those immigrant workers who want to speak out and protest those conditions. Why do you think the CIW has been effective in securing victories when other farmworker organizing has not? I think the CIW recognized how the power structure has changed in American agriculture in the last 30 years. In the era of Cesar Chavez, there was effective organizing against the growers, but in the 21st Century, the real power lies with the multinational corporations which are purchasing these commodities. The growers are increasingly trapped and squeezed by this system as well. The thing about a right-to-work state like Florida is that it doesn’t have a great tradition of labor unions; the CIW was in a very difficult position in trying to figure out how to help these poor workers. So instead of creating a union—which has become all the more difficult because of the large proportion of immigrant workers in agriculture and the fear that some of these immigrants have of being deported—the CIW decided to go after those with the greatest power: Burger King, McDonalds, Walmart. They have succeeded in a way that other worker groups and other industries can now emulate. Thirteen years went by between the CIW’s launch of its Campaign for Fair Food and Walmart’s decision to sign on to their Fair Food Program in 2014 . And their code of conduct only protects relatively few farmworkers. What do you say to those who say that was a lot of work for not much change? Well, change has to begin somewhere. Ideally, you’d have the U.S. government on the side of farmworkers simply enforcing the labor laws that exist, increasing the minimum wage, penalizing growers who are engaged in wage theft and companies that are connected to wage theft and minimum wage violations, etc. But in the absence of this, communities are going to have to do it. You can see the triumph of the CIW as a form of community organizing and there’s no reason why communities throughout the U.S. can’t do the same sort of thing. You have said: “One of the problems with our food system … is it’s ultimately based on the exploitation of poor workers, mainly recent immigrants.” How do you respond to people who say paying food workers fair wages will result in food that is priced out of reach for most Americans? Well there are two answers: We’re paying the price for this food anyway, it’s just that the price isn’t reflected at the checkout stand. The cost of having this inequality and poverty in our midst is huge. We’re paying for it—not just in quality of life—but in all kinds of services that state and local governments and the federal government have to provide. So this is a way for the agricultural industry to shift its external costs on to the rest of society. When I did my investigation of the exploitation of farmworkers in the U.S., and did a rough calculation of what it would cost to provide a decent income to every farmworker in the country, I found it would increase the annual food bill of a typical American family by between $35 and $50 a year. So for less than it costs a family of four to go to the movies and buy popcorn, you could eliminate poverty among migrant farmworkers. It’s a solvable problem. How would you define today’s food movement? Where are you seeing the movement flexing its muscle or having an impact? The food movement I’m proud of is a subset of a larger movement for social justice in this country. The food movement that is about status—about finding narrow distinctions between olive oils and one-upping one another with obscure ingredients or the latest trend in restaurants—I have absolutely no interest in whatsoever. I really liked the proposed national food policy Mark Bittman and others put together. I have profound admiration for the success of the CIW. And I have profound admiration as well for Alice Waters and the Edible Schoolyard and the movement to bring nutrition into the classrooms of the U.S. in a way that is tangible and meaningful. There are so many people whose work I really admire. What is missing in our national discussion about food? I think one of the issues that isn’t discussed enough in the context of our food system is racism . I think racism plays a central role in the exploitation of workers throughout the food system. It’s an unpleasant topic, but I think it’s one that we all have to confront to understand why things are as bad as they are at the moment. The greatest outcry about the exploitation of farmworkers in the U.S. occurred during the only decade in the last century in which most of our farmworkers were white. After the publication of The Grapes of Wrath and the powerful photographs of the farmworkers in California in the Great Depression, there was enormous interest in the plight of farmworkers. But that was really an anomaly. For more than a century, the people who have harvested our food have belonged to racial and ethnic minorities. When you look at the United States right now, in meatpacking, in farm labor, increasingly in the restaurant industry, you see people of color—and that’s one of the reasons why this society is abusing and exploiting them. That’s a major issue that we need to address. These are the people who feed us. What do you think of the new, somewhat stricter pesticide exposure regulations the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency just passed? The pesticide regulations to protect farmworkers are absolutely essential. One of the main reasons to eat organic is not because there may be some minor pesticide residue on the food that will harm you, but because farmworkers are being poisoned on a monumental scale. There are thousands of injuries each year due to overexposure to pesticides. Having the regulations in place is terrific. What’s even more important is enforcement. So many of the consequences of pesticide exposure aren’t apparent for years afterwards. People shouldn’t be poisoned in order to feed us. Next week is International Food Worker Week. Do you have any suggestions about how readers can help support food workers? The most important thing we can do is increase the minimum wage so it’s a living wage. Restaurant workers, migrant farmworkers will be helped enormously by this and other low-wage workers throughout the economy will as well . All the wages at the bottom will go up if the minimum wage is increased to $12 or $15 an hour. Secondly, educate yourself and, to the degree you can, buy food from companies that are treating workers well. Help boycott companies that are treating workers poorly. The last thing is fight against the demonization of immigrants in this country. Speak out against the demagogues who are trying to get votes by scapegoating some of the poorest and most hard-working people in the United States.

Originally published by AllAfrica on 10/09/2015 In the 2013 WTO Ministerial in Bali, India stood mostly alone as the rich countries tried to isolate the government for its stockholding and food security program. But India is far from alone in recognizing the value of public food reserves as insurance against price volatility, emergency food in the event of shortages, and stocks for anti-poverty programs. In fact, many African countries, including Kenya, Egypt, and Zambia manage such initiatives. They would be deluding themselves to think that the WTO measures taken against India will not be used against them. Most of these countries have exceeded, or are on the verge of exceeding, the de minimis limits set by the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), tripped up by the same loophole that has snagged India. That technicality, which artificially inflates the calculation of subsidy levels, must be resolved in Nairobi along with additional progress on outstanding agricultural issues in the long-running Doha negotiations. To put the Doha Round in perspective, suffice it to say that even if the entire round was concluded to the satisfaction of the developing countries, it would not address any of the issues of food sovereignty that are raised by social movements in the Food and Nutrition Watch 2015, released today at FAO in Rome. It is, thus, from the perspective of social movements, a minimalist package facilitated by the WTO - an agency that they believe does not have the legitimacy to deal with issues of agriculture and food security, and which ultimately seems to favor corporations and profit interests of the most powerful States. U.S.: Divide and Conquer The AoA allows the rich countries to retain their farm subsidies while preventing developing countries, from providing similar level of subsidies to poor and marginal farmers. All attempts by the G-33 countries to push through their proposal on food security at the WTO, by treating public stockholding programs as allowable Green Box subsidies, have been stymied, particularly by the US and the EU. On the other hand, issues like the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) where developed countries stand to benefit the most, continue to be pushed at breakneck speed, pushed aggressively by the WTO Chair, Roberto Azevedo. Tragically, the US manages to have its way at successive WTO ministerials because of the divisive politics it plays. At Bali, it was the Least Developed Countries (LDC) package that was used to divide the developing countries. At Nairobi the tactic that is most likely to be used is to divide developing countries by trying to carve out an entirely different category of "Low Income Developing Countries" (LIDC). The goal is to split them from the "emerging" economies, primarily the BRICS countries, then argue they are now too developed to receive the same special and differentiated treatment (S&DT) mandated for developing countries as a whole. This divide-and-conquer strategy seems to be taking effect, as the African Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries presented a recent paper at the WTO, which argued precisely for separating off the emerging countries. This plays directly into the US designs for creating divisions at Nairobi. Making the "First African WTO Ministerial" Meaningful The Tenth Ministerial is already being touted as the first "African" Ministerial, raising the stakes for host Kenya to produce an agreement. Failure, of course, is defined as the rich countries not having their way, yet again at the cost of some of the hungriest people on the planet. By all indications, the US and other developed countries are not prepared to offer any concessions in key agriculture negotiations. They are likely to push for an end to the Doha Development Round (DDA) without comprehensively addressing all the issues that were agreed upon as part of the Doha framework. This would enable the developed countries to introduce new issues at the WTO including the so-called Singapore issues such as services, competition policy, and investment, which had been put on the back-burner by member states until the DDA was comprehensively negotiated. They also want to target state-owned enterprises in the developing countries. While Kenya, in its eagerness to host a successful Ministerial could possibly break ranks with the developing countries and call for a premature closure to the Doha round, the implications of doing so for other African countries are serious. Consider just four of these. First, all developing countries would lose the policy space to be able to hold reserve food stocks without being hauled up before the dispute settlement mechanism of the WTO for distorting trade. Even under the peace clause that India managed to negotiate at Bali, only existing programs are covered, so no new programs are allowed. As pointed out earlier, many countries in Africa including Morocco, Kenya, Jordan, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tunisia, have either breached the limits that they are allowed to subsidize or are likely to do so. Continuing U.S. Cotton Subsidies Second, U.S. negotiators are offering only minimal concessions to address the long-running issue of its cotton subsidies suppressing prices in international markets, at great cost to other cotton exporters in the world, including Africa's C4 cotton countries (Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin and Chad). The U.S. and Brazil settled their dispute over the programs, in part because the 2014 U.S. Farm Bill enacted special provisions on cotton. But a recent study estimates that those reforms in no way ended the price suppressing effects of U.S. policies. In fact, researchers estimated the cost to the world's other cotton producers at $3.3 billion per year in the coming years, as U.S. subsidies lower the price of U.S. cotton on international markets. The C4 countries are projected to lose about $80 million per year (Burkina Faso - $33 m; Mali - $26.5 m; Benin - $16.5 m; Chad - $3.3 m). India's losses are projected at more than $800 million per year. Third, the biggest concern of developing countries in seeking to reduce U.S. domestic support is to end unfair competition and eliminate the dumping of agricultural commodities on developing countries. The recent years of relatively high prices have given the world a reprieve from such cases, but there is evidence that we may be entering a new era of low crop prices and renewed dumping unless stronger domestic support caps are agreed in Nairobi. The United States is already exporting maize at prices below the costs of production, in part thanks to a projected $6 billion in subsidies to U.S. maize producers. Finally, U.S. negotiators are trying to undermine provisions that facilitate access to life-saving medicines. They are proposing to terminate the existing moratorium on applying what are called "non-violation compliants" (NVCs) in the TRIPS agreement. Such a termination, which serves the interests of multinational drug firms, would make developing countries subject to trade disputes as and when they want to implement such public health measures. Developing countries have tabled an alternate proposal asking for NVC complaints to be made inapplicable to the TRIPS agreement. On all counts, poor countries have much to lose in Nairobi if the US and other developed countries, backed by the WTO Secretariat, have their way at the Ministerial meeting. This is not the time for African negotiators to accept the tacit abandonment of the development mandate embodied in the Doha Declaration.

Drawn from World Hunger: 10 Myths, by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins. Being “free” sounds great—like being free to eat or to have a job at a living wage; so surely a “free market” is the way to ensure these important human freedoms. Right? Unfortunately, what we call a free market can’t protect essential freedoms because it’s trapped in six enduring fictions. So let’s free ourselves, one fiction at a time. One: A “free market” works best to meet human needs. If by “free market” we mean one unbounded by rules, it does not exist. All market economies are governed by rules. In ours, no one is allowed to sell babies, trade with terrorists, or sell liquor across the street from your kid’s school. While market rules are plentiful, one key, unspoken rule drives most economies today: Do what brings highest return to existing wealth—what garners the corporations’ executives and shareholders the greatest immediate gain. By this rule, wealth accrues to wealth until we end up in the United States with inequality more extreme than in Turkey or India; and in a world with two-thirds of adults trying to survive on 3 percent of global wealth. In such a world, no matter how much food we grow, hunger is inevitable. Two: Government necessarily impedes a vital market. In truth, a market economy cannot thrive without government. Think of the essentials to economic success that government provides, from legal structure to infrastructure. As for government being bad for business, this can hardly be true if in economies ranking among the world’s most successful, government spending contributes a big part of the GDP. Take three of the five countries deemed most economically “competitive” by the business-oriented World Economic Forum: Switzerland, Finland, and Germany. In each, government spending accounts for about a third to more than half of the country’s GDP. And in the United States, which ranks fifth in global competitiveness, make that 40 percent . A lot of government spending directly benefits an economy. Take Brazil. Each month, the government transfers a modest sum to poor women, if they keep their kids vaccinated and in school, directly addressing hunger. Every dollar spent on the program generates almost twice that amount in economic activity. Three: A free market serves individual freedom. In the 1980s, at UC Berkeley, I had the opportunity to debate perhaps America’s most celebrated “free market” champion, the late Milton Friedman, coauthor of Free to Choose . He claimed that the market serves freedom by enabling people to make choices based on their values. I then pointed to the obvious. If true, the market serves human freedom only on one condition : that people have purchasing power to express their values in the market. Thus freedom, using Friedman’s own definition, actually expands as societies set rules ensuring that wealth is widely and fairly spread. By the same logic, a market operating without rules to prevent wealth from amassing at the very top denies most individuals’ “freedom to choose.” And, in many societies that includes the freedom to choose to eat. Four: A free market gives us all the choices we need. Before we celebrate too much, let’s consider some choices our market economy denies, illustrated in a metaphor borrowed from political philosopher Benjamin Barber: In our market economy, we get to join a giant cafeteria line with plentiful dishes where— if we have the money—we can grab whatever appears appetizing. Great choices! But notice what we don’t get to choose. We cannot enter the kitchen and select the menu. For example, we don’t get to say, “No, it’s not more choices among processed foods that I want. I want more plentiful, and less expensive, fresh fruits and vegetables.” True, our supermarkets typically carry thirty thousand items. Wow. But without “menu making” power via democratic government providing citizens a voice in public decisions, my choices—including those protecting my family’s health as well as healthy soil and water—are extremely limited. Five: A free market maximizes a nation’s efficiency. Few would call it efficient to put up new walls using stones plucked from the foundation, yet our farming practices result in almost two billion tons of topsoil being washed or blown away from U.S. cropland each year. Here and in too many other ways, our food economy is destroying the essentials our progeny will need tomorrow. Or ponder the extreme inefficiency of a world food economy in which only 3 percent of the calories in feed going to cattle end up returning to consumers in beef. If we define efficiency as getting the most benefit from resources, human and natural, while ensuring their ongoing health, most modern-day economies are not “efficient.” Six: The market is “value neutral.” In the United States we say we value “democracy” and “life.” Yet, we leave access to food largely to a person’s capacity to buy food in a market that drives purchasing power into ever fewer hands. Thus 48 million Americans, lacking in purchasing power, live in households facing food insecurity. But wait! Democracy means a voice for every citizen, and no one chooses uncertainty about where her or his next meal is coming from. Logically then, hunger and food insecurity belie democracy as a core value of our society. In America we also say we value “life,” but we then tolerate a market with wages so low that poverty is implicated in a death rate of US babies more than twice that of several Western European countries. A society’s market is an unmistakable expression of its values. So here we are, trapped in six dangerous fictions creating a highly un free market, one that leaves many of us denied freedom, the freedom to realize our full potential on a healthy planet. They blind us from understanding that a well-functioning market—one able to end hunger—is impossible without democratic government. Ironically, the market-is-all-we-need dogma ends up destroying the very conditions necessary to realize the market’s prized strengths—openness, competition, and transparency. In large part as a consequence of this dogma, now spreading far and wide, one-quarter of humanity now suffers nutritional deprivation in world of vast food abundance. This is what I mean by “dangerous” fictions—ideas that are literally killing us that we can crack open and leave behind. Originally published by Huffington Post on 11/03/2015

World leaders in Paris are in the midst of critical climate negotiations toward the first enforceable agreement in two decades. We hope that two giant questions—too often missed or downplayed—will be a focus: Can our food system—now speeding climate change while leaving a quarter of humanity suffering nutritional deprivation—reverse course? Instead of a climate curse, can our food system become part of the climate cure, while at the same time producing nutritious food that’s accessible to the world’s poorest people? Big changes! But evidence of their possibility mounts. First, however, the big obstacles. Our industrializing food system—from land to landfill—has become a big climate troublemaker, estimated to account for up to 29 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. Most startling, these emissions are growing so fast that, if they continue at current rates, in thirty-five years those from our food system alone could nearly reach the safe target set for all greenhouse gas emissions. To get a fix on how big the problem is, take in these fast facts: Agriculture alone contributes nearly a fifth of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions; and industrial agriculture (that using manufactured inputs) releases two to three times more carbon dioxide per unit of land than does organic farming. Since the industrial era began, humans have removed a third of the Earth’s carbon-absorbing forest cover largely to grow crops, a shift that can reduce soil carbon per unit of land by more than 40 percent . That’s an area roughly the size of South America. Increasingly, that land is growing feed or fuel, not the basic foods of the planet’s poor majorities. Soils treated with synthetic pesticides and fertilizers hold about 30 percent less organic carbon compared to organically managed soils. The current model of industrial agriculture—only about 70 years old—has already proven to be a dead end. But, by adopting ecological practices, farming would emit fewer greenhouse gas emissions and store more carbon. And now to my second question—food accessibility for those who most need it? Ecological practices free farmers from expensive corporate-controlled inputs, so they especially benefit small-scale farmers and farmworkers, who also are the majority of hungry people . Some of these beneficial practices are: Composting—returning to the soil decaying organic material from plant and animal wastes. Just one ton of organic material can result in storing almost 600 pounds of carbon dioxide. Agroforestry —integrating trees on farms. It improves crop productivity and yields additional food and fodder from the trees . Globally, says the World Bank , among a range of ecological farming practices, “agroforestry by far has the highest sequestration potentials.” One study found that this approach in the EU, combined with other ecological farming practices, has the technical potential to sequester GHGs equivalent to 37 percent of its 2007 emissions. Biochar —a form of charcoal generated by controlled smoldering of organic material, including waste, such as common weeds. Its efficacy varies widely, but biochar can increase the soil’s capacity to store carbon and enhance crop yields. Its estimated long-term carbon-sequestering capacity is huge . Holistic livestock management —careful movement of herds to prevent overgrazing avoids carbon loss from bare soils. In Namibia , herders shifting to this method reduced soil degradation, improved soil-surface cover, and conserved water, concludes a report co-sponsored by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Planting multiple types of crops in the same field is another climate-saving farming practice . Together, and combined with afforestation and other earth-healing practices, these approaches could potentially sequester carbon equal to a fifth of global carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions annually, reports a leading world authority, Professor Rattan Lal of Ohio State University. Lal describes this big-picture possibility not just as technically feasible but as “attainable.” Farmers helping to meet the climate challenge are also those addressing the roots of hunger. In the West African country of Niger, small farmers have nurtured the regrowth of 200 million trees on 12.5 million acres, securing the food supply for 2.5 million people. Most of us don’t think “trees” when we think of food and hunger. But Trees help conquer hunger as they reduce soil loss, retain soil water content, and often provide fruit, nuts, and fodder. In China, where many see only unmitigated ecological disaster, the government has worked with poor farmers on its north-central Loess Plateau to transform“moonscape”-like erosion in an area two-thirds the size of Massachusetts. In an area known for widespread hunger, small farmers limited destructive grazing, built wider terraces, and planted new fruit trees. Not only did the orchards flourish and crop yields increase by 60 percent, but incomes also more than doubled, all improving diets and spurring new schools, roads, and local enterprises. In Rwanda, since independence in 1962 almost two-thirds of its forests have been wiped out. But visiting China’s Loess Project, Rwandan forestry officials were inspired. Rwanda has since committed to increasing its current forested area 50 percent by 2020. The country connects its fight to conquer hunger and poverty with its goal of reversing completely the degradation of the country’s soil, water, land, and forest resources by 2035. In southern India, the state of Kerala, home to thirty million people, in 2010 officially declaredthe goal of becoming 100 percent organic within ten years. By 2013, fifteen thousand farmers were in the process of securing organic certification. Elsewhere in southern India, 5,000 women of the Deccan Development Society have created food security in 75 villages. Overall, in two southern India states, two million farmers are moving toward ecological practices. These farmers—and others like them around the world—are both our real climate heroes as well as hunger-conquerors. May global climate talks embrace the immense contributions toward solutions to be found in remaking our food system. The result could be the inseparable advancement of food security, ecological health, and climate mitigation. Originally published by Huffington Post on 12/02/15

Originally published by Civil Eats on 12/15/2014 In 2010, when I was on tour promoting my book Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It , I felt lonely. Not because no one was showing up for my book talks, they were. And not because I was alone; with my nine-month-old daughter in tow, I was never by myself. I felt lonely because, back then, there were very few of us talking about the connections between food and climate change, despite the fact that the global food system—from field to plate to landfill—is responsible for as much as one third of all greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). In just a few years that has changed. Somewhat. Today, many serious “big green” environmental groups are looking at how the food system can reduce its emissions and how agriculture can be harnessed for the cause. Many food-focused groups are also increasingly seeing the work they do–to promote organic farming, to fight petrochemicals and synthetic fertilizer, to protect biodiversity–as part of promoting climate solutions. More ordinary people are drawing these connections, too. I witnessed this firsthand at the People’s Climate March in September, when I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with 410,000 eaters, food activists, and farmers proudly waving signs with sentiments like “cook organic, not the planet!” Still, there’s much awareness-raising to be done, as a new report out recently from the London-based think tank, Chatham House, tells us. The report is based on a first-ever poll of 1,000 people from 12 countries—including Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Africa, the UK, and the U.S.—on their attitudes about climate and food. The folks at Chatham were especially curious to learn just how aware people are about the climate impact of meat production, since the livestock industry is a key culprit in emissions. Responsible for 14.5 percent of the total global GHGs , the livestock sector is responsible for as much emissions as every single train, plane, and car on the planet, combined. The survey also tested people’s awareness specifically about beef and dairy, since these products account for “65 percent of the GHGs emitted by livestock,” reports Chatham . Based on average global assessments, Chatham notes, emissions from beef are “around 150 times those of soy products, by volume, and even the least emissions-intensive meat products–pork and chicken–produce 20–25 times more GHGs.” Certain countries are particularly critical to this conversation, especially China, a country expected to grow its demand for meat and dairy in the coming decades “over four times that of the next fastest-growing consumer, Brazil,” according to Chatham. So, what did the researchers hear in their interviews? Eighty-three percent of respondents agreed that “human activities contribute to climate change.” But among believers, only one-third see the meat industry as a significant contributor. By comparison, two-thirds pointed the finger at transportation, even though “the contribution to overall emissions is almost equal between the two sectors,” says Chatham. The Chatham poll also explored whether learning the facts would shift food choices. What they found was a clear and resounding yes in countries like Brazil,Italy, India, and France. While in the U. S., only 26 percent indicated that it would impact their choices. It was particularly encouraging that people in Brazil and India–countries slated to see big growth in meat and dairy consumption in the coming years–showed high levels of accepting both the reality of climate change and the willingness to consider the climate in reducing meat consumption. One reason consumer change is so key is because we’re in a major “policy vacuum” regarding this issue. The industry is largely unchecked by national regulators and absent from scrutiny in climate negotiations, the report notes. What’s more the food industry is heavily subsidized: Chatham estimates livestock subsidies in OECD countries added up to a whopping $53 billion in 2013, which has the effect of incentivizing more meat production. It also notes national governments have by and large excluded livestock from emissions reductions targets. (The U.S. is no exception: agriculture is exempt from many Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations regarding emissions). Chatham makes a strong case that consumer action is critical, but as groups and governments consider a focus on food, there are two important caveats. First, the messaging must be sophisticated. Cutting back on carbon-intensive foods—like feedlot beef—does no good if we don’t simultaneously talk about better choices. If you replace your burger with processed food filled with palm oil from Indonesia and high-fructose corn syrup from the chemical-intensive American cornbelt, you may have not reduced carbon “foodprint” at all. We can also stress not all beef is created equally. Scientific literature is mixed on the relative benefits of grassfed beef versus feedlot cattle, but some recent studies suggest that grazing can offset the climate impact of pasture-raised beef, for example. Of course, this potential needs to be put in context of the planet’s carrying capacity for grassfed cattle and the simple fact that in most countries pastured beef is largely unavailable. Second, as we focus on consumers, we must not let industry and government off the hook. Agribusiness companies driving rainforest destruction to grow animal feed need to be in the hot seat alongside energy giants like Chevron and BP, while meat producers, like Tyson and Smithfield, must also be held accountable for their climate impacts. And we should speak up to ensure that governments monitor and regulate the worst climate-change culprits in the food sector, not subsidize them. “It’s encouraging that people in emerging economies are open to changing how they eat once they know about the meat-climate connection,” Mia MacDonald, executive director of Brighter Green , said in an email about the Chatham survey. “But in these places, policies that would create more sustainable, humane food systems—and not replicate the U.S. model—are really lacking. And agribusinesses are very powerful. As a result, people, local and global environments, and animals (both domesticated and wild) are all losing out.” This report is an important step in raising awareness about food-sector emissions—especially important because, as Chatham notes, emissions from this sector will increase by 30 percent by 2050 if we don’t change these trends. But as we sharpen our focus on our plates, let’s keep our eyes on politics, too.

Drawn from World Hunger: 10 Myths, coauthored by Joseph Collins. The billionaire Koch brothers chose the Libre [Free] Initiative as the name of their political outreach efforts in the Latino community. Some of the most conservative House Republicans call themselves the Freedom Caucus . And last month, Pope Francis enjoyed a standing ovation from Congress with the words “land of the free and the home of the brave.” Hearing the refrain, most Americans leap to our feet with hand on heart and pride inside. But what do we mean by “free”? Unless we together grapple with the meaning of “free” and “brave,” might we end up singing this refrain ever more fervently while losing the actual experience of freedom? Two strains in our understanding of freedom seem to run deep in our culture, but rarely do we spell out their very powerfully different implications. So, with the hope of triggering rich debate, let me try. Freedom for me involves having choice, in the richest sense, including the capacity to choose how we develop our unique gifts and passions. Political philosopher Harry Boyte captures its essence as the “liberation of talents.” This understanding of freedom lies at the heart of my life’s message about hunger, as laid out in World Hunger: 10 Myths , the book I’ve coauthored with Joseph Collins. From this perspective, it becomes clear that where people go hungry, freedom has been drastically curtailed, while societies making real the right to eat are on the path to freedom. But many in American culture hold a different view: Freedom, in its core economic expression, means unlimited material accumulation. By that definition, of course, freedom for some will continue at the cost of hunger for many. Such an understanding misses the insight of Yale University economics philosopher Charles Lindblom, who in his classic Politics and Markets coolly reminds us that “income-producing property is the bulwark of liberty only for those who have it.” In the Global South just a tiny minority have such a bulwark to their liberty. And, most Americans don’t have it either. About half of Americans have zero or near-zero net wealth ; much less possess income-producing assets. Fortunately, this understanding of economic freedom was not the vision of many whose philosophy shaped the birth of our nation. Some perceived that a link between property and freedom could be positive only when ownership of socially productive property is widely dispersed. In 1785, after a conversation on a country road with a desperately poor single mother trying to support two children with no land of her own, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, “Legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property.” The misery of Europe, he concluded, was caused by the enormous inequality in landholding. Many of our nation’s founders also understood that being able to think and speak for oneself without fear is foundational to the culture of a free republic. So “independence” carried the meaning of being free from dependency on others for survival — the kind of dependency characteristic of the aristocracies our founders had rejected: another key reason for our founders’ passion for ensuring a wide dispersion of wealth. Americans today might think such views vanished with the powdered wig. But no. In 2014, two professors surprised a lot of people with research revealing that Americans’ ideal level of economic inequality would be a society in which an average CEO’s pay is no more than seven times that of an unskilled worker’s. The reality? U.S. CEOs receive on average more than 350 times what the unskilled worker receives. Security: Not a Threat but a Ground of Freedom Economic insecurity constrains our freedom, as Franklin Roosevelt summed up, declaring, “Necessitous men are not free men.” More recently, University of Maryland philosopher Henry Shue offers a helpful exploration of precisely why the right to that which is essential to life itself — particularly the right to an adequate diet and health care — is basic to freedom: No one can fully, if at all, enjoy any right that is supposedly protected by society if he or she lacks the essentials for a reasonably healthy and active life. Deficiencies in the means of subsistence can be just as fatal, incapacitating, or painful as violations of physical security. The resulting damage or death can at least as decisively prevent the enjoyment of any right as can the effects of security violations. Moreover, freedom so understood is not finite. My artistic development need not detract from yours. Your intellectual advances need not reduce my ability to develop my own intellectual powers. And assurances of my protection from physical assault, including my right to nutritious food, need not prevent you from enjoying equal protection. This is true because sufficient resources exist to guarantee the fulfillment of food rights for everyone. Despite vast waste of food resources, the world produces nearly 2,900 calories a day for each of us. Not only does your freedom to develop your unique gifts not have to limit my expression, but my development in part depends on your freedom. The failure of our society to protect the right to basic security means that all of its members are deprived of the intellectual breakthroughs, artistic gifts, and athletic achievements of those whose development has been blocked by poverty and hunger. When we are denied the potential inspiration, knowledge, example, and leadership of those who are directly deprived, all of us experience a diminution of our freedom to realize our own fullest potential. In all, I see a positive link between economic security and freedom. Freedom as Participation in Power Another vein in many Americans’ understanding of freedom is that it means being free from interference, especially from government. The gist is the absence of something negative. But I believe we need a stronger, more active, understanding of freedom to end hunger and enable the “liberation of talents.” Freedom must include the freedom to participate with a meaningful voice, to have a say creating our common destiny. And this realization brings me to the “Home of the Brave” refrain with which I began. Bravery today involves citizens willing to forego despair about our democracy. To reject cynicism. To stop simple finger pointing. Bravery today means the boldness of citizens stepping up — no matter what the odds — to expand this active understanding of freedom by removing the grip of money over public decision making so that government becomes accountable to them. This is what freedom means to me. Originally published by Huffington Post on 10/27/2015

Originally published by Live Mint on 09/08/2015 The tenth ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), to be held in Nairobi on 15-18 December, is already mired in discord, with negotiators unable to agree on a mandated post-Bali work programme. At issue are US and European Union (EU) proposals to scrap the texts agreed to thus far in this interminable round of trade negotiations. Yet again, the developed world led by the US and the EU are pitched against developing countries led by India, China and Indonesia, who have over the past two years tried unsuccessfully to move towards the promise—made at the ninth ministerial conference in Bali in 2013—of a permanent solution to the public stock-holding issue in food security, while advancing the stalled Doha development round. The irony that a country such as India, which witnessed more than a quarter of a million farm suicides between 1996 and 2014, has to fight to retain its farm subsidies, which are a fraction of what the US and the EU provide their farmers, is not lost on most observers. Nor is US intransigence in refusing to consider a proposal from the group of 33 countries (G-33) to resolve the stockholding issue simply by bringing the WTO agreement into line with 21st century prices. The 2014 US farm bill is one of the main reasons the US government is walking away from the post-Bali agriculture negotiations. Studies show that the US is likely to exceed the subsidy limits agreed in Doha negotiations in 2008, and it will probably exceed even current WTO limits. US Congress thumbs its nose at WTO The 2014 farm bill, which takes effect this crop year and will be in effect for five years, is decidedly more trade-distorting than its predecessor. It eliminates direct payments to producers, which were considered less trade-distorting than price or production-based programmes. It replaces them with production and price-based programmes that offer producers of supported commodities a choice between payments to compensate for low prices (price loss coverage or PLC) or payments to compensate for revenues lower than the recent five-year revenue average (agricultural risk coverage or ARC). On top of that, producers get subsidized crop insurance from the federal government, and special or different programmes support dairy, cotton and other crops. How do these programmes work? Producers opt in to one of the programmes for each crop for the five-year terms of the farm bill. The price-based coverage is much like the US’s previous countercyclical payments (CCP), setting a price trigger and compensating producers when prices fall below that level, up to a fairly high limit. Wheat producers, for example, would be covered for prices below the PLC price of $202 per tonne. The revenue-based programme, ARC, pays producers if their crop revenues fall below historic averages for their area based on yields and prices. The programme uses the previous five years as the baseline, years in which prices and yields have been unusually high. That makes producers eligible for an almost absurdly high level of support, levels that will, however, evaporate if there is a long run of low prices. In the early years of this farm bill, though, ARC coverage is high, particularly for corn and soybean, with effective support prices of $179 per tonne and $388 per tonne compared with PLC support prices in 2014 of $146 per tonne and $309 per tonne. Not surprisingly, most corn and soybean farmers opted for ARC over PLC. Why does the 2014 farm bill limit the US government’s negotiating room in the WTO? According to projections from researchers at the University of Missouri, farm supports are likely to remain at or above current levels, leaving the US little room to agree to proposed cuts. Projected outlays for 2014 crops are around $12 billion. More important, virtually none of the US support under these new programmes would fall in the Green Box, exempted from limits based on the assumption that they are minimally trade distorting. Both programmes are, indeed, tied to specific crops, prices, or levels of production, so they will be disciplined as Amber Box support subject to reductions under the current WTO agreement. Under the proposed Doha agreement, based on the texts agreed in 2008, the new programmes will likely fall in the Blue Box, which will be subject to new caps. The US limit will be $4.7 billion. They will also contribute to the new limits on overall trade distorting support (OTDS), which for the US will be $14.5 billion. And with the so-called de minimis exemption reduced from 5% to 2.5% of the value of each crop, more of that trade-distorting support will count against the US limits. The University of Missouri researchers ran a series of 500 simulations for the next 10 years comparing the results to the proposed Doha limits as if the agreement were in effect as of 2014. They found that in 34% of those simulations, the US exceeds its reduced Amber Box allowance in at least one year. Worse, nearly 99% of the simulations showed Blue Box caps being surpassed in at least one year. OTDS limits were nearly 100% likely to be breached in at least one year, with a 40% probability that they would be exceeded in any given year. In other words, if the US agrees to the 2008 Doha text on agriculture, it is virtually assured to be in violation of its commitments because of the 2014 farm bill. US loses credibility in Doha negotiations US intransigence in following through on the commitment in Bali to negotiate a permanent outcome on India’s programme of administered prices and stockholding for food security looks all the more hypocritical in light of the 2014 farm bill. University of California professor Colin A. Carter wrote in a 2014 commentary, “The provisions of the 2014 Farm Bill... may well have cost the United States any credibility in future agricultural trade negotiations in the Doha round.” The US government was already hypocritical in calling out India for a programme that uses all the same policy measures the US used in its earlier history. It was hypocrisy as well to call for close disciplines on payments to some of the poorest farmers in the world in order to feed some of the hungriest people in the world when US farmers are far better off and recipients of US government food assistance get four times the amount of food. And it was further hypocrisy to call India’s programme highly trade-distorting when very little of the procured food finds its way into export markets while, by contrast, the US exports a significant portion of nearly every supported crop. But the 2014 farm bill adds a new layer of hypocrisy to US claims. Consider that the new legislation increases support prices by one-third or more. And consider what that means for US maize. The support price under the PLC programme is up 41% and at $146 per tonne is now higher than the current market price for maize by $2 per tonne. That would trigger payments if applied to 2014 prices and production. But most maize farmers opted for revenue insurance, which has a 2014 supported price of $179 a tonne, a $35 per tonne subsidy. Projections suggest that payments to maize farmers for the 2014-15 crop year will be more than $6 billion. Now, imagine if payments to US maize farmers were subject to the same archaic WTO discipline the US is insisting on for India, calculating the supposed subsidy not on the basis of current market prices but compared with the stipulated 1986-88 reference price, with no adjustment for inflation. That already high US subsidy, when compared to the reference price of $92 per tonne, would appear to be $87 a tonne and a ridiculous $32 billion, just for the US maize crop. Of course, the US subsidy is not that large. Neither is India’s for rice or wheat. But the US hypocritically holds India to that archaic calculation of its subsidies while not having to do the same for its far larger and more trade-distorting farm supports. Will the Doha round survive Nairobi? The Barack Obama administration is relentlessly pursuing two large trade agreements—the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). These allow for far greater trade liberalization in market access and investment rules than what the Doha round offers while excluding US agricultural subsidies from the discussion. The US is simultaneously pushing the WTO to move beyond the Doha round to the so-called Singapore issues of government procurement, trade and competition and trade and investment. The Narendra Modi government successfully called the bluff of the developed world after Bali by threatening not to ratify the trade facilitation agreement unless the “constructive ambiguity” of the peace clause, which left India and other developing countries vulnerable to being dragged to the dispute settlement mechanism at the WTO, was clarified. India rightly recognizes the temporary gains from the Bali agreement and is clear-eyed that the DDA can only be concluded by addressing all issues of the 2008 Doha Framework. Since Bali, India has gained strong allies, with backing from China and Indonesia. Brazil, too, is insisting on respect for the 2008 negotiated texts. Despite the unity of the developing world, the road to Nairobi remains uphill. Kenya, which is projecting the Nairobi ministerial conference as the first African one, wants to make it successful, and that could mean settling on a less ambitious outcome. Even though many African countries are united behind the G-33 proposal, it is possible that the US and EU may (again) drive a wedge, like they did by pushing a minimalist package for least developed countries (LDC) at Bali, unless India and China step up the diplomatic effort. The India-Africa summit in New Delhi in October may offer India another chance at making a decisive push to get African countries to close ranks at Nairobi. In the meantime, India must not succumb to US pressure to reduce domestic support to farmers or replace the public distribution system with cash transfers in order to be WTO-compliant. India’s national food security law promotes security not only by providing subsidized food to the poor but by supporting poor farmers with stable and profitable prices, just as the US did in its early farm programmes when it had a large and poor farm population. The developed world certainly dominates the global market for hypocrisy, and the US Farm Bill, passed by a Congress unconcerned with the rest of the world, is a case in point. Hopefully, the developing world can hold firm to join India in defending public stockholding programs for food security and in reviving the promise of development embodied in the Doha development round.