New Directions - Benbrook

Clarity regarding goals, and a sharp, relatively narrow focus is needed for the organic and sustainable agriculture community to achieve appreciable success in changing the direction of changes in the policy arena impacting the production, processing, and marketing of organic and sustainably grown food.

The policy arena is competitive, crowded, and resistant to change. We are entering a constrained budget climate because of recent federal fiscal policies and the high costs of war. Those agricultural commodity groups and interests with a piece of the current USDA-fiscal pie will be doing everything they can to hold onto as much of their current money as possible. Fitting new programs and new policy goals into the mix is going to be exceptionally difficult for the foreseeable future.

While it is useful to think through what a model, pro-organic, pro-sustainable agriculture twelve-title farm bill might look like, our community can muster the intellectual and political capital to seriously engage a limited number of issues within two or three titles. By “seriously engage,” I mean convene, nurture and feed a coalition of groups committed to, and capable of achieving a concrete and meaningful set of changes in current federal law and/or budget priorities. I am not talking about getting a 10% increase in SARE funding; but rather, a major increase in organic research funding, or a significant change in USDA payment limitations policy, or major increase in support for farmers markets, or a change in policy regarding the nutritional quality of organic food.

Two areas seem ripe for major changes in the next farm bill -- the basis of delivering food aid and getting organic and local food into the School Lunch program. Today, the USDA provides food aid in the form of surplus corn, soybeans, wheat, dried milk, butter, etc, as opposed to providing cash to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Oxfam, the International Red Cross, and various religious charities. All European nations now give cash to accredited NGOs because this builds demand for food in periodically food insecure parts of the world, thereby helping address long-term needs to invest in the rural sector and agricultural infrastructure. Providing food aid in the form of surplus commodities – and lots of it when surpluses are high – undermines local farmers in food insecure nations and is more about helping farmers in the U.S. than those facing acute or chronic food shortages. This is a hot topic and will be a major area of debate and perhaps change in the next farm bill cycle.

For reasons many people at EcoFarm have highlighted over the last few years, the School Lunch Program is also an appropriate target for federal policy reform, if and as the many groups working for change at the local level can find ways to join forces and seek more systemic change. The nation faces a number of diet-driven health crises, and virtually every expert and scientific advisory body that has assessed these problems concludes that the most critical point of intervention is when children are young and still forming life-long eating habits.

There is an ongoing, and indeed expanding infusion of new people, fresh talent, new energy, technology, and investment capital into the world of organic food. Without a doubt, we are growing more diverse as we grow in numbers. This is good and a source of great new power to move the marketplace and change agriculture, but it also makes it more complicated for our expanding community to reach consensus and clarity regarding policy priorities and goals. We are kidding ourselves if we think the “movement” can go in “new directions” without going through the organic, democratic process of building a collective understanding of what those directions should be and how to change the trajectory of change in the organic and sustainable food businesses and marketplace.

In addition, as our community grows and becomes more diverse and more potentially powerful in the political arena, we will have to create new organizations and institutions that will drive the process of reaching consensus on new priorities and directions and staying true to the core principles of organic farming. New organizations are also needed to help create broad, strong, and focused coalitions and to manufacture the glue that will help keep new coalitions together. We have to accept that the faithful that come every year to EcoFarm are but a small part of the genome that will shape the future of organic.

As companies in the organic food business grow larger and more influential in the policy arena, the community will have to invent comparably powerful self-governing entities to assure that two things remain core competencies of our movement:

• Continual improvement in the science and art of organic food production and processing, and in addressing the fairness and equity issues that loom so large today; and
• Adherence to organic rules and regulations, as well as community norms in the treatment of workers, partners, neighbors, and the public.

We also need to find new and better ways to embrace and rejoice over the substantial movement in the conventional agriculture community toward the methods and practices pioneered on organic farms by organic farmers. I suspect that the magnitude of differences in the production practices and systems found on well managed organic farms compared to well managed conventional farms has already peaked, or soon will. The superiority of organic farming systems is a matter of fact rooted in system design and the laws of biology and ecology. The economic and food-quality superiority of organic production systems will become increasingly difficult to dismiss or ignore. The USDA and federal government will move mountains in an effort to prop up failing conventional systems and the infrastructure and policies that sustain them, but eventually the benefits of organic will become stronger than institutional inertia and the fear of change.

Public policy and the USDA will increasingly be pushed and pulled in ways that will directly and materially impact organic farmers and the organic and conventional food businesses. These policy processes must be engaged by our community, and engaged effectively, to prevent bad things from happening. We lack the institutions and sense of shared purpose needed to consistently succeed in the policy arena. About all we can do now is prevent mini-disasters from becoming bigger ones. This is not meant as a criticism of the dedicated and talented people who now work on behalf of the organic community on policy and political issues. It arises from a sober accounting of what these folks face on a day-to-day basis and what we, as a community, will have to do in order to gain more traction in the policy arena.

In sum, movements are created and held together by a shared sense of purpose and the willingness of many individuals and constituencies to give up a piece of what they hold most dear in order to become part of a bigger river with greater potential to move mountains. We need to step back and discuss policy goals and priorities, in the hope that some will emerge that can unite the entire community and inspire everyone to do what they can to make change happen. That is what a “movement” is all about and what we must find if we are to become part of one.