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In my comments, I’d like to focus on a few things we should think about and do as a social movement.

At the outset, then, let me make clear that my interest is in building a social movement, not an industry. While I am certainly glad that the organic food sector has been successful at growing the market for organic food relative to other food, that, in my mind, is not equivalent to effecting widespread and deep rooted change in the way we grow, distribute and eat food. And, I believe that changing our food system to one that is truly ecologically sustainable can only be achieved with major social and political transformations. Historically, these have been made through social movements, not existing power structures. My comments today, then, are directed to the movement not the industry.

One other preliminary comment: I’m really excited that social justice is becoming an explicit goal of several organizations within the California movement. I hope that at some point today we can talk about the key social justice issues and strategies to address them.

So, now I’m going to take on some of the sacred cows of those who identify with the movement and will do this through three over-arching points:

1) Key Terms.

I hear a lot of terms thrown around to describe the problems we face, terms like globalization, consolidation, concentration. I don’t have time to work through all of these today, but let’s take up a couple:

In short, let’s get the analysis right; let’s get the history right.

2) We need to focus more on processes rather than forms.

We saw this with organic standards, how attention to processes was reduced to what materials can be used. There’s an equivalence with social concerns.

Big versus small is the wrong way to talk about it. There is as of yet no evidence that small farms are necessarily more sustainable and socially just than big farms. Nor is local an easy stand-in for sustainability and social justice.

Indeed, one of problems with identifying the problem as globalization or bigness is that they tend to lead to the conclusion that if you do opposite you get the right result – e.g., localize, scale down. We need to get beyond dichotomous thinking.
Instead, we need to think about processes that lead to justice: inclusion, democratization, cooperation, income-sharing (rather than exploitation), etc.

3) Act like a social movement. We need to learn from history.

Successful social movements don’t try to make everybody happy – they certainly don’t harbor the pretense of win-win solutions. They identify a problem, usually an institution or group of people who are responsible for the problem (at least in part), and make them a target. They create coalitions of interest in regard to this target. They galvanize their constituents by naming the enemy and articulating grievances. They use both fiery rhetoric and reasoned analysis. In my opinion, one of reasons that the anti-GE has been more successful on a worldwide level is that it is not afraid to act like a social movement. There’s also a lot to learn from recent political history – let’s not be afraid to fight the fight.