The Washington Peace Letter is published monthly for the social justice community of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. It's purpose is to support local, national and international struggles against oppression. It seeks to present a radical analysis of current events, covering information not readily available in the corporate media.

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Imagine that your great grandfather and great grandmother were farmers. Now imagine that you were talking with them right now about the “progress” we’ve made in growing food.

“Have you heard about the great new invention called “terminator technology, gramps?” The United States Department of Agriculture used our money to help a little ol’ chemical and seed company called Monsanto design a seed that can’t be saved and re-planted.”

Come again, sonny.

“Yea, gramps, and it gets better. Monsanto actually has “seed police” that fine farmers who are “caught” saving their seeds. They encourage neighbors to tell on each other.”

You don’t say. Did ya hear that Esther? Junior says people are going to the clink for saving their seeds.
“That’s just the beginning. They are also putting bug killer right into the corn. Problem is that researchers have shown that monarch butterflies will be killed off in the process.”

Heavens, Junior, how can they do that? If the corn kills the butterflies, what happens when you eat the corn?
“Well, grammy, no one really knows for sure. The Europeans have been stopping these monster seeds, but we’ve been planting and eating the plants they grow for years now.”

Well, just don’t buy food grown with that kind of nonsense, dear.

“There’s no way to tell what has genetically altered, Grandma.”

Huh, you must need better glasses?

“It’s not that. None of the food is labeled. Monsanto and others fight anyone in court who tries to notify shoppers through labels about whether our food has been grown by frankenstein, rather than nature.”

But does it taste better than the old fashioned varieties?

“I have no idea, Grandpa. Most of the food is sold to giant food processors like Archers Daniels Midland, or used to feed animals at factory farms”

Factory who??

“Factory farms—thousands of cows in a small space, with no room to move.” My word. Doesn’t that stink? And where does all their dung go, anyhoo? “Stinks to high heaven. They dump the crap into the nearest waterway.”

Surely, sonny boy, they must be doing that so that they can provide better meat and milk to our children.

“Actually, grandma, the Europeans have banned our meat for the last ten years because it contains hormones.”

Hor-what?!

“Hormones. They shoot the cows up so that they grow faster. But that’s not the end of it. There’s mad cow disease. To save money, the factory farmers have been feeding ground up cow parts back to the cows.”

Well, at least with all these new inventions you probably don’t have to worry about those old pests anymore.

“Wish that were true. We’re losing the same percentage of crops to pest infestation as we did back in your farming days, before the introduction of chemical pesticides and fertilizers. We put over 800 million pounds of pesticides on crops every year just in the United States. Most of the drinking water in agricultural areas is contaminated with chemicals like the weed killer atrazine, which is banned in Europe.”

And so the conversation would go on. My grandfather was a wheat farmer in Oklahoma. The price he got for a bushel of wheat during the depression was about the same, literally, as what wheat farmers are getting today. A bushel of wheat, which is being sold on the market for less than $3 a pound (despite costing nearly $5 a pound), produces 60 boxes of Wheaties. Eighty percent of farmers live near the poverty line.

Meanwhile, supermarket owners complain that they can’t afford to stay in poorer neighborhoods because profit margins are too low. So who is making all the money?

After a decade of merger mania, a small number of corporate behemoths such as Con-Agra, Perdue Chicken, Dupont and Archers Daniel Midland, increasingly convert our collective hunger into windfall profits. The result of this consolidation in agriculture, according to a 1998 report by the USDA National Commission on Small Farms is that “farmers have little to no control over setting the price for their product.”

Federal farm programs and bank lending policies that favor large scale, conventional agriculture over small-scale family farming exacerbate the problem. A recent lawsuit brought by the National Black Farmers Association against the USDA, which revealed a systemic pattern of discrimination in lending practices, further limiting who has access to wealth generated from food. African-American farmers and consumers have quite possibly been hit hardest by this “new world food order.”

Here in the DC area, farmers in agricultural counties such as St. Mary’s in Maryland and Faquier in Virginia are holding on to a thin string, as high-priced development encroaches all around. The farmland protection advocacy group American Farmland Trust has rated the fertile farmland in the DC area the second most threatened in the country. Nationally, over a half a million farms have been lost in the past 15 years.

The usual justification for the sort of consolidation and corporatization we are witnessing in agriculture (and every other sector of the economy), is that the changes will be “better for consumers.” While the agribusiness lobby schmoozes Capitol Hill, curtailing regulation of pesticides, genetically altered food or factory farming, less than one mile away an entire Ward of the nation’s capital has not even one supermarket to buy food. Archer Daniels Midland, “supermarket to the world,” apparently considers Ward 8 in Anacostia an extra-terrestrial neighborhood.

A recent Washington Post article (“Safeway’s Closing Leaves Ward 8 Struggling to Shop,” 5/6/99) described the burden faced by many residents, particularly the elderly and those without private transportation, to simply purchase food. A study conducted by the Capital Area Community Food Bank found that residents living east of the Anacostia River have 1/6 the access to stores selling fresh produce as folks living west of Rock Creek Park.

Filling the void left by the departure of supermarkets in the cities are ice cream trucks, “supermarkets on wheels”, and corner stores, which sell mostly alcohol and junk food. “I wouldn’t be caught dead buying anything in there,” said Claritha Hampton in the Post article. “You’ve got to pay almost triple the cost.”

Getting to a nearby supermarket to buy healthy food can be a burden, particularly for the elderly and the many low-income community residents who don’t own cars. The implications for lack of access to healthy food go beyond inconvenience. Consider that infant morality rates in D.C. are twice what they are in Cuba, that Washington, DC has the highest rate of cancer in the country, and that lifespans for African-Americans are significantly shorter than for other members of our community.

So what is to be done? If DC follows national trends, it is not likely that market forces will bring large supermarkets back to our urban centers in the near future, without creative incentives. Waiting for “them” to bring healthy food to where it is most needed may be like waiting for Godot. A very long wait. We need to work together to identify other, more reliable, sources of healthy food.

Jesse Jackson once said that we need to forge greater alliances between the “rural feeders and the urban eaters.” Today, as power and development increasingly are drained toward the suburban fringe, paving over former farmland and taking people, supermarkets and resources from the cities, that is especially true.
A national “food security” movement has been gathering steam over the last five years to build just these sort of relationships. From New York to San Francisco, community food security coalitions have formed to confront the inter-connected problems of fragile local food systems and access to good food in low-income communities. This “good food” movement is about regaining control over the food system and what we put into our bodies. It is about using food to build community.

In early May, a diverse and multi-cultural group of organizations, food co-ops, environmental groups, churches, farmers, businesses and individuals came together for a “Good Food for All” Earth Day festival at Eastern High School in DC. The festival featured speakers and workshops promoting increased support for local farmers, more community gardens, more food co-ops, more farmers markets and farms stands, more awareness about the link between what we eat and what we drink and breathe.

Festival organizers are working to engender a “good food movement”, grounded in the goal of making “good food” available to all people at all times, regardless of where they live or how much money they make. Projects include cultivating an urban farm in Anacostia and opening up new farmers markets and community farm stands in neighborhoods without access to supermarkets or other outlets.

The “good food for all” movement starts with what you have for dinner, and where you buy the ingredients. It continues with the friends and neighbors you invite to share the meal with you. It rolls through the nearby farmers market, where we come out of our homes to meet each other and see the face of the person who has grown that which sustains us. The good food for all movement is strengthened when you join a community garden, or volunteer at a community garden or local farm, or speak to your child’s class about where their food comes from.

For more information on how you can buy directly from local farmers at a market or through a “Community Supported Agriculture” program, join a community garden or volunteer on a “good food for all” project, check out Community Harvest’s web site: www.goodfooddc.org [no longer in service, 6/24/00]. You can also call us at 202-234-0591, or e-mail goodfood4@aol.com.

John Friedrich is with Community Harvest.

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