The battle against bad farming Part 1

Pondering the characteristics of today’s supposed “all-about-me-and-my-social-networking” generation, lefties like me can occasionally become jaded. Some of the questions asked of me, college instructor since 1983: • “What’s happened to our youth’s rebellious nature?” • “Why are the Mexican-American college attendees or students in Ireland doing all the rabble-rousing when we’re the freest country in the world?” • “If young people don’t fight for the environment, who thinks the planet isn’t toast?” Lucky for me, I’ve run into many young people fighting for the environment and social justice. I’ve talked with youth volunteering through AmeriCorps in Spokane working on wetlands restoration, like Joe Cannon and Amanda Parrish with the Lands Council’s Beaver Project. There’s 25-year-old Spokane-raised Molly Callen, teaching academically challenged students in Seattle by dedicating herself to the non-profit Morningside Academy for low pay and long hours to raise reading levels. Janae Choquette is another 20-something helping take on one of Seattle’s, and the country’s, sacred cows: Bill Gates – for zero pay and little recognition in a city that seems to want more of what Microsoft and Amazon brings to their paychecks while living amongst many in the anti-war, pro-social justice, anti-corporate “movement.” “It seems like a lot of people my age struggle with finding a sense of purpose or feeling fulfilled by their jobs and even their lives. Though it comes with a different set of obstacles, working to build movements for social, economic, and environmental justice is incredibly meaningful,” said the 22-year-old Choquette at Community Alliance for Global Justice, where her office is plastered with posters of solidarity movements, agriculture empowerment initiatives and fair trade consortiums. One of CAGJ’s newest projects, AGRA Watch, co-chaired by Choquette, is running up against the neoliberal panacea of globalization run amuck; corporations and compliant governments pushing to disengage local solutions to local problems; and strategic corporate interests looking for profits in everything, from other countries’ minerals and bio-crops to water and food. Choquette is a white graduate of Evergreen State College who understands her upper-middle class family’s position of privilege has much to do with her marching orders to put some gravitas into stopping another plan by the West to re-colonize Africa, as does her own personal and intellectual framing tied to cultural and environmental justice. Last June, she was hired as an unpaid co-organizer of CAGJ’s campaign to stop the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s “next green revolution,” called Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA. “This industrial agriculture program pushes farmers off their land; increases debt owed for that monoculture model to function; it degrades the land tremendously; and destroys the social fabric of the culture,” said Choquette. We talked a few days after Thanksgiving, where supporting peasant farmers and indigenous communities was high on her list of homilies during her family’s gathering. While Choquette’s mother understands her work and her father accepts her passion, she’s still a product of a system of white privilege and dominance. She shared how her father, a successful businessman, has fallen in the same pit as many North Americans who believe in exceptionalism mythology: that we live in a society that allows anyone, no matter what color, economic class or gender identity, to advance and share in fruits of capitalism equally. “My father believes that if he had been born another color he’d still be where he is today,” she said laughing. Her youthful regard for people of color within her city and outside her country has much to do with her work at Evergreen, including her senior project entitled, “Political Economy of Hunger,” plus travels to Spain and Kenya. She’s not easily swayed by jaded ex-hippies who see her generation as uninterested, sucked into unbridled consumerism, and all about me, me, me. “I believe that my generation is more aware of the problems of the world than we’re often given credit for, but we’re overwhelmed and paralyzed by the fatalistic sense that there isn’t anything we can do about it or that there is no alternative. The cult of individualism is crippling and disempowering, making us feel isolated and powerless. We’ve been taught that the most we can do to make a difference is live our lives well and make choices about what we consume. This is obviously not a recipe for meaningful, coordinated social change on a large scale.” Activists like Choquette, AGRA Watch and CAGJ are battling for community-directed, small-scale sustainable farming against peddlers of pesticides, genetically-altered seeds and a model of complete control of farmers’ crops and spiritual and economic destinies. The wonky but elegant agro-ecological process explores permanent, small-scale and sustainable farming that empowers people to feed themselves, not work as cogs in the industrial agriculture behemoth. Here’s what more than 110 organizations and connected individuals say in a Dec. 7, 2010, letter to the Gates Foundation addressing concerns about AGRA’s hydra of hyper technology, high fossil fuel inputs, little or no transparency, heavy investments by companies like Monsanto, and lack of community-based development: “To reach our shared goal of a future without hunger, we believe the Foundation should direct its funding to agroecological research and programs and provide assistance to farmer organizations, governments, and international institutions in support of agroecological agriculture in Africa. Scientific research has proven their superior potential, and now you are positioned to contribute to their expansion. For your efforts to be successful, the Foundation must listen to the voices of small farmers, farmer organizations, consumer groups, and other civil society organizations in Africa who will be most impacted by your work and are most familiar with their own problems and how best to solve them. To date, the extent of your consultation and collaboration with Africans has been limited to those who belong to elite strata of society or are involved in only large-scale projects, while just three individuals control the issuing of AGRA grants.” Various non-governmental organizations, government and academic researchers, and United Nations agencies place global hunger at 1 billion people, and eradicating the triumvirate of hunger, lack of accessibility to clean water, and institutional and endemic poverty is high on the agenda of many groups around the world. Climate change is also part of the overall agriculture framework to help bring funding and low-impact solutions to areas where local agronomists and peasant farmers already have centuries’ worth of experience working the land to fit the respective ecological, hydrologic and cultural characteristics. The biotech, genetically-modified seed and mega-corporation model that the Gates Foundation is pushing, according to groups like La Via Campesina, Kenya Biodiversity Network, Center for Food Safety, and dozens of other signatories, is “distorted in favor of supporting inappropriate high-tech agricultural activities” which runs counter to credible and comprehensive science. Critics include farmer/activist Michael Ableman who sees bio-intensive and sustainable agriculture as keys to small-scale agroecological approaches. Heather Day, CAGJ’s director, adds that “civil society organizations, farmworkers, farmers and farmer organizations, grassroots groups, health and consumer organizations, environmental groups, scientists, and academics … feel it is imperative” to petition the Gates Foundation to support the findings of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development’s 2008 report. “The 2008 report frames hunger as a fundamentally social and economic problem and warns that continued reliance on high-tech solutions (including transgenic crops) is unlikely to reduce persistent hunger and poverty and may in some cases exacerbate social inequities and environmental degradation,” AGRA Watch’s letter states.