Living Democracy, Feeding Hope

Originally published by Global Post on 02/25/2014 LILONGWE, Malawi — Visit this small, landlocked country in late January and you will have a hard time believing its people often go hungry. It is mid‐rainy season, and in and around the capital city the landscape is lush and green. Look more closely and you’ll notice that nearly every inch of unpaved space seems planted with maize (corn); the green stalks rise up to five feet above moist, rich soil. Outside of the city, along the road leading south toward the former colonial capital of Zomba, the hills roll with maize, not in vast tracts reminiscent of Iowa but in small, neatly bordered plots. It certainly doesn’t seem like a land that cannot feed itself. But until recently, that is what Malawi has been. Droughts often threaten the country’s one rainy season, and with per capita incomes at around $900 per year, hunger, and even starvation, stalk the countryside. The World Food Program has permanent offices here, and for good reason. Even this season, when the rains have come strong but late, more than 10 percent of the country’s 16 million people face severe food insecurity. According to news reports, some have starved. It is paradoxical only to outsiders that this greenest of seasons is also the hungriest. By planting time late in the year, many peasant farmers have consumed the last of their saved grain, even following a decent harvest like they had last year. Until the new crop comes in late March or April they have to rely on meager cash income to feed themselves and their families. “We don’t have a food shortage,” said Billy Mayaya of the Malawi Right to Food Network. “We just have a maize shortage.” The right to food movement has grown in tandem with Malawi’s fixation on maize. Both were sparked by the same deadly event, a famine in 2002‐2003. Between 1998 and 2001, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund recommended that the Malawi government cut spending. The government eliminated a small but effective program of seed and fertilizer distribution, and maize production fell 40 percent by 2002. The World Bank and IMF then persuaded the government to sell off its food reserves. Sure enough, no sooner had emergency stocks been sold off in an unsurprising wave of corruption, than the rains failed. As many as 1,000 people died in the ensuing famine . This humanitarian crisis prompted the government to resume its food reserves, critical in a landlocked country where emergency food aid can take 3 to 5 months to reach the hungry. And it ignored World Bank and IMF advice by establishing a broad input subsidy program intended to put good seeds and fertilizer into the hands of poor farmers. The cash‐strapped government had to launch the program with its own funds when international donors refused to support an initiative seen as inimical to free market principles. This was true, for the simple reason that in this largely subsistence economy, the market was rife with failures. No investor was about to step in to improve small‐scale farmers’ productivity. And there was no one else to produce food. The program was a success, and within a few years Malawi had grown enough maize to export some to neighboring countries. Even most donors conceded that the program had worked. The 2002 famine, as much a product of governance failure as it was crop failure, also sparked the Malawi Right to Food Network. A 2006 international fact‐finding mission pinpointed the causes of the crisis, and activists set to work crafting Malawi’s Right to Food Bill. The bill enshrines in legislation every Malawian’s right to “the progressive realization of the right to food,” committing the government to advance such rights. The right to food has gained traction in recent years as part of the broader recognition within the international community of economic, social, and cultural rights. Under the leadership of UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, the concept has translated into national legislation and constitutional guarantees. In India, the Supreme Court found in favor of plaintiffs claiming their right to food had been violated by the elimination of key government programs. For a country as vulnerable as Malawi, Mayaya says the movement made perfect sense. “Which comes first, the right to food or the right to vote?” Mayaya asks. “It’s not a right to a handout, it is the right to ‘the progressive realization of the right to food.’” The Right to Food Bill awaits legislative approval, something Mayaya hopes will happen after May 2014 elections. De Schutter brought an official UN mission to Malawi last year, issuing a comprehensive report that praised the government for its efforts but faulted it for the overreliance on maize and chemical fertilizer, which he warned could be masking rather than replenishing depleted soils. The sentiment seems widely accepted both in and out of government, though the subsidies are so entrenched in the political structure that they would be hard to eliminate. But they can be shifted. Current government efforts to distribute legumes seeds – for beans, pigeon peas, groundnuts, soybeans – along with maize are a start. They diversify diets, offer crops that ripen at different times of the year, and replenish the soil with nitrogen and organic matter. Ultimately, such programs can reduce Malawi’s heavy dependence on fertilizer imports, which consume an unsustainable share of scarce foreign exchange. South of the capital, I saw plenty of legumes intercropped with maize. Farmers were enthusiastic, one telling me that thus far he had not needed chemical fertilizer on his one acre of maize, which stood tall above him. I asked if the high‐yield hybrid maize favored by donors and the government didn’t need those fertilizers. After all, modern hybrid seeds like those distributed in Malawi by Monsanto and other seed companies perform well only with the application of high levels of fertilizer. The farmer smiled. This was a local variety, he told me, which he didn’t need to purchase every year. Specialists explained to me later that its yield isn’t as high as hybrid seeds under optimal conditions, but under the variable conditions farmers face, it does almost as well, even if fertilizer is scarce. It also tolerates erratic rainfall better and stores more reliably. The farmer pointed to his healthy maize plants and told me proudly that he was growing “orange maize.” He said it’s high in Vitamin A, which I knew was chronically in deficit in developing countries. In fact, it’s the reason behind the long‐promised, never‐delivered “golden rice,” genetically modified to add Vitamin A. This farmer may not have known it, but he was rejecting the kind of high‐tech agriculture heavily promoted by international donors. He was rebuilding the fertility of his depleted soils by intercropping nutritious legumes while growing a vitamin‐rich, resilient variety of maize. At the same time, he had reduced his costs — he saved seeds, and didn’t need to buy fertilizer — and reduced Malawi’s need to import fertilizer. Maybe this is what the progressive realization of the right to food will look like in Malawi.

Originally published by TIME on 06/23/2014 A poll out last week from the Organic Trade Association found a sharp decrease in parents who say price is a key factor limiting their organic purchases. “Parents in charge of the household budget recognize the benefits of organic,” said the trade group’s Laura Batcha. “And they’re willing to pay a little more to know that they are giving their families the highest-quality and most healthy products being offered in their local store.” We can already hear the organic food naysayers: Highest quality? Healthy products? Hogwash — the organic industry just wants you buying more of its goods. But the truth is choosing organic-certified foods — when you can and can afford to — is one of the best choices you can make for your children. We should know: as a mom of two girls and an author of books about sustainable food (Anna) and as a pediatrician and father of four (Alan), we have a handle on the research as well as firsthand experience. We choose organic because we know, for example, that children fed an organic diet have much lower levels of metabolites of high-risk insecticides in their bodies. We also know that choosing organic food reduces the risk of exposure to toxic pesticides in our diet. The 2008–09 President’s Panel on Cancer report stated, “The entire U.S. population is exposed on a daily basis to numerous agricultural chemicals.” Many of these chemicals are known or suspected to cause cancer or disrupt our hormones, mimicking testosterone or estrogen, its authors continued. “Nearly 1,400 pesticides ... registered by the Environmental Protection Agency for agricultural and nonagricultural uses ... have been linked to brain/central nervous system, breast, colon, lung, ovarian cancers ... as well as Hodgkin's and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma” and more. The American Academy of Pediatrics has also warned about the exposure to pesticides. “Children encounter pesticides daily and have unique susceptibilities to their potential toxicity," it wrote in 2012, and "chronic health implications from both acute and chronic exposure are emerging.” While we can’t limit all of our children’s exposures to toxins in the environment, we do have a say in the food they eat. And one of the best ways to limit their exposure to these chemicals is to choose an organic diet. Because of the persistence of pesticides in the environment, no food is 100% residue-free, but Chuck Benbrook of the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University has found that organic food has significantly lower pesticide residues than conventional food. Choosing organic meat and dairy for your kids is also the best way to ensure that they’re not exposed to endocrine-disrupting chemicals like the synthetic hormones given to nonorganic livestock to speed growth and alter reproductive cycles. And choosing organic meat and dairy means your children are not fed meat that was raised on daily doses of antibiotics to speed growth, leading to dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Your kids will get more of the good stuff too. A recent study comparing organic and nonorganic dairy production, commissioned by the farming cooperative Organic Valley, found a medically significantly higher concentration of heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids in organic products. “Organic Valley is proving what our farm families have known for a long time,” said George Siemon , a founding co-op member. “Not only is high-quality pasture and forage better for cows, it produces nutritionally superior whole milk." Organic food is a healthy choice for all of us but especially for kids. Infants and children are particularly vulnerable to chemicals, in part because their immune systems are still developing and in part because, pound for pound, they’re exposed to more chemical residues than adults. Another reason is that children and babies tend to eat a lot more of certain foods than adults — think bananas or apples. The developing fetus in the womb is perhaps most vulnerable of all: three studies by scientists at Columbia University , the University of California, Berkeley , and Mount Sinai Hospital tracked women exposed to higher amounts of organophosphate pesticides while pregnant and found that once those children reached elementary-school age, they had IQs averaging several points below those of their peers . We make the choice for organic not just for the health and safety of our own children but also for the health and safety of all children, especially to help protect the children of the people who grow and harvest our food. We know, for instance, that children born to women exposed to pesticides in agricultural fields or communities have lower IQs and other troubling health outcomes. What about that 2012 Stanford study that purportedly found that organic food is no better for you than conventional food? The metastudy — or study of studies — was reported widely in the media to have found little evidence of health benefits from organic foods . While it found that conventional produce is five times more likely than organic to contain pesticide residues, the authors dismissed this conclusion based only on the total number of pesticide residues in food, not their toxicity. Critics of the study stressed that toxicity — the health risk posed by a particular residue — is what matters. According to Benbrook, an assessment of the same data set based on the known toxicity of residues reveals a 94% reduction in health risk from these pesticides among those who eat organic foods . This summer, you can join with families across the country in heading out to farmers' markets or supermarkets and seeking organic food, knowing that when we can and can afford to, organic is one of the best choices we can make for the health of our families.

Originally published by Al Jazeera on 05/27/2014 Mexico is the 'centre of origin' for maize [Reuters] I'd come to Mexico to investigate the ongoing controversy over the proposed introduction of genetically modified (GM) maize into the birthplace of this important global food crop. The issue was hot, because last October a Mexican judge had issued an injunction halting all experimental and commercial planting of GM maize, a process that was well underway in six northern states. The ruling cited the need for precaution to ensure that Mexico's rich diversity of maize varieties were protected from inadvertent "gene flow" from GM maize. (See my earlier article on the injunction.) As I began to investigate this most controversial of biotech initiatives, the question that most puzzled me was: why anyone in Mexico thinks the country needs anything that transgenic maize has to offer? Monsanto, of course, had an answer to that question. I met with a group of company officials in their high-rise offices in Mexico City's transnational business district of Santa Fe. They offered their "Vision 2020", in which transgenic maize is key to feeding the world. In Mexico, they argued, it would help double Mexican maize production, reduce persistent rural poverty among the country's small-scale maize farmers, restore the country's self-sufficiency in its key food staple and reduce the negative environmental impacts of maize farming. They even used the term "food sovereignty" to describe their goal for Mexico. This was more than a vision; this was a hallucination. GM benefits? A recent US Department of Agriculture study of the first 15 years of US experience with transgenic crops concluded that the technology had produced only limited and uneven yield improvements over conventional hybrid varieties of maize. The main benefit, when there was one, came in the reduced need for labour, since insect-resistant transgenic maize reduces pesticide applications and herbicide-tolerant varieties reduce manual weeding by allowing the liberal spraying of entire fields with Monsanto's Round-Up weed-killer. Mexico's rural poverty problem, of course, has everything to do with the lack of jobs, so it was hard to see how labour-saving technology would be a boon to the poor. Monsanto, of course, does not actually have its transgenic sights set on the small-scale farmers who populate Mexico's central and southern regions. Fewer than 30 percent of Mexican farmers even use conventional hybrid maize - high-yielding, single-use seeds, which need to be purchased every year. They prefer to stick with seeds they can save year to year, often varieties of the native "landraces" of maize the injunction is intended to protect. Why would anyone think Mexican farmers would pay even more for transgenic seeds developed for the kind of industrial farms found in Iowa? Or in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, the heart of the country's irrigated maize belt? That question got us past the rose-tinted "Vision 2020". Sinaloa is the market Monsanto wants, along with the other agricultural states of the north. In 2009, the Mexican government approved experimental planting in six northern states, where Monsanto and a handful of other biotech multinationals - DuPont, Dow, and Syngenta, among others - had applied for permits eventually to plant millions of acres of transgenic maize. Monsanto's permits were for Sinaloa. The planting was restricted to the north because these are areas of presumed low densities of native varieties of maize. In recent years, these experimental trials have also been limited to yellow maize, the same varieties grown in the United States and exported to Mexico to feed the growing industrial production of meat and processed foods. Just as the north was considered safer for environmental reasons, yellow maize was less objectionable because the product was not directly consumed by humans. That regulatory distinction is common. Many countries that allow GM imports permit it only for animal feed or processed foods, such as vegetable oil. Health concerns abound regarding the direct consumption of transgenic food. Most recently, tests showed the presence of the herbicide glyphosate , widely used with Monsanto's herbicide-tolerant GM soybean and maize varieties, in samples of mothers' breast milk in the United States. High risks, low rewards Almost no country consumes more maize directly than Mexico - in its rich variety of tortillas, tamales, soups, and other preparations that earned Mexico the distinction as the only country whose cuisine is recognised by UNESCO as the patrimony of humanity . Mexicans have grown accustomed to yellow maize, via imports, but they don't have to eat it. White maize, much of it from Sinaloa and the other northern states, is a different story. I asked Monsanto officials whether their goal was just to open up yellow maize markets in Mexico to transgenics. It made no sense to me. The seed provider already has the Mexican market for yellow maize seeds; 90 percent of US maize is in GM seeds, and that is the source for Mexico's imports of yellow maize. Monsanto's seed market won't get bigger because some of the seeds get planted in Mexico. The response was surprisingly clear. "In order for the penetration of biotechnology crops to be successful, it will have to be for both white and yellow corn," said Jaime Mijares Noriega, the company's Latin America Director for Corporate Affairs. "If it was only yellow, we would not be investing." I was shocked. Why would company officials, in the middle of a lawsuit, state so openly that their goal is to put transgenic maize into Mexican tortillas? And why did they think anyone would buy their controversial seeds? Company representatives presented, in very general form, the poor results from their own field trials. They didn't call them poor, I did. Monsanto's own corporate-funded trials suggested a 10 percent yield advantage over conventional hybrids. That's a small gain for a technology that will be more expensive for farmers. More to the point, though, Monsanto's own data show that Sinaloa's farmers, using non-transgenic varieties, already get yields higher than those on the company's carefully controlled experimental fields. Wouldn't the company have a tough sell in Sinaloa? They nodded. It might take time to win over Mexico's farmers. But why would Mexico, with its rich diversity of this important national and global food crop, want to take such high risks with such low rewards? One of Monsanto's researchers, Dr Juan Manuel Oyervides, had presented a long-view perspective on yield gains in Mexican maize. He chose to highlight his speculative estimate that the government's delay in allowing GM maize had resulted in a "lost decade" of productivity stagnation, sacrificing 12 percent of potential yield improvements worth $9.3bn. That bit of quantitative creativity caught my attention, but it's not what I asked about. Professor Oyervides's graph showed that the fastest yield growth in maize had come in that "lost decade", using conventional hybrid seeds and native maize varieties. One of the main arguments biotechnology companies make for the urgent adoption of their seeds is that yields are stagnating. His data showed the opposite. Doesn't that imply that Mexico has not in fact exhausted the productivity potential of existing technologies? My own study, with Mexican researcher Antonio Turrent , had shown exactly that. "We need complex solutions to complex problems," says Victor Suarez, head of Mexico's largest independent organisation of grain producers. "Transgenics are simplistic. Our problems are not solved with one gene."

Originally published by Global Post on 03/24/2014 International food prices have fallen since 2008, when agricultural commodity prices doubled, pushing millions around the world from bare subsistence to hunger and raising the number of food insecure people to nearly one billion . Is the crisis over, then? Far from it, according to Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. As he told the UN Human Rights Council earlier this month, global policymakers have yet to address the structural causes of the crisis. In particular, they have failed to recognize that industrial agriculture is not the ultimate solution to global hunger — and that it is, instead, part of the problem. In part, De Schutter drew his conclusions from his official mission to Malawi last year. As I toured the country last month , it was easy to see what he saw: the promise and allure of hybrid seeds and synthetic fertilizer, as well as their limits. De Schutter took over as Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food six years ago, as the global food crisis was breaking. His UN mandate is to advance the “progressive realization of the right to food,” and he has been a tireless advocate at a critical juncture for global agricultural and food policy. He will hand over his mandate to an as‐yet‐unnamed successor in April, and he used his final report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to deliver a sweeping assessment of the progress to date and the daunting challenges ahead. His message was upbeat but firm: “The eradication of hunger and malnutrition is an achievable goal. Reaching it requires, however, that we move away from business as usual.” Twentieth century food systems ʹhave failedʹ Unfortunately, most global policy responses to the 2008 food crisis have strayed little from business as usual. They have been too influenced by business — particularly multinational agribusiness — which profits from a food system that is over‐reliant on fossil fuel‐based agricultural inputs. To his credit, during his tenure, De Schutter has been willing to ruffle some corporate feathers while arguing for greater investment in small‐scale farmers who produce food sustainably. In his final report as Special Rapporteur, De Schutter calls for a 21st century approach that replaces last century’s focus on increasing yields with high inputs of improved seed, synthetic fertilizer, and other technologies with one that stresses equity, resilience, and sustainability. ʺThe transition to agri‐food policies that support the realization of the right to food requires major political efforts to restructure support around agro‐ecological, labor‐intensive, poverty‐reducing forms of agriculture,ʺ De Schutter writes in the report. ʺThe food systems we have inherited from the twentieth century have failed.” I encountered the debate over high versus low‐input agriculture everywhere I went in Malawi. Here is a very poor sub‐Saharan African country, landlocked and densely populated, but with a government deeply committed to helping small‐scale farmers grow most of its staple foods, particularly maize. Still, Malawi and its farmers are reliant on imported fertilizer and imported seed technologies that neither small farmers nor the government can afford. Malawi is on a classic high‐input treadmill that keeps the people and their government running, but getting nowhere. The farmers are subsidized by the government to use imported inorganic fertilizers and hybrid seeds from outside companies like Monsanto. Sometimes they get higher yields — but not if they can’t afford extra fertilizer, which the seeds require. If the subsidies run out, the farmers can’t afford the seeds or the fertilizer. Even though food security has improved in the short run with fertilizer‐induced yields — and this is no small achievement in such a food‐insecure country — farmers run hard to stay mostly in place. For Malawi’s government, this treadmill is even more daunting. The country can’t import the expensive fertilizer without adequate foreign currency, which it can only get by exporting more goods. Unlike the United States, most poor countries can only import as much as they can export. The country’s main exports are agricultural goods, mainly tobacco. But tobacco prices fell in 2011, and suddenly Malawi had no dollars to pay for imports. The solution? Import less, including fertilizer, but export more, even though you don’t have the fertilizer to produce more. The reality is unavoidable: Run faster! Unfortunately, this treadmill is only going to pick up speed. Last year, the government committed itself to the G8 countries’ New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition , a private‐sector‐led agricultural development scheme, with hopes of drawing foreign investment for export crops like sugar and African palm. Foreign investors in the New Alliance are promised land and public financing for irrigation, among other things. Irrigation requires foreign currency, not just for the equipment, but also for the imported fuel to run the pumps. Malawi may come out of the New Alliance with more investment and more foreign currency, but only if the projects are successful, only if the investors stay, only if – the conditionals go on. De Schutter has been critical of the New Alliance, arguing that small‐scale farmers are being left out of such arrangements. Africa represents the last continent for industrial agriculture to conquer, he told the Guardian: ʺThereʹs a struggle for land, for investment, for seed systems, and first and foremost thereʹs a struggle for political influence.ʺ Promising alternatives The New Alliance may focus too much on business (as usual), but since 2008 we have seen some promising alternatives to corporate‐led development. One of them will come soon to Malawi. In 2009, international donors launched the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program ( GAFSP ), which pools international donor contributions for agricultural development. Recipient countries and civil‐society representatives help set project priorities. One of the top priorities they’ve set is supporting sustainable smallholder food production, particularly by women, who represent the majority of developing country farmers. So far about $1 billion has come into GAFSP, with strong US support. The Malawian government will soon launch a $46 million GAFSP project to build and rehabilitate irrigation for small‐scale food production. This type of work couldn’t look more different from New Alliance projects. It involves small‐scale farmers, the majority women, in producing not export crops but food. The project promotes food crops like rice, beans, and cassava that enhance diversity in both diets and fields. Diverse crops help rebuild natural soil fertility, reducing the need for imported fertilizers. An explicit aim of the project is to encourage the self‐organization of farmers into cooperatives, a prerequisite for achieving both economies of scale and infrastructure management. When one of the project’s coordinators told me about integrating farmers into “value chains,” he was not talking about those dominated by multinational firms. He was talking about Malawian businesses involved in processing and distributing foods in the domestic market. This is not business as usual. It is the kind of public investment that can sidestep the development treadmills, ensuring that the impressive efforts by Malawian farmers and their government move the country forward. And it is a concrete step toward what the De Schutter calls “food democracy” — a model that focuses more on farmers and their governments and less on business.

Originally published by Global Post on 06/27/2014 KISARAWE, Tanzania — I arrived in Tanzania, one of the frontlines in the battle over land grabs in Africa, just as another round of international negotiations on guidelines for “responsible agricultural investment” (RAI) wrapped up in Rome late last month. The policy document is intended to curb so-called “land grabs” in Africa and other developing countries. Negotiations were not going well. The governments of developed countries were debating every point in the guidelines, which are slated for approval by the UN’s Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in October. They were resisting many of the most basic principles to guarantee the right to food and land for farmers and herders who have seen their land and livelihoods given away to foreign companies and governments. Those distant policy debates seemed urgent as I sat down with villagers from the Kisarawe area of Tanzania, southwest of Dar es Salaam, where 11 villages have given up 20,000 acres of land to the British-owned Sun Biofuels for a large-scale biofuel plantation. The biofuel project has failed, and now the villagers are staring at 5,000 acres of useless jatropha trees surrounded by guards hired to keep villagers off what used to be their land. When the villages agreed to give up the land, they’d been promised compensation for it and, more importantly, more than 1,000 jobs, a variety of community development projects – roads, wells, schools, health clinics – and agricultural investment in local farms. But those security positions were the only jobs the farm was providing. The local village councils and some farmers have gotten a little compensation for the land, but have nothing else to show for it. “We offered the land so the community can benefit,” said Ramazani Jetta, a small-scale farmer from Marumbo village. Under Tanzanian law, the villagers’ deal with Sun Biofuels had converted the title of the property from “village land” to “general land,” putting it under the control of the Tanzanian national government. The government then leased it to Sun Biofuels to produce vegetable oil for the production of biodiesel, to meet the growing demand for renewable fuels in Europe. But the failure of Sun Biofuels’ project does not mean the land will be returned to the villages. Instead, it will stay with the leaseholder while the company and the government look for a new investor to sublease the land and develop it. As long as the company pays the paltry rent on the land and puts it to productive use, it is lost to these regretful villagers. For the full 99 years of this lease. For a community desperate for agricultural investment, and the jobs and higher incomes that investment could bring, this is the worst of possible outcomes. These are poor rural communities that gave up their land because they need jobs, schools, clinics, roads, and higher agricultural productivity from their small farms — none of which they will now see. I was far from the negotiations in Rome, but this was a textbook case of irresponsible agricultural investment — precisely the kinds of practices the RAI is intended to curb. The agricultural price spikes of 2007-2008 fueled a surge in large-scale land acquisitions, particularly in Africa. An estimated 100 million acres of African land have been sold or leased to foreigners in the wake of the food price spikes, according to the Land Matrix Initiative . China got a lot of the initial blame for exploiting the opportunity and buying up land, but the main buyers were US and British companies like Sun Biofuels. The charge of “land-grabbing” seems apt. The deals typically involved 99-year leases for small sums of money on land that was not “unoccupied,” as the local governments had suggested. Thousands of farmers and herders, most with no formal land title and no legal basis to defend their rights, were dispossessed overnight. This is the very problem the UN’s Committee on World Food Security is trying to address with these guidelines on responsible agricultural investment. In Kisarawe, Tanzania, these problems have been all too real. I’d read about the case, which has been well documented by the Oakland Institute and other international researchers and campaigners, before arriving, but it was worse than I realized. It’s bad enough that your community loses 20,000 acres of mostly common forest land to a foreigner for a project of marginal benefit to the local economy. It’s worse when that project fails. The villagers now have nothing. Actually, for a time, they said, they had less than nothing. Sun Biofuels had cut down the forest to plant its biofuel crop. “We used to fetch water, it was close,” explained Salima Nasoro, a brightly clad woman from Muhaga village. “We used clay for handicrafts. We cut poles for construction. We made timber. We got charcoal. We kept bees. We collected traditional medicines.” Now, the land is mostly off-limits. They hadn’t grown much food on that land, but they had depended on the forest the way rural communities often do. With much of the forest gone and the land under guard, they had lost even those benefits — they’d even lost one of their burial grounds. Now all they had was a graveyard of untended jatropha trees. Sun Biofuels was just one of many foreign biofuel ventures that failed because it believed its own propaganda about jatropha. The oilseed plant, native to Africa, has been promoted as the perfect biofuel crop because it is inedible, so it doesn’t divert food into fuel, and grows on marginal lands, so, in theory, it wouldn’t take good land out of food production. Europe was looking for feedstock to meet its renewal-fuel mandates for biofuel use, and jatropha was the new “green gold.” As it turned out, the crop gives marginal returns on marginal lands. Investors, of course, are never looking for marginal returns, so they went after the best agricultural lands. Kisarawe’s land is rich with agricultural potential. Even at the start of the Sun Biofuels project the jatropha took longer to produce than the three years they promised their investors. The company got one small crop before going bust. I’d realized before I took the short 50-mile drive to Kisarawe that the story there was not just the land grab but its aftermath. I contacted Alan Mayers of Sun Biofuels for an interview. He declined, but he sent me to Valerie Fernandes of Mtanga Farms, the Tanzanian company he said had taken over the lease. This was news. No one, least of all the villagers, had heard of Mtanga. I met Fernandes in the company’s Dar es Salaam office. The chief administrator for Mtanga Farms, a Tanzanian-owned cattle operation that has “overlapping shareholders” with Sun Biofuels, had been involved in Sun Biofuels for some time. She said they planned to keep farming the 5,000 acres of jatropha and they would bring 1,200 head of cattle to Kisarawe for the beef operation. I asked her why Mtanga would keep farming a biofuels crop that she called “a failure.” She had no answer. She said the company was presenting a new proposal to the Kisarawe District Council — the local government — for approval. I asked about Mtanga’s obligations to fulfill some of the commitments made by Sun Biofuels, the very promises of development that had convinced the villagers to give up the land. She was adamant: Sun Biofuels made those commitments, not Mtanga. The project failed because jatropha was a failure. Sun Biofuels had paid its compensation, that’s all they owed, and Mtanga did not have any obligations to the villagers even to discuss the company’s plans for the land. This arrangement was starting to look a whole lot like a land grab: a foreign investor making empty promises to villagers to secure access to the land – for 99 years – then flipping the land to another investor once the lease is secured. In fact, the Oakland Institute recently documented a similar case in Sierra Leone . But Fernandes didn’t care. The next day in Kisarawe I told the villagers that I’d met with her, and Mtanga now had the lease and planned to produce livestock, and that it does not intend to negotiate new commitments for development — conditions the Tanzanian government insists on when it negotiates a new land deal. “It’s a waste, and it’s not what we agreed to,” said Halima Ali, one of the Muhaga village members. “We need discussion. We need new commitments,” said Salima Nasoro of Sun Biofuels’ unfulfilled promises. “If they can’t fulfill the conditions, they should leave the land.” The task force members said they do not believe Mtanga will develop the land.“They are just saying things to keep the land,” said task force chair Ibrahim Muhat. “That is their tactic.” I sent Fernandes an email communicating the villagers’ desire to meet with Mtanga to discuss the company’s plans. “With all due respect,” she replied in a terse email message, “surely the villagers do not expect to be consulted on the plans for a farm that belongs to Sun Biofuels? I agree the villages surround the land but do they contribute to the upkeep of the land that they expect to be consulted? “The leasee (sic) has no obligations whatsoever to the memorandum of understanding signed by [Sun Biofuels] and [Kisarawe District Council]. The villagers have been paid for the sale of their land, that’s their compensation.” My last day in Tanzania I met with David Mushendwa, a Senior Land Officer and lawyer in the Land Ministry. Was it true, I asked, that Mtanga has no obligations under Tanzanian law to fulfill any of the non-financial commitments made by Sun Biofuels to secure the land? He offered his personal opinion that Mtanga should negotiate, but confirmed, “The village has no control after the land is transferred to general land. In practice, all they are entitled to is compensation.” It has become clear that companies can make whatever false promises they need to make to secure land, knowing that once they get the land they can renege on the promises. Tanzanian Land Minister Anna Tibaijuka has called actions like these “equivalent to Ponzi Schemes.” Still, government representatives in Rome are actively resisting any effort to include land rights in the guidelines for responsible agricultural investment. Without them, foreign agricultural investment in Africa is likely to remain as irresponsible as it is in Kisarawe.

Originally published by Global Post on 02/06/2014 ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — The African Union commemorated the 10‐year anniversary of the Maputo Declaration on agricultural development with the launch of the “Year of Agriculture and Food Security” last week at its summit in Addis Ababa. Around the summit, following discussions of the political and humanitarian crises in South Sudan and the Central African Republic, I heard the talk turn to agriculture. And African governments certainly have a lot to talk about. Since Maputo, which mandated that African governments commit to spending at least 10 percent of their budgets on agriculture by 2015, 20 nations have pledged to do so under the rubric of the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program (CAADP). Agricultural spending has doubled across the continent, a notable achievement that has shown solid results in increased food production and economic growth for those countries that have fully invested in the sector. But there is a long way to go. According to a new report from the nonprofit ActionAid, most governments are not “walking the talk” – they are failing to live up to their CAADP commitments. ActionAid found that only seven governments have consistently met the Maputo mandate – Ethiopia, Niger, Mali, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Senegal, and Guinea. The average agricultural budget allocation for the region is just 5 percent. And much of the spending fails to meet the needs of the continent’s overwhelmingly small farms or the female majority who do most of the work. A significant part of the problem is that women lack equal access to land, credit, and the limited training and support currently provided by governments. According to the United Nations, studies have shown that equal access could boost their yields 25 to 30 percent, and on a global scale, it could raise food output between 2.5 and 4 percent while reducing the number of hungry by 12 to 17 percent. The ActionAid report also found that most public investment in the seven countries meeting their Maputo commitment goes for the provision of chemical inputs rather than cheaper and more climate‐ resilient support for agro‐ecological farming methods, such as intercropping and crop rotation. These farming methods can boost smallholder productivity while reducing dependence on imported fertilizers and other agro‐chemicals. One study cited in the report of nearly 300 different projects found yield increases of 79 percent from sustainable practices. Unfortunately, the tone at the AU summit sometimes echoed the agribusiness‐led New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, initiated by the G8 club of wealthy nations in 2012, and less so the voices of African farmers themselves. The business model for African agriculture comes partly out of necessity. On average, governments have been able to fund only about 20 percent of their CAADP budgets out of revenues. Blame it on weak tax collection. Blame it on foreign debt. Blame it on corruption. But underlying all of those are relatively weak economies with limited access to foreign exchange. As a result, African countries are desperate for foreign investment. Even some of CAADP’s success stories seem fragile. Malawi has earned wide acclaim for its commitment to growing more of its own food, spending roughly 20 percent of its government budget on agricultural development. Its fertilizer subsidy program flew in the face of World Bank recommendations, but it delivered the food, or at least the maize. Malawi produced so much of the crop that it even exported it, just years after suffering famines over much of the country. Now the country is facing enormous challenges. Tobacco sales, which accounted for at least half of all export earnings, collapsed in part due to decreased international demand. The foreign exchange crisis led to an International Monetary Fund rescue plan, which came with all the usual stringent conditions. As a result, the currency was floated on the open market, and ceilings were removed from fuel and electricity prices. Those have more than doubled in the last year, raising the prices for nearly everything in this landlocked country. Of particular concern are food prices. Maize prices doubled, despite a decent harvest last year. This was partly the result of the currency devaluation, even though Malawi does not import maize. The country does import fertilizer, which jumped in price in domestic currencies. Meanwhile, there is less money to spend. A massive corruption scandal involving the diversion of funds in the input subsidy program – known locally as “ Cashgate ” – has prompted the suspension of international donor support, which accounts for as much as 40 percent of government revenues. Under such conditions it is easy to understand why Malawi would sign on to the industry‐backed New Alliance package last year. But the New Alliance’s priorities are not always consistent with the agricultural development frameworks many countries such as Malawi have devised. They also come with an exacting set of policy conditions related mostly to improving the “investment climate” in the country and opening up good lands to industrial agriculture. The AU summit ended January 31 with an historic commitment to end hunger on the continent by 2025, as part of UN Secretary General Ban Ki‐Moon’s “Zero Hunger Challenge.” To reach that goal, African leaders need to make this the first of many years of agriculture and food security. Small‐scale farmers, many of them as hungry for change as they are for food, need investments in their food‐producing capacity, and governments – in Africa and in the donor community – need to take the lead to make it happen, not hope for the private sector to lead the way. Madam Elizabeth, a smallholder farmer and member of the Eastern African Farmers Federation, spoke to delegates on a panel during the summit on the theme, “From Rhetoric to Action: Towards a Transformed Agriculture.” She called on Africa’s leaders to invest in smallholder farmers. “We have the potential to feed the world when we are given the necessary support.”

Agribusiness led the charge, with dire warnings about unsustainable population growth and looming resource constraints. How can we produce enough food to feed this growing population? “Between now and 2050, we need to double the food supply,” said Dr. Robert Fraley, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Monsanto, during an interview with National Public Radio’s Takeaway host John Hockenberry. “That's probably the greatest challenge facing mankind.” Indeed, that is the theme of this year’s World Food Prize event, taking place October 15-17 in Des Moines, Iowa. This event promises more of the same solutions. The panic is not warranted, the claims about the need to double food production are unfounded. According to ActionAid’s report, “Rising to the Challenge: Changing Course to Feed the World in 2050,” the solutions lie not in the rush to increase industrial food production but in supporting sustainable and productive farming practices among small-scale farmers – particularly women – in developing countries while halting the diversion of food to biofuels and reducing the obscene levels of waste and spoilage that keep one-third of the world’s food from nourishing anyone. Sowing the seeds of panic As the ActionAid report shows, reliable international projections from the United Nationssuggest the need to increase global agricultural production – not food production – by 60 percent, not 100 percent, to feed a population of 9.3 billion by 2050. What’s more, they estimate that, with important caveats, we are on track to do just that. Yield improvements, land use changes, and new investment should get us there, based on current trends. For companies like Monsanto that sell agricultural inputs, producing more is indeed the solution to just about everything; after all, that lets them sell more seeds and chemicals. It is not surprising that Monsanto and other agribusiness firms might overstate the situation. But if we can put aside the panic, maybe we can talk about our real problems, and they have everything to do with policymakers’ fixation on throwing more high-yield industrial agriculture at the hunger problem. Why? The hungry are not hungry because the world lacks food. We grow enough food right nowto feed about 10 billion people, yet according to the U.N. nearly one billion of today’s seven billion people are chronically undernourished and well over one billion suffer from significant malnutrition, in a world of plenty. They are hungry because they are poor, and they are poor because they are (by and large) either small-scale farmers without enough land, credit, extension services, or investment, or they are underemployed workers with incomes too low to support their families. Increasing the global supply of agricultural commodities might bring food prices down for a while, but it won’t feed the hungry. What will? Public investment in sustainable small-scale food production in developing countries. Seventy percent of the hungry live in rural areas and rely primarily on agriculture for their livelihoods. A U.N. report confirmed the consensus that the best area to invest in agriculture is small-scale farming, where the “yield gaps” are the largest and where hunger in the most prevalent. Yet policymakers and multinational firms continue to promote large-scale industrial agricultural projects – some denounced as “land grabs” – such as those encouraged by the G8 countries’ New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. The U.N. Committee on World Food Security (CFS) meets in Rome this week to approve guidelines for responsible agricultural investment that can limit the most damaging impacts. Many displace small-scale farmers without their consent to grow export crops that offer few jobs and contribute nothing to local food security. Such codes of conduct might stop the worst abuses, but they won’t bring the change in direction that we need, toward public investment in small-scale farmers using low-input, agroecological practices. This is consistent with the findings of an unprecedented 2009 multi-agency report that called for an end to “business as usual” policies. Changing course There is no question that we need to continue to invest in appropriate technologies to enhance productivity, reduce environmental damage (including greenhouse gas emissions), and adapt to climate change. Public investment is crucial, and it has grown in the wake of the 2008 price spikes. So is private investment, which has responded to those high prices with a surge in investment that has driven prices below pre-crisis levels. But if we’re going to achieve the goal of zero hunger, we have to change course. In addition to investing in climateresilient small-scale agriculture, particularly with women farmers, we must: Stop diverting so much of our food and feed to biofuel production, which the National Academy of Sciences estimated was responsible for 20-40 percent of the 2008 price spikes. FAO’s food projections do a poor job of incorporating biofuels into their estimates, and biofuels are one of the leading non-food uses of agricultural land. According to the International Energy Agency, crop-based biofuels demand will grow 150 percent by 2035 if we don’t change our policies. Government consumption mandates, such as the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard, must be scaled back, an action that can do far more to keep food prices in check than investing in expanded agricultural commodity production. Reduce food waste and spoilage, which squanders one-third of all food grown in the world today. In the U.S., most of that waste is at the retail and consumer levels. In developing countries, it comes from poor storage, transportation, and infrastructure, the very things that should be the focus of public investment. The CFS in Rome this week will be making recommendations based on a detailed U.N. report on the issue. Following them would do more to increase food availability, particularly for the hungry, than expanding commodity crop production. It is time to stop the Malthusian fear-mongering. We can feed the world in 2050 if we change course and if we stop focusing only on producing more agricultural commodities. That has never solved the hunger problem. Instead, let’s increase the availability of land and food by reducing biofuel production, get more of the food we grow to the dinner table by reducing food waste, and invest in the most important food producers in the world: small-scale and family farmers. The 2008 global food price spikes were a wake-up call to global policymakers, shaking them from the lethargic slumber of the overfed. The rhetorical responses were swift, butpolicies and practices have changed little. That is in part because they relied on the tried-and-failed solution of increasing commodity food production. Originally published by Christian Science Monitor on 10/26/2014

Originally published by Global Post on 01/31/2014 GENEVA — The world’s elites gathered in Davos, Switzerland last week for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF), paying $20,000 a person for the privilege of offering grand solutions to other people’s problems. I was down the road in Geneva attending a decidedly low‐brow, two‐day expert workshop on agricultural trade and development. But downwind we could almost smell their champagne fondue, which no doubt helped the powers‐that‐be focus on the global food crisis. WEF’s “ New Vision for Agriculture ” is their answer, which, along with the G8 nations’ “ New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition ,” represent the bold new initiatives from the rich world to solve poor people’s hunger. For all the newness, the world’s small‐scale farmers can be forgiven for seeing little more than new bottles for some old wine, which they still can’t afford. The old wine includes an overwhelming focus on technological solutions, industrial‐scale farms, and high‐input methods often poorly suited to small‐scale farmers. The new bottles, though, look sharp. The labels show happy African farmers in lush fields, and they feature all the right catch‐phrases: “sustainable agriculture,” “climate‐smart production,” and of course “meeting the world’s food needs.” They look like they came out of a corporate branding campaign. Basically, they did. The one new thing in this new wave of attention to agricultural development is the explicit leadership of “the private sector,” which at the international level generally looks like a who’s who of the top agribusiness multinationals. The G8 led an impressive effort in 2009 following the spikes in food prices to marshal rich country funds to support developing country food production. That has since given to a drop in public funding, a narrowing of geographic ambition, and a heavy reliance on corporate leadership and investment. This year, Vietnamese leaders led the cheers for the WEF’s New Vision, supporting the role of “public‐ private partnerships” (PPPs) in “integrating value chains” and promoting development. Vietnam , with its strong developmental state and highly productive smallholder rice farms, can afford to bring in international corporate partners. After all, the government has already transformed its war‐ravaged land into a highly productive, smallholder‐based rice exporter. The government is in a relatively strong position to negotiate with transnational firms. Unfortunately, most African governments come to the PPP negotiating table hat‐in‐hand. Only about 20 percent of their agricultural investment plans are covered by government funds. That’s where the G8’s New Alliance comes in, dangling foreign investment in front of cash‐strapped African governments. There is no doubt that they need the investment. In many countries there is little private capital, nor the expertise manage to complex projects. Infrastructure is poorly developed, particularly in the areas of transportation — key to both domestic and international trade — and irrigation, central to raising agricultural productivity. Such investments, though, have rarely come from the private sector. They are seen as public goods, in part because they are long‐term investments with potentially a wide range of beneficiaries. And if the “public” part of the partnerships is to provide such investments, they will need international donor support to succeed. The other challenge for the New Alliance is aligning its private funding with countries’ national development priorities. Multinational agribusiness firms are generally looking either to expand their markets — think Monsanto with its seeds and agro‐chemicals — or to find new, inexpensive sources for their export operations — think mining companies or garment factories. If an African government’s main priority is increasing the productivity of its domestic staple food producers, to improve the lives of the farmers and ensure the country’s food security in a world of volatile prices, it is less clear why private capital would be interested. Mostly, they’re not. In Davos, Dupont CEO Ellen Kullman spoke on a New Alliance panel chaired by USAID head Rajiv Shah on Jan. 23. Citing Dupont’s expertise “up and down the value chain,” the chemical executive hit all the right chords about feeding Africa’s growing population by helping “accelerate progress locally.” According to Kullman, ʺThis will enable such things as affordability to import food, improve trade policy, better enable the free flow of food, build agricultural food systems and value chains, develop new ways to improve shelf life as well as the freshness and variety of foods available, and provide nutrition education to encourage healthy eating as incomes rise.ʺ Look closely. All of these concrete steps bypass small‐scale farmers. Instead, they increase imports, make those imports cheaper, put those foods into value chains dominated by multinational firms, and provide fresher foods to middle class urban consumers, whom they can encourage to eat the firms’ “healthier” processed foods. For small‐scale farmers trying to improve their production of staples, there’s no new wine in that pretty bottle. In fact, the bottle may contain nothing more than a concentrated dose of Dupont’s agricultural chemicals. Or a high‐protein drink handout to make up for another poor harvest. If the corporate partners in the New Alliance want to contribute to enhancing food security in Africa, they will need to show they are willing to be true partners with national governments, respecting their development priorities and making long‐term commitments that do more than open markets for the firms’ goods.

Originally published by Business World on 01/07/2014 In the courtyard of the bali International Convention Centre, just outside the hall where World Trade Organization (WTO) delegates were negotiating a modest, if controversial, agreement, someone had erected a small impromptu shrine, replete with flower petals and other offerings. The memorial was for Lee Kyung Hae, the Korean farmer who, ten years earlier, had scaled the barricades keeping the masses from WTO negotiators in Cancún, Mexico. He pronounced the simple indictment that “WTO kills farmers,” then took his own life. With a reported quarter-million farmer suicides since 1990, Indian negotiators may well have had Lee Kyung Hae on their minds as they arrived in Bali, Indonesia for the WTO’s ninth ministerial. The country’s National Food Security Act was under threat from the WTO’s arcane rules, and Indian negotiators came to fight. So did India’s Right to Food Campaign, which sent two representatives to object to the intrusion of the global trade body in India’s domestic policy-making. The act was the result of a decade of organising and lobbying. How could a distant trade body undermine its simple principles of paying hungry farmers a decent price for their grains and distributing it to India’s millions of hungry? In a last-hour settlement in the early morning hours of 7 Dec., negotiators reached a compromise, granting India and other developing countries with such programmes a four-year “Peace Clause” which ensured they could not be sued under WTO subsidy rules for their existing programmes. The Right to Food Campaign objected, but the agreement allowed the WTO to salvage a modest agreement in the stalled Doha Round of negotiations on food security, trade facilitation, and specific measures for Least Developed Countries. It is likely the agreement will change very little on the ground, but it puts India’s food security programme front and center as WTO negotiations heat up in the next four years. Also on the table is the larger Agreement on Agriculture, which produced the controversies over rich country subsidies and poor country flexibilities that have repeatedly stalled Doha negotiations since 2003. Indian negotiators had every right to come to Bali with a chip on their shoulders. Their painfully reasonable proposals had been largely ignored since 2008, and now the United States and a few other countries were objecting to a joint proposal from the Group of 33, led by India but including other agricultural countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia. The proposal called for programmes such as India’s, which subsidise farmers through administered prices slightly higher than prevailing market prices, to be exempt from WTO disciplines because they feed the hungry and do not distort trade. Thus, they should be included in the so-called Green Box of permissible farm subsidies. It was not lost on delegates that the country objecting to this proposal now has a remarkable $120 billion of its annual $130 billion farm and food subsidy bill protected in the Green Box. The vast majority is for food programmes for the poor in the United States, but some is for farm subsidies to corn, wheat, soybean, and rice farmers. How could U.S. delegates call India’s programme, which distributes food within India, trade-distorting when their own Green Box subsidies go to crops that are heavily exported? Nor was it lost on the Indian delegation that the foundations of U.S. farm policy coming out of the Great Depression in the 1930s used precisely the measures India is now pursuing: supported farm prices, public stock holding, managed domestic markets, and public support for food purchases. As I noted in a talk I gave in Bali, we in the United States used such measures because they work. In fact, the U.S. was trying to catch India in a WTO technicality. Under archaic WTO rules, written by the U.S. and the E.U. to protect their farm subsidies, supported prices are considered a subsidy if they pay above market prices. India did not object to this. What they objected to was the bizarre rule that instead of comparing purchase prices to current market prices they would be compared to an antiquated “international reference price” set by the Agreement on Agriculture to be the average international price from 1986-88. Such a calculation makes any administered price today seem like a massive subsidy. Because of that artificially low price, a barely above-market price of Rs 1,250 per tonne for rice would look like a Rs 986 subsidy when compared to the outdated Rs 264/tonne reference price. The actual subsidy was barely above market prices. India’s initial proposal had been, quite simply, to update the reference price for inflation. The U.S. and other developed countries refused. And the battle of Bali was on. Indian negotiators, under pressure from home to defend a popular programme, with elections looming, were strong despite the intense pressure to accept a four-year Peace Clause with no promise of resolving the issue. Lead negotiator Anand Sharma, Minister of Commerce and Industry, was defiant in a 5 Dec. press conference. “The right to food security is non-negotiable.” India and its allies succeeded in preventing the U.S. and other rich countries from declaring India’s food security programme in violation of WTO rules, agreeing to a Peace Clause for existing programmes with a firm commitment to resolve the issue within four years. This was certainly a setback for the rich countries. That said, the draft decision in no way gives the green light for such programmes. Those countries that don’t have programmes now would not be protected by the “Peace Clause.” And onerous reporting requirements create a “guilty until proven innocent” situation by putting the onus on the developing country to prove that its stock-holding programme is not “trade distorting.” Indian activists worry that the government will use the agreement as an excuse not to expand the food security programme to pulses and other crops not currently supported. Meanwhile, the US and EU are in no way obligated to make good on the commitment they made in Hong Kong eight years ago to eliminate export credits and subsidies, the most trade-distorting government intervention of them all. The text calls on them to make their best endeavor at reductions, with no targets or commitments. The right to food won an important defensive battle in the larger war for a global trading system worthy of the lofty development ideals of the Doha Round. The next battles will come in the short four years that WTO members have committed to resolve this issue for good. The hope is that all this attention to farm subsidies will put the issue front and center in negotiations to come. “Public stock-holding is just the tip of the subsidies iceberg,” said Martin Khor of the Geneva-based South Centre. “Hopefully we can reveal the rest of the iceberg now and try to fix it.” Anuradha Talwar of India’s Right to Food Campaign seemed exhausted by the WTO meddling in India’s policy-making. “The agreement on the table today is going to make it even more difficult to achieve food security for our people,” she sighed. “And it was hard enough already.”

Originally published by Global Post on 01/02/2014 Employee Angel Rodriguez checks the beer during the bottling process in the Cervecería Calavera, on July 20, 2012, in Tlanepantla, Mexico State. Producers of handcrafted beer are making their way in Mexico following the emergence of new breweries in crowded neighborhoods of the capital and as large emporiums producing traditional brands like Corona stopped being Mexican-owned. Credit: Ronaldo Schemidt Mexico’s largest agribusiness association invited me to Aguascalientes to participate in its annual forum in October. The theme for this year’s gathering was “New Perspectives on the Challenge of Feeding the World.” But it was unclear why Mexico, which now imports 42 percent of its food, would be worried about feeding the world. It wasn’t doing so well feeding its own people. In part, you can thank the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for that. Twenty years ago, on January 1, 1994, NAFTA took effect, and Mexico was the poster child for the wonders of free trade. The promises seemed endless. Mexico would enter the “First World” of developed countries on the crest of rising trade and foreign investment. Its dynamic manufacturing sector would create so many jobs it would not only end the US immigration problem but absorb millions of peasant farmers freed from their unproductive toil in the fields. Mexico could import cheap corn and export electronics. So much for promises. NAFTA produced a devastating one-two punch. For the first 10 years, the flood of US exports of corn, wheat, meat and other staples drove Mexican producer prices well below the costs of production. Mexico’s three million small-scale corn farmers saw prices for their crops fall 66 percent, largely because the United States increased corn exports by 400 percent, exporting at prices 19 percent below even US farmers’ costs of production. (See my earlier study .) Call it the Age of Agricultural Dumping. Soybeans, wheat, cotton and rice saw similar export surges under NAFTA, with similar drops in producer prices. Mexico’s agricultural exports to the United States increased as well, but it takes a lot of tomatoes and strawberries to make up for the surge in staple-food imports. By the mid-2000s, Mexico was importing 42 percent of its food, mostly from the United States. Corn import dependence had grown from 8 percent before NAFTA to 32 percent. Mexico was importing nearly 60 percent of its wheat where before it had imported less than 20 percent. Import dependence was more than 70 percent for soybeans, rice and cotton. Then came the sucker punch. In 2007, international prices for many staple crops doubled or tripled, and so did the cost of importing them. Countries like Mexico that had gotten hooked on cheap imports paid a heavy price. Call it the Age of Dependency. US policies had as much to do with these high and volatile prices as they had with the Age of Dumping. Now, instead of price-depressing surpluses caused by US agricultural policies, US subsidies and incentives were diverting 40 percent of US corn — 15 percent of the global supply — into ethanol production. This drove up the price of corn, but also prices for related crops, like soybeans and wheat, and the livestock products that had relied for so long on cheap feed. Compounding the price volatility, US deregulation of financial markets in the early 2000s had brought agricultural commodity markets into the global casino. Financial speculators, fleeing the collapsing US housing and stock markets in 2007, went “all in” on commodities, driving prices to disruptive highs, then lows, then highs again. This was devastating for countries dependent on imported food. The world’s Least Developed Countries, which had exported more than they imported in the early 1980s, saw their food import bills skyrocket to more than $25 billion, driving their collective agricultural trade deficit to more than $19 billion. (See my earlier report .) Mexico’s agricultural imports topped $20 billion following the price spikes, with its agricultural trade deficit jumping to more than $4 billion. Corn imports accounted for more than half the bill. And most telling: twenty years into NAFTA, 55 million Mexicans — about half the population — are estimated to be in poverty, many without secure access to food. The night before my talk in Aguascalientes, in which I would gently call attention to the high cost of Mexico’s failed cheap-food experiment under NAFTA, I ended up at a lush cocktail reception talking to the US Embassy’s agricultural attaché. I must have said something about Mexico’s agricultural trade deficit, and he immediately took offense. “This year,” he proclaimed, “Mexico may actually run a surplus.” I knew better; I’d seen this statistical sleight-of-hand many times. “Do you mean the ‘agri-food’ trade balance?” I asked. He nodded. “The one that has beer as one of Mexico’s biggest agricultural exports?” He nodded again, and not sheepishly. Beer has undoubtedly been a NAFTA success story for Mexico. “Beer is a product of agriculture,” he said, with conviction. I took a sip of my margarita. “Don’t you think including beer distorts how Mexican agriculture is really doing under NAFTA?” I asked. Not at all, he replied, the beer sector is a perfect example of the kind of integration NAFTA can achieve. “Look, Mexico’s even importing the barley malt from us to make its beer!” I said. I took another sip. “So Mexico’s agricultural contribution to its beer exports is … what?” I asked. Nervous laughter. Here is a case where NAFTA has gotten the United States to open its market to something of value that Mexico can export, and Mexico can’t even capture the value from it. The industry’s growth benefits US barley growers and US malt makers. Mexico can’t even import the barley and make the malt themselves. So the country is basically a maquiladora for beer bottling. I guess Mexico contributes the water. Which it doesn’t have enough of. This has been Mexico under NAFTA in a nutshell. Giving away everything of value, then deluding yourself that your farm sector is doing fine because your Corona beer, bottled from US ingredients, is a big hit in the States. Meanwhile, hungry corn farmers wait for their government to invest in producing more of its own food.

Okay, I didn’t wear a hidden mic. (Did they have those in ‘67?) I didn’t don gloves to mask my fingerprints that hot summer in Philly. But, I was truly an infiltrator, a provocateur-for-progress in t he War on Poverty declared 50 years ago this month. Photo: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Poverty Bill, August 20, 1964 Here’s how it happened and what I learned. After a stint in a Quaker-run organizing school in Chester, PA, where training included speaking against the Vietnam War on (literally) soap boxes in Rittenhouse Square and watching FBI agents snap our photos, it was increasingly clear to me: Ending the war was not enough, something was deeply wrong here at home. Tom Hayden, Students for a Democratic Society , the Port Huron statement — they all made perfect sense to me. We knew what we had to do, and I was ready: Go door-to-door and empower ourselves and our neighbors, especially those hurting most in our destructive system. Paying my rent by temping as a “Kelly Girl,” I set out to try to enlist in this war for a better America. But how? And with whom? I’d heard of a brand new front in the War on Poverty, the Neighborhood Renewal Program run by the Philadelphia Housing Authority. Its goal was tackling the deplorable housing conditions in Philly’s poor communities. Housing inspectors were instructed to get tough on negligent landlords, and aid was offered to help renters buy their row houses in the rundown section of Germantown where I lived. But there was more to the strategy. Some in the Housing Authority shared wholeheartedly the Great Society credo of “maximum feasible participation,” in which dignity and self-assertion were as important as any brick and mortar undertaking. And that’s the door that opened. It turned out that in addition to hiring actual housing inspectors, some gutsy folks launching the Neighborhood Renewal Program also began hiring organizers. They were hush-hush about it, but my bosses made clear: Pass the test to get on the payroll as an inspector but hit the streets as an organizer. In ending poverty, it’s not enough to have dwellings in better repair if their inhabitants feel defeated. So just as critical as holding landlords to account was, in their view, going door-to-door to help spark what we’d now call self-organized initiatives. Coming together, poor people will find their voices and push for their rights, thereby helping, much more broadly, to right our broken system. So, to pass my housing inspector test, I got coached: “When a landlord offers you a pen, do you accept it?” Correct answer: “No.” I accept nothing, ever, from a landlord. Okay, got that. The rest I pretty much had to figure out on my own. I’d heard about the Welfare Rights Organization that took off nationally the year before. My direct supervisors encouraged me to start knocking on doors in the depressed, almost-all-Black area in the heart of Germantown. I’d tell the women I met about this organization and their rights as tenants and, in most cases, welfare recipients. I’d make the case that together they could at least get the help Americans are entitled to under the law. I was 23 and white — with a southern accent, even. I was nervous. But I soon found that door after door opened, and I was welcomed in. Friendships blossomed. In the heart of Germantown, my new allies and I met in a community center and learned about welfare law and our rights — and we planned our actions. A main tactic was to demand a “Fair Hearing” before welfare department officials at which a welfare recipient could make her case. We also organized an action against the Salvation Army. The women I worked alongside were deeply offended that, because their welfare checks were too meager even to clothe their kids, they had to turn to the Salvation Army; before any help was forthcoming, they had to sit through intrusive grilling on their moral rectitude. That had to stop, we demanded. Ours was a rally for dignity. Back in the office I shared with real inspectors, I was always ill at ease. I assumed they whispered about me: “Just what does that girl do?” I even wondered if after hours they rifled through my trash. Soon enough, women were interested, and we created a real welfare rights chapter: the Northwest Philadelphia Welfare Rights Organization. In my City of Philadelphia car, I transported our members to and from city-wide meetings of the organization. I felt connected to the dozen or so of us who met regularly to share our job search and childcare struggles and to strategize together. But I did have my favorite — Lilly. Her spunky spirit really lit me up. I knew she struggled so hard to keep her kids fed, clothed and warm. Paying coal bills was especially tough. Lilly was in her 40s. Then one day I got the call. Lilly had just died of a heart attack. “Would you and Marc [Lappé] come to the funeral and wake?” “Of course,” I said. I couldn’t believe we’d lost Lilly. Part of a funeral in a Black community for the first time, I was so relieved to find I could cry openly, and at the wake I could hug and be hugged all I needed. But Lilly’s death hit me hard. I knew in my heart that Lilly had not died of a heart attack. She had died of the stress of poverty. That truth stayed with me, and the following year I began graduate school in Community Organizing at UC Berkeley (in a program that no longer exists). Then came the moment — the “Lilly’s truth moment.” Working on “fair housing” in racially segregated Oakland as part of my grad program, one morning I woke up with this thought: I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do anything to “save the world” until I understand how it contributes to uprooting the causes of Lilly’s needless death. So, starting with Diet for a Small Planet , I’ve spent decades pursuing that root-cause question, and, thank God, I have come to grasp how, within a systemic vision, bottom-up organizing is truly central to transformative democratic change. What’s heart breaking to admit, though, especially in this anniversary year, is that as a society we lost our way. The War on Poverty helped cut the poverty rate from about 21 percent to just over 11 percent between the early ‘60s and early ‘70s. But today, we’re back to roughly the rate of the early years of the War on Poverty. Imagine if over the last half century we’d kept going... if we’d raised the minimum wage instead of letting its value sink, if we’d protected labor rights, if we’d made taxes fair as we prioritized full employment, stellar public schools and affordable higher education — and if in the process we’d cleansed our politics of corporate dominance. Imagine. In this moment, though, I just hope that in reliving how Lilly’s needless death forced me to dig deeper I’ll rekindle my own belief in possibility: the possibility that today’s staggering inequality - with 95 percent of all income gains since 2009 going to the top one percent — could trigger a rebirth in America of a sustained quest for root-cause solutions with everyday citizens in center stage, a possibility just as unimaginable by most people today as was the War on Poverty before January, 1964. Originally published by the Huffington Post on January 14, 2014