Living Democracy, Feeding Hope

Too bad. I depend a lot on NPR, so my heart sank as I listened to Morning Edition’s recent series on the world hunger crisis. Using Honduras as its case study, the four-part series reinforces dangerous myths that actually block us from seeing the real solutions to hunger all around us. We’re told that “across the globe .... [f]ood is expensive and there’s not enough food to feed empty stomachs.” No. In fact the world produces enough to make us all plump. True, today an estimated 100 million additional people are, or will soon be, facing hunger as food prices exceed their budgets, but the deeper lack they’re experiencing is not food itself. It is power. Drawing the distinction between lack of food — a symptom — and lack of power — a cause — is essential to seeing solutions. Yet this series portrays as progress examples that do nothing to correct, and in fact worsen, the underlying power imbalances at the heart of hunger. In the broadcast , we hear that Wal-Mart is a solution because it provides a market for poor Honduran farmers who otherwise would have no way to sell their produce. But if access to a market is, in itself, farmers’ salvation, here at home each year more than 10,000 farmers would not be going under. The question is who controls a market: Where the answer is a few monopsony buyers — what Wal-Mart represents in the NPR case study — power remains with them. They set the terms and they decide whether to stay or to leave. Fortunately, in Latin America and elsewhere some rural communities are beginning to free themselves from distant, monopoly power. Imagine this: In what may be the pesticide capital of the world, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, pests developed insecticide resistance and genetically modified (GM) cotton failed to live up to Monsanto’s promises. Farmers faced catastrophic losses, triggering thousands of suicides, and many then began to move in another direction. Now, almost two thousand villages are embracing community-managed sustainable farming using natural pest controls, not purchased chemicals, and are enjoying improved incomes and health. Yet, the NPR series ignores such hopeful examples. It notes gloomily that most small Honduran farmers will cut back on production this year, despite higher prices for their crops, because “prices for fertilizer and pesticides have gone up even more than food prices.” In a disturbing disconnect, the series still promote as solutions not only purchased farm chemicals but genetically modified seeds; yet the cost of these seeds puts them out of reach of many poor farmers, as acknowledged at the tail end of the second piece in the series. Worse, and not acknowledged, are the documented, serious environmental and health risks linked to GM seeds. NPR misses the real story: On every continent one can find empowered rural communities developing GM-free, agro-ecological farming systems. They”re succeeding : The largest overview study, looking at farmers transitioning to sustainable practices in 57 countries, involving almost 13 million small farmers on almost 100 million acres, found after four years that average yields were up 79 percent. NPR chose to reinforce the myth that the only hope for poor rural people is dependency on concentrated economic power when, all over the world, poor farming communities are discovering their own power to work with each other and with nature to build healthier, more secure, and more democratic lives. What a lost opportunity. Originally published by Huffington Post on 9/11/08

Days of infamy sear our psyches. We never forget. “Where were you when JFK was shot?” In Indiana volunteering in a home for the mentally ill ... “When the assassin’s bullet found MLK?” In Philly going door to door for the Welfare Rights Organization” ... “On 9-11?” Approaching New York City on a train. But what about those days that positively remake our sense of ourselves? Certainly, the fall of the Berlin Wall is one, yet I’m pretty fuzzy on where I was that day. But November 4, 2008 will never get fuzzy. It is my very first, unforgettable day of public joy. After 9-11 we found ourselves speaking to strangers as we sought comfort. This week, I find myself speaking to strangers as my joy just can’t be contained. I’m convinced that my grandchildren will view 11-4-08 as more transformative than any of our nation’s days of infamy. I say this not because I’m counting on any particular policies Barack has promised us, but because of deeper changes. First, Barack Obama’s victory stands not only as a liberating milestone for people of color. It is a step toward human liberation — further freeing us all to benefit from the gifts of all. Discrimination in any form is a burden for all, depriving everyone. And with the success of this young black man, it seems we’re catching on — in the nick of time. As I watched weeping on Tuesday night, I recalled my mom, Ina Moore, who in the segregated Texas of my childhood helped integrate our church. In a 1960 unpublished essay about her friend Bessie, whom she loved dearly but with whom she couldn’t sit down for coffee at the local diner, my mom wrote: “I have learned that I, too, wear a tag of identification, classifying me as “white” first, an individual human being second. And I have learned to read the fine print underneath the label which says, “YOU are a forger and a thief. You have forged a pass to all the better seats. You have falsified a deed to all the fertile valley, leaving for others only the barren, eroded hillsides. You have stolen the dignity of other human beings. My I.D. hangs heavy around my neck. I’ll be glad when I can take it off.” Now, 48 years later, I can feel that I.D. tag beginning to drop away. Next, the Obamas are real. Sure, some have shouted “cult of personality,” but Obama is not the mythic Kennedy, the bigger-than-life Johnson, the ever-charming Bill Clinton. In retrospect, they seem like caricatures we co-invented. They’re not people like us. Now, imagine the implications of having a real human being and a real human family in the White House: If they are real people like us, and they are making history, maybe we real human people are making history, too. “I feel empowered!” a thirteen-year old in our family shouted over the phone to me as victory became certain Tuesday night. Watching them, we’re reminded moment to moment that what real people do matters. And our new First Family carries another vital message: that of true male and female partnership, that of a family engaged with and enjoying each others’ lives; that of honesty, playfulness and deep love. If the neuroscientists are right that our brains’ “mirror neurons” fire as though we are acting out what we observe, then our collective psyches will be actively absorbing empowering relational models, quite unlike those offered by the Bushes, Clintons, or Kennedys. And I’ll bet that long after they leave the White House, Barack and Michelle and their girls will be shaping us. Finally, implicit in Obama’s campaign slogans and speeches has been one consistent message that is key to the success of any community organizer: “The answer is not in my hands. It is up to you.” Our problems are simply too complex and pervasive to be solved from the top down, Obama knows. They require huge changes in all of us, and most of us change not when we feel coerced but when we engage and feel our voices are heard. In Santa Fe, N.M. days before the election, everywhere I saw signs reading: “Obamanos!“ — a Spanglish term meaning “Let’s go Obama.” For me, it carries with it a “let’s move forward together” spirit — the opposite of the “I’m the Decider” mentality, which positions the White House as a sort of executive bunker. Democracy presumes our involvement. It presumes mutual accountability. And that presumes transparency, listening, and respect. The Obamanos spirit is the spirit of democracy itself: No longer something done to us or for us, democracy becomes what we ourselves create: a culture of engagement drawing us out of our isolation and into an ongoing — no longer once-in-a-lifetime — experience of public joy. For we can shed cynicism and despair only as we realize our common capacity to become the public problem solvers our world so desperately needs. So, get ready, reach out to others — then, Obamanos! — Frances Moore Lappé, with her daughter Anna Lappé, leads the Small Planet Institute in Cambridge. Author of 16 books, her most recent is Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad . Originally published by Huffington Post on 12/08/2008

As about 30 countries scramble to protect their citizens from hunger by limiting food exports, the title of a front-page New York Times article calls out: “Hoarding Nations Drive Food Costs Ever Higher.” But where does responsible government action end and hoarding begin? (If the Irish government had begun a little hoarding instead of exporting grain in 1845, many deaths could have been avoided in the Irish potato famine .) It’s not an easy question to answer, which suggests that it might be a perfect time to ask how countries got into this no-win, export-or-not quandary to begin with. Part of the answer is the longstanding premise, assumed by international lending agencies, that nations should use their farmland to grow what’s most profitable in world trade and use the proceeds to import food as needed. For decades countries have been “encouraged” — even by making it a condition of a needed loan — to use prime farmland to grow luxury and non-food items from coffee to cut flowers for export, and to adopt an agricultural model dependent on imported fertilizers, pesticides, and seeds. At the same time international agencies, dominated by the industrial countries, have given this “advice,” the U.S. and Europe have also been busy subsidizing their own agriculture at almost a billion dollars a day. Their huge subsidies make their farm commodity exports so cheap they undermine the sales by the very poor farmers in the Global South who they encouraged to depend on exports. Surely today’s deepening hunger crisis reveals the dangers of vulnerability to policies completely outside one’s control. The end of hunger and real food security require provisioning from domestic resources wherever possible. This approach, combined with a solid international grain reserve to be released in response to unforeseeable setbacks, has the best chance of assuring adequate food supplies. Could we Americans ever breathe easy if we were dependent on imported food for our very survival? I doubt thatany people could. Why is it that “energy independence” is embraced by the left and right, but you never even hear anyone utter the phrase “food independence?” Analysts go on vying to tease out the varied pieces of the puzzle of today’s renewed hunger crisis: Is it “hoarding” that’s to be blamed? Is it heightened speculation? Is it the growing Asian elite’s market-demand for grain-fed meat? The rising price of oil? The diversion of food to produce agrofuel? (A l eaked World Bank report suggests that this diversion alone could have pushed prices up 75% since 2002.) But these questions avoid asking why we have failed to end hunger even in the good times. For years, the world’s more-than-ample supply of food — keeping well ahead of population growth — has left over 800 million hungry. Because we’ve not grasped the root causes, today’s prices risk pushing another one hundred million people into the ranks of the hungry. No amount of lifting of agricultural trade barriers will address this longstanding, now intensified, crisis. Understanding hunger begins here: In our world where the bottom 40 percent of us have to survive on just over three percent of world income and eight in ten live in societies where inequalities are worsening, the real “hoarding” is done by those with vastly disproportional income: Their market demand diverts 37 percent of the world’s grain and about a third of the world fish catch to livestock, and now almost a third of U.S. corn to ethanol. How could this extreme and worsening inequality happen? Because of our thin concept of democracy — that elected government plus a one-rule economy (highest return to existing wealth) are all we need to meet human needs. As a result, economic and political power concentrate in such a way that policies emerge which defy the values and common-sense of most citizens. For, where are everyday citizens who would choose to have their survival dependent on the vagaries of volatile international markets? Nowhere. Thus, our hunger crisis is actually a democracy crisis. Hunger can be eliminated only as we remove the influence of concentrated wealth over public choices and ensure the ongoing, healthy distribution of power. The sooner we start recasting the crisis thusly, the sooner we’ll all be able to thrive. Originally published by Huffington Post on 07/12/2008

If you Google “food scarcity,” you’ll find hundreds of thousands of links. It’s everywhere — including at the recent G8 Summit in Japan. Even as the members there enjoyed seven lavish courses and a “G8 Fantasy Dessert” — you can’t make this stuff up — food scarcity was all they could see. The G8, the World Bank, and much of the international food establishment seem to be afflicted with a deadly disorder: a strain of amnesia, apparently contagious, that has erased memories of hunger-fighting failures and breakthroughs of the last four decades. If they can recover, what insights might they retrieve that could save us? For starters, perhaps these four: > There’s been no food shortage! What if we all remembered that food production has kept ahead of population growth for decades? Today almost 3,000 calories per person is available in the world — even after shrinking available calories by feeding over a third of grain to animals and now diverting a hundred million tons of corn to cars. > But we’ve broken the link between food availability and people actually eating. During more than 90 percent of human evolution, as long as there was food, everyoneate; innately, we are a species of food sharers. Yet, even before the current crisis, nearly 900 million people were going hungry. By the late ‘90s, five million more faced hunger each year. Last year, that five million jumped to 50 million. So we’re facing the biggest human rights crisis of my lifetime: The U.K.’s ActionAid estimates that current price spikes may have doubled the number of hungry and food-insecure people to 1.7 billion. If so, that’s a quarter of the world’s people. > The dominant “development” strategy leaves us with more food and more hunger. Aid to agriculture has sunk to a tiny four percent of total development aid, and the G8 has called on its members to increase that aid, especially in Africa. Sounds good, if you are amnesic — if you’ve forgotten that as important as the amount of aid given are the assumptions behind it. Take one now well-tested assumption: that the economic model centered in the industrial countries works: “All poor, hungry people need to do is get their feet firmly on the first rung of the economic ladder.” Hmm. Have we forgotten this model’s largest case study, India? During the booming 1990s, India’s progress in reducing hunger came to a halt. Now, almost half of India’s children suffer malnutrition — a greater number than in all of Sub-Saharan Africa. In the 1960s, millions of poor Indian farmers were encouraged to take on debt to buy costly hybrid seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation equipment. Rice and wheat displaced diverse, often highly nutritious foods. Over time, costs rose and yields flagged as pests gained resistance and soil became degraded. At the same time, prices sank, and beginning in the 1980s, as international lending agencies insisted on anti-public, pro-market policies, the Indian government reduced farmer (and consumer) protections. Many poor Indian farmers were bankrupt; and in desperation as many as 150,000 have committed suicide since 1993. In India’s “breadbasket,” the state of Punjab, “water, people, animals, milk and agricultural produce are all poisoned with the stuff,” The Economist reported last year. What “stuff”? Farm chemicals resulting in “children young as ten... sprouting tufts of white and grey hair. Some are going blind... [and others] are afflicted by uncommon cancers.” > We’ve proven what does work! Empowered farmers on every continent are working together to better use local resources, work with nature, and free themselves from dependency on forces beyond their control. A study of 286 farming projects across 57 countries looked at almost 13 million farmers who were moving toward sustainable, agroecological practices on almost 100 million acres. After four years it found an average 79 percent increase in yields. And, we can feel confident that those higher yields are actually filling the stomachs of the communities that produced them. Over 30 years ago I sat in Rome at the world’s first world food conference. Today the G8 is striking the same old chord: If there is hunger, there’s gotta be lack of food, so the Summit calls for “strengthening the world market and trade system for agriculture and food, and stimulating world food production”; i.e. let’s lower trade barriers and bring on the agri-chemical and seed conglomerates. Threatened with a world food crisis that makes the 1970s horror appear mild, let’s slap ourselves awake so that we can act from what we’ve learned: Freedom from hunger flows from the democratic empowerment of citizens making ourselves ever less vulnerable to concentrated, unaccountable power, and that includes food and energy cartels now posting record profits even as people riot, desperate to eat. Originally published by Huffington Post on 7/19/08

...tell ‘em to talk to my friend Harry Rhodes. He’s proof that “healthy, local, and organic” isn’t just for foodies and the so-called well-heeled. For seven years, his Chicago-based non-profit, Growing Home , has provided jobs and training for the homeless, the previously incarcerated, and people with low incomes. At Growing Home’s four farm sites, participants learn organic farming and produce marketing. They also acquire general job skills. Over 70% of them end up getting work. As Harry explains: “We now have our first year-round urban farm that we own, the Wood Street Urban Farm — leading to a huge increase in interest in our work. When you can show a model of what an urban farm is and what can be replicated, people pay attention. Every week we give tours, with people coming from the Chicago area, from all over the country, and many coming from other countries. “We have increased the number of people we train annually to about 30. This is just a drop in the bucket. Our mission has expanded from job training and organic agriculture to community and economic development. “We are showing how urban farming can be used as the catalyst for turning around low-income neighborhoods, such as Englewood on the south side of Chicago.” US incarceration rates have hit a worldwide, all-time high — 762 jailed persons per 100,000 residents, compared to Canada’s 108, or France’s 91, and almost two-thirds of them seemingly destined for re-arrest. Isn’t Growing Home showing us a pathway out of this labyrinth of stagnation and insanity? Suddenly, organic food looks less like a yuppie luxury and more like it could and should be a staple for our sanity and security. I can’t wait to visit the Growing Home team next time I’m in Chicago, and I’m especially eager to hear about the others they are sure to inspire. As Harry says, “just think what 10 or 100 organizations like Growing Home could do.” Originally published by Huffington Post on 9/19/08

“Finish your supper, Francie, children are dying in China,” I heard growing up. It didn’t make sense to me then, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s retake this week makes even less. He’s now scolding Brits for not eating every last pea on their plates: Britons all need to be “doing more to cut our food waste,” in order to “get food prices down,” said Brown, as the G8 meets in Japan. True, food waste is enormous and egregious. Nearly half of food grown in the U.S. is wasted . But wagging a finger at better-off individual eaters in a world economy constructed to make both waste and hunger inevitable is totally off the mark. Brown reinforces the dangerous myth that a shortage of food is the reason food prices have jumped, resulting in 50 million more people hungry last year. The Prime Minister should know better. The official “price index” for foods that poor people eat the most — grains and oils — has climbed more than threefold so far this decade. This is a catastrophe, but there’s no way that changes in eating habits of northerners could be the cause or cure of this radical jump. A recent leaked World Bank report says agrofuel production alone has caused food prices to rise 75 percent between 2002 and February of this year. I like the term “agrofuel,” because it reminds us that we’re talking about using agricultural resources, instead of “biofuel” that could be made from non-food materials. (It should be noted that The Wall Street Journal has posted a new piece in which Donald Mitchell, author of the draft of the “leaked report,” says it was a work in progress and “doesn’t reflect the official position of the World Bank.”) Today’s hunger crisis results from anti-democratic power that chose to put agribusiness interests in agrofuel production ahead of citizens’ interest in eating. It takes no PhD in economics to predict a big price impact from significant farmland diversion from food to fuel. The doubling of the real price of oil in two years, also driven by an industry unaccountable to democratic interests, plays a huge role as well. More broadly, the world’s avoidable, deepening power inequalities end up generating so many people too poor to exert market demand for basic foods that it then makes “economic sense” to turn land into producing raw materials for the better-off: Over a third of the world’s grain and most soy meal goes to livestock and now a quarter to a third of U.S. corn goes to feed automobiles. Brown suggests that households wasting less can mitigate the price crisis. But what if a shortage of food isn’t the cause of this crisis? Since the ‘60s and ‘70s when the War on Hunger was declared, right up to now: there’s always been more than enough food to go around. Today the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that, compared to the prior year, preliminary 2007/2008 world grain production data show an increase of more than 5 percent; whereas the world’s population is growing at about 1.2 percent a year. Brown is blaming citizens’ eating choices when citizens’ primary responsibility for this crisis is that we have not yet stood up and made this madness stop. As I write in Diet for a Small Planet , eating a sane diet — plant-centered, non-chemical, locally produced and in healthy quantity — can be a fantastic step to send longer-term market signals to shift the economy to health. Not to mention a way to thrill our bodies by giving them what makes them thrive! But let’s not kid ourselves. The reminder we citizens most need isn’t Mr. Brown’s admonishment; it is that we can reclaim our governments so they serve our interests. Think about it: No assemblage of regular citizens would have chosen to shift good land to feed cars when 18,000 children die of hunger every day, or allowed unchecked, unaccountable speculation to push the run up of prices. Only as we create democracies beholden to citizens, instead of narrow but powerful special interests, can we put policies in place that will transform the world of hunger tearing at our hearts into the world of plenty that it actually is. [Post-script to Prime Minister Brown: Eighteen courses? ] Originally published by the Huffington Post on 7/16/2008

As commentators vie to predict the impact of Obama’s March 18, 2008, “race speech” on his candidacy, it’s easy to fixate on what it tells us about Obama the person — his steady courage, his nuanced thinking, his mastery of imagery and storytelling. All are important attributes to weigh as we choose our next president. Yes, Obama’s speech was one of our nation’s most thoughtful on race and contained important character clues. But let’s not miss the speech within a speech — the one about democracy itself. Obama implicitly reminds us, first, that democracy requires that we learn to hold competing truths simultaneously. “He talked to us as if we are grown-ups,” a friend told me last night, and I agree. But being a grown-up goes beyond nuanced thinking in any general sense: it requires a capacity to accept another’s pain as real without denying or belittling our own. Such appreciation of differing realities, the opposite of fundamentalism, is the beginning of democratic dialogue. Second, this speech quietly but firmly reminds us of one huge reason American democracy has been thinning, rapidly and dangerously — from the drastic retreat in government transparency to the violation of constitutional protections to the reversal of progress in overcoming poverty. It’s that those who benefit from democracy’s regression encourage us to blame each other for our ills, to think, mistakenly, “zero-sum” — that “your dreams come at my expense,” to use Obama’s words. Race is a mighty tool in that blame-deflection game, and too many of us have been sucked in. “Not this time,” Obama tells us. Yet, to ensure that this time will be different he must now help Americans understand precisely why and how the vast majority of us share common interests: That, to pick but one example, the burden on America is not the cost of anti-poverty efforts; the burden for us all is poverty itself. A 2007 study [PDF] estimates that damage caused by childhood poverty alone costs us in, for example, health care and lost economic output, $500 billion yearly — almost well over four times what we spent in 2006 on education, energy, and homeland security combined. The third important democracy message in Obama’s speech is his reminder that democracy is an unending journey, not an endpoint. Faithfulness, then, to our founders’ vision means that we never proclaim our democracy perfect but relentlessly further its unfolding. Now he and we must follow through on this core insight. To retrieve what we’ve lost and to move democracy forward requires our rethinking democracy’s meaning: As long as it is primarily a structure — elections plus a market, or a string of programmatic advances — we are vulnerable. We’ve seen, as noted above, that in just one generation much of the underpinning of democratic freedom can be stripped away. Obama can use his remarkable intellect and oratorical power to remind us that democracy strong enough to meet today’s challenges is not a set system but a set of system values and norms — inclusion, fairness and mutual accountability, for starters. It is a culture whose premise is that solutions require the insight, experience, ingenuity, energy — and therefore the buy-in — of citizens. If we are truly to unite, to stop blaming and start solving problems together, as Obama suggests, millions and millions of us must be able to see a rewarding place for ourselves in democracy. But with over two dozen lobbyists walking the corridors of power in Washington for each person that voters have elected to do our work, is a culture of citizen empowerment possible? So long as Red and Blue alike — almost 90 percent of us, according to a 2002 Harris Poll — believe that corporations wield too much political power, many will assume it’s not worth our time to engage. In his speech Obama refers to “a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests.” But he can even more forcefully focus Americans on this mother of all issues: noting that the danger is not only private power’s distortion of public priorities but its shutting out of the real force needed, that of engaged citizens. Even as he calls us to overturn the barrier of corporate influence, Obama can use his unique voice to remind us of the power we each have now. He can call out the innumerable — but invisible to most Americans — exemplars of citizen-driven initiatives, often partnering with government, that are succeeding: from state-wide Clean Elections now in Arizona, Maine and Connecticut to the citizen-driven planning process that turned smog-clogged Chattanooga into a U.N. environmental-award-winner to community-led initiatives in low-income Kansas City neighborhoods that pushed high-school graduation rates up 40 percent in less than a decade to government-community partnerships in Burlington, Vermont, that made that city the nation’s leader in the share of its housing that is permanently affordable. What many classify as an historic speech about race may, on reflection, also be an historic speech about democracy. This time, each of us must push Obama and ourselves to bring its messages to life. Originally published by Huffington Post on 3/26/2008

We know Hillary Clinton is smart, and we so can assume that for some time she has known, as well as anyone, that it is virtually impossible for her to become the Democratic nominee for President in 2008. So what could explain her continuing to battle, risking her party’s approbation? We fear there is one explanation that fits too well: that Clinton is actually already fighting the 2012 race. We hope we are wrong. But within this frame, her actions do make perfect sense. Clinton seems to be doing her best to weaken Obama’s candidacy and therefore the likelihood that he can win against McCain. With that result, she could say, “I told you so” and offer herself as the 2012 savior of the Democratic Party. Her husband’s statement last weekend, that the Democrats were more likely to lose in November if she is not the nominee, fits that pattern. Here’s, sadly, how the strategy looks to us. First Clinton defends her continued presence in the race against all odds, arguing that the pressure on her to get out is “unprecedented.” To make her case, she compares hers with two other supposedly extended campaigns — her husband’s and RKF’s. But Bill Clinton was essentially unchallenged from March on. And RFK? He entered the race mid-March, so his campaign lasted less than three months. Then she continues her campaign as long as possible — ideally right through the convention — all the while pressing themes already proven to weaken Obama’s. Her methods: • Play on powerful racism that in America lies barely below the surface by emphasizing Obama’s weakness among white working-class voters. • Stoke anger about her trailing position among her most ardent supporters — older white women — by using sweeping claims of sexist treatment instead of attacking specific sexist statements. • Promote uncertainty about Obama’s religious beliefs, but subtly so she doesn’t get slammed. For example, when she was asked whether Obama is a Muslim, she equivocated with “No, as far as I know.” • Point out, along with McCain, Obama’s lack of military service as evidence that he will be inexperienced and weak in dealing with our enemies — not as tough as she and McCain would be. • Make the full counting of the Florida and Michigan votes a moral necessity, increasing anger among those voters. Although these states would not appreciably affect the delegate count, giving them full voting rights would create havoc in the Democratic Party’s 2012 campaign schedule. • Resist as long as possible the inevitable coming together of the two campaigns, depriving Obama of time to consolidate his efforts and giving her more time to deepen resentment against Obama among her supporters. As a 2008 strategy, when Clinton had a reasonable chance of becoming the nominee, each of these tactics made some sense. Negative campaigning, carefully designed, often works wonders. But now that it is clear to virtually everyone that — barring some catastrophic event — she will not be the nominee in 2008, her actions seem to make sense only as a 2012 strategy. She is taking a big risk, to be sure. If she goes too far, she will be seen as one cause of Obama’s failure — another Ralph Nader. She must take care not to alienate those whose support she will most need in 2012. But if we are right, she will continue to come right up to the line but not cross it too often, fighting on and on through the convention in August. If we are wrong, and we hope we are, Clinton will graciously withdraw next Tuesday night when all fifty states, Puerto Rico, and the territories have been heard. She can declare whatever victories she wishes. But at that point, she must join Obama, ask all of her supporters to throw their full energies in support of him, and do everything she can to help him become President of these United States. Whether or not Clinton refuses to concede at this point, the remaining uncommitted superdelegates should declare themselves immediately after the release of Tuesday’s results and the leadership of the Democratic Party should publicly declare that the people have decided who their nominee will be. Richard R. Rowe, Ph.D. has been active in the Democratic party for many years, and served in 2003 as Director of the Internet and Information Services for the Dean for America campaign. He is a Senior Fellow of the Small Planet Institute and recently was Co-chair of the Transition Team on Technology for Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. Originally published by Huffington Post on 6/06/2008

Except for Iraq, the world has not seen a sustained increase in deaths from terrorism; after the horrific 2001 spike, terror fatalities returned to levels of the late 90s. In fact, by mid-2007, outside Afghanistan, Iraq, and other “insurgency theaters,” says Virginia-based think-tank The Intelcenter, fatalities from Islamist attacks around the world have declined by more than 90 percent from their 2004 high point. So reports Human Security Brief 2007 from the Human Security Report Project of the School for International Studies, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. What?!? Didn’t Senator McCain just remind us that “we live in a very dangerous world”? Yes, and he’s of course not alone. From the U.S. National Intelligence Estimates to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, we’re told that the incidence and threat of terrorism are increasing. Those who insist terrorism is getting worse count politically motivated killings of civilians by non-state groups in Iraq — in 2006 home to 79 percent of global terror fatalities — and distort the wider picture. Plus, their counting is just plain inconsistent, note authors of theBrief: The same analysts who include Iraqis killed by non-state armed groups among terror victims exclude similarly caused deaths in Africa’s civil wars in their terror counts. Most encouraging and underreported, the Human Security Brief describes a broad “popular backlash” against violent Islamist movements in the Muslim world. “Large and growing majorities of Muslims” also “reject Islamists’ harsh and repressive ideology.” A July 2007 Pew poll in four largely Muslim countries found the number of those justifying attacks on civilians was down by half compared to five years earlier. A late 2007 ABC News/BBC poll found just one percent of Afghans expressing “strong support” for the presence of Taliban and jihadi fighters. And such sentiments are shared by just about anyone we can think of, Muslim or not. From our friends and loved ones to John S. McCain — we’ve all been victims of terrorism, directly or indirectly. Thirteen years after Oklahoma and seven years after 9-11, we know we may never be fully healed. But we might do well to see what can be learned from the experience of those who have continued to live with terrorism on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis. More and more people around the world are disavowing violence against civilians, and support for terrorism is drying up. People are fed up, and that’s good news — because being fed up works. When regular people reject the mentality of violence, the reality of violence withers and weakens. So how can we keep that trend going? Not by fear-mongering that leads to a shoot-now/think-later stance and makes civilian casualties inevitable. Case in point? A Human Rights Watch report this week says that “civilian deaths from U.S. and NATO airstrikes — almost all from unplanned strikes — jumped nearly threefold between 2006 and 2007. And civilian deaths from airstrikes “act as a recruiting tool for the Taliban.” Killing civilians? That sounds like a sure way to reverse a hopeful trend. If John McCain, Barack Obama, or any presidential candidate wants to keep America secure in the 21st century, they’ll have to reject the disproved notion that military violence can be the primary answer to terrorism. Not only must we improve intelligence and develop smarter defenses, the U.S. will have to start trusting the good sense of people who increasingly reject violence, and prove that trust by working much harder to protect them from harm. It turns out that changing attitudes about war and violence isn’t some kind of pie-in-the-sky idea designed to make us feel better (even though we probably would). It’s happening. And it is good foreign policy. Does your presidential ticket know that? Originally published by Huffington Post on 10/12/2008

With talk of terrorist “pals” and melanoma prognoses, can this presidential campaign get worse? Probably. But maybe meaner and scarier is not the way to reach the undecided — still somewhere between 5% and 18% percent of us. (Whatever their numbers, they will choose our next president.) If they haven’t decided by now, could it be because they feel put-off, confused, and downright insulted by the barrage of emotional, narrow, lie-tainted charges? If I’m right, there’s opportunity as never before in these precious remaining weeks. That’s why my colleagues and I have relaunched UDecide.org , to help you reach out to friends, in-laws, classmates, co-workers, neighbors, email contacts — and strangers — to create our own barrage: one of essential, factual contrasts between the candidates, presented in a respectful way. On the UDecide site you’ll find clear fact-flyers — with complete, credible sources — to email, download, photocopy, share, and post. Everywhere! We did this during the ‘04 race, and two million UDecide flyers got out there. We can do it again. UDecide flyers can turn up quickly in doctors’ waiting rooms, on school cafeteria walls, on coffee-shop bulletin boards, and on car windshields in church parking lots. We can use the web to reach Americans who don’t live on the web. In these last weeks, it’s something we can do wherever we are. Frances Moore Lappé P.S. Also, please check out these two sample quotes below from folks who took this strategy and ran with it 2004. UDecide Users : * “I’m taking a big stack of the Women’s issues flier with me today as I run my errands. I’m leaving stacks at the gynecologists’ office, the foyer of the daycare, and the yoga center. Hopefully another woman will read one and be enlightened!” — Lynda * “I own a tattoo studio in Oregon. I have a large number of clients that are undecided on just how they are going to vote. I’m putting the flyers in a binder on the coffee table for them to see and discussing the topics while I tattoo them. I am also going to make up waterproof posters and tack them to to utility poles around town.” — Donald Originally published by Huffington Post on 11/06/2008

What a weekend to be hanging with the guys from Farm Aid : historic financial meltdown, plus, breaking news — ignored by virtually all big media — that by the beginning of this year the food price crisis had pushed 75 million more people into hunger and that as many more could join them by year’s end. That would be 150 million more hungry people in a world of food plenty! For me this crisis has felt like one of the most egregious human rights disasters ever. While we’re told that big agribusiness will save us, it’s a system centralizing their control of our food system that got us here. So it’s been my honor to be asked to join Willie Nelson, Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young —as well Maine farmer Brenna Chase and Duwan Grant from The Food Project — at a pre-concert Farm Aid press meeting. Together, we’ll show that sustainable, local family farming isn’t “quaint.” It disperses power, protects the soul and water, and can help avert climate catastrophe. If family farms are not our future, we have no future. See the concert on on DirectTV’s The 101 Network or online here on Saturday, starting at 4pm. There’s a lot that should be said, and there’s not time to say it all. But below are talking points I’ve worked up to prep myself for the Farm Aid press event. Please: read them, let me know what you think, and pass them on — especially to anyone who might think that Farm Aid is old news. My thanks to Mark Schultz of the Land Stewardship Projec t and John Crabtree and the good people of the Center for Rural Affairs for their great ongoing work and their assistance in preparing me for this event. “Keep on rockin’ in the free world!” WHAT ALL AMERICANS NEED KNOW ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THEIR FOOD >>> We hear it’s a food crisis but ours is really a democracy crisis. Democracy is about people having their say, but how many regular citizens would say “yes” to a farm system that so tilts the playing field that our best farmers — family farmers — are driven under while the price of food climbs? >>> Farm Aid can help us turn the week’s scary lesson about what happens to us when financial power is concentrated and unaccountable into a loud wake-up call: Concentrated, unaccountable food power may even be worse, and only family farming can reverse it. >>> What does concentrated power look like? In agriculture, it is — to pick one example — three giant corporations controlling most of the world’s grain trade; in food, just ten corporations controlling half the products on supermarket shelves. If that were healthy, our economy and our people would be, too. But one in nine private health dollars goes to treat food-related illness. >>> A system consolidating agribusiness control — and subsidized by tax dollars — is pushing under 10,000 U.S. farms a year, while it erodes soil and pollutes water. It results in over three-fourths of our food dollars now going to everybody but the farmer. >>> The good news? We know how to fix it. * Family farms are typically more productive than the biggest operations, and are more effective in protecting topsoil, groundwater, and communities; not to mention farmers. * More and more farmers are creating farmer-owned marketing cooperatives that keep vastly more of the return from farming in rural communities. * Though President Bush’s science advisor Nina Fedoroff claims that organic farming could support “maybe half” the current world population, in fact, if organic farming went worldwide food availability could increase by 50 percent, reports a 2007 University of Michigan study. * Family farms make economic sense, community sense, and ecological sense, so they’re gaining where smart families, communities, and states see the writing on the wall. They’re relinking farm and city; farmer and eater. The most recent Minnesota farm census, for example, recorded a gain in the number of new farms. >>> Americans are told family farming is passe, but what’s really passe is believing we can continue with a chemically dependent, fossil-fuel addicted farming model. Our inefficient food system is a big contributor of greenhouse gases, and its concentrated power is what has led us into this food and farming crisis. Family farmers are our future, without them we don’t have a future. Originally published by Huffington Post on 10/23/2008

Farmers and eaters around the country and the world are watching the Nov. 6 election in California with bated breath. Will Proposition 37 — requiring labeling of GMOs in our food — pass? Note that even China requires labeling! But here in the U.S., GMOs took off in the 1990s with no public debate, and today they’re in most processed foods, making Americans the world’s GMO guinea pigs. We know it’s easy to get sunk by “information overload” and agribusiness advertising. So far the largest GMO maker, Monsanto, and other industry giants have plowed at least $35 million into keeping us in the dark. To help us think straight, we’ve prepared seven points to consider and share with your friends — all backed by authoritative studies. Here’s what they reveal: 1. GMOs have never undergone standard testing or regulation for human safety. And now that they’re in 70 percent of processed foods, it’s extremely difficult for scientists to isolate their health risks . 2. But we know that GMOs have proven harmful in animal studies. A 2009 review of 19 studies found mammals fed GM corn or soy developed “liver and kidney problems” that could mark the “onset of chronic diseases.” Most were 90-day studies. In a new two-year study , rats fed GM corn developed two to three times more tumors — some bigger than a quarter of their total body weight — and these tumors appeared much earlier than in rats fed non-GM corn. Among scientists, the study has its defenders and critics, but even the critics underscore that we need more long-term studies. 3. And the most widely used GMOs are paired with an herbicide linked to serious health risks. GM crops — Roundup Ready soy and corn — are treated with the herbicide glyphosate, which in exposed humans has been associated with DNA damage . In the lab, it’s proven toxic to human liver cells. 4. The consequences of GMO technology are inherently unpredictable. Inserting a single gene can result in multiple, unintended DNA changes and mutations . “Unintended effects are common in all cases where GE [genetic engineering] techniques are used,” warn scientists . One such environmental consequence — genetic contamination of other plants — is already documented. Note that unlike food, once released into the environment, seeds can’t be “ recalled “! 5. GMO makers intimidate and silence farmers and scientists. GMO corporations use patents and intellectual property rights to sue farmers , block research , and threaten investigators . “For a decade,” protested Scientific American editors in 2009, GMO companies “have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research,” so “it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised.” 6. GMOs undermine our food security. Within the biotechnology market, Monsanto alone controls 90 percent of GE crops worldwide. And Monsanto is one of three GMO companies including DuPont and Syngenta that control 70 percent of the global seed market, reinforcing monopoly power over our food. GMO seeds are costly and must be purchased every year, so they worsen farmers’ indebtedness, dependency, and vulnerability to hunger. 7. GMOs aren’t needed in the first place, so why would we take on these risks and harms? Studies show that safe, sustainable farming practices applied worldwide could increase our food supply as much as 50 percent. And keep in mind that the world’s already producing 2,800 calories for every person on earth every day — more than enough. And that’s just with what’s left over after using half the world’s grain for feed, fuel and other purposes, and wasting one-third of all food. So the urgent question isn’t about “more” anyway. It is, How can all of the world’s people gain the power to secure healthy food? And a good start is knowing what’s in our food. For a cool, just-released animated video devouring the myth that we need industrial ag, see foodmyths.org . Shopping in the Know (Not GMO) • Avoid processed foods! It’s a simple way to reduce exposure to the four most common GM ingredients: non-organic forms of soy, canola, cottonseed and corn, including high-fructose corn syrup. • Look for the voluntary “non-GMO” label. • Buy “certified organic,” which ensures that no GMO ingredients were used. • Visit www.NonGMOShoppingGuide.com for a list of thousands of GMO products and brands. To sort more food myths from facts, visit the new Food MythBusters: the Real Story About What We Eat website at FoodMyths.Org . And, if you live in California, vote Nov. 6 for Proposition 37 to require GMO labeling. Speak out, wherever you are. Demand federal GMO labeling and work to end GMOs. Originally published by Huffington Post on 10/25/2012