No System is Immune: Structural Racism in the American Food System

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This past quarter I had the opportunity to work with a Washington organization fighting to empower the youth of the state to fight for bold, equitable, and science-based climate policies. Through my work with Our Climate, coupled with my politics of the world food system course, I became more educated about the concentrations of power in wealth that dominate and dictate the processes and practices of the world food system.

The richest fifth of the population control 90 percent of the world’s wealth and emit 80 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.[i] This block of people is mostly white. This fact does not exist without substantial consequences for the rest of the population. For example, 10 percent of white households experience hunger in the United States, Black households experience hunger at rates of 20-25 percent.[ii]

Source: https://alliancetoendhunger.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Hill-advocacy-fact-sheet__HUNGER-IS-A-RACIAL-EQUITY-ISSUE_Alliance-to-End-Hunger.pdf

Food insecurity, as we know can and does lead to inability to attend school or jobs, decreased health and health outcomes, disease, shortened life expectancy, and more. Systemic racism does not solely exist in our legal and governmental institutions. It shows up in the global food system, especially in the American food system. Systemic racism is not isolated to a few systems or institutions, food insecurity is not the only manifestation of systemic racism. Private agricultural land ownership is dominated by white people.[iii] Only 1.3 percent of farmers in America are Black.[iv] Black farmers receive less assistance from the government than white farmers.[v] The list goes on and on.

Source: https://foodfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/DRnumber2_VF.pdf

Systems are inherently interconnected and organized to achieve a function. Yet, our national food system fails Black Americans. Change in systems is inevitable and we must leverage this inherent change to ensure that food systems serve Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color just the same as they serve white people. We must call upon our politicians and listen to Black activists to address these issues.

Lastly, I want to share some important resources, activists, educators, and organizers to turn to during this time.

END NOTES:

[i] Political Ecology of the World Food System Lecture, April 16, 2020

[ii] https://alliancetoendhunger.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Hill-advocacy-fact-sheet__HUNGER-IS-A-RACIAL-EQUITY-ISSUE_Alliance-to-End-Hunger.pdf

[iii] https://foodfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/DRnumber2_VF.pdf

[iv] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/29/why-have-americas-black-farmers-disappeared

[v] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/29/why-have-americas-black-farmers-disappeared

– Sophie Stein

Soil Conservation in Brazil & The World Food System Beyond

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Blue and Yellow Globe

Brazil is one of the largest agricultural exporters in the world. In my research group, we found that land rights and soil conservation are key issues within the context of Brazil’s agricultural production. If the trend in poor land management of degraded pasturelands and encroachment into the Amazon region continues, it appears soil erosion—and nutrient loss along with it—could increase by up to 20%, according to this study’s findings.

Trade, Self Sufficiency

In chapter 3, “Agricultural Trade Liberalization,” of Jennifer Clapp’s book Food, it’s clear that international trade in the food system is a marketplace rife with inequalities and contradictions, often at the expense of people lower on the socioeconomic ladder, and especially those in developing countries whose main trade output is agriculture. However, even for an industrial nation such as Japan, boasting one of the highest GDPs in the world, the nation’s reliance on food imports point to the fact that money alone cannot buy independence.

In a 2012 article from the United Nations University publication Our World, Japan’s low food self-sufficiency (60% of their calories are from imports) was discussed and ramifications contextualized. It’s notable that the goal to increase the self-sufficiency to 45% by 2020 have since been pushed back to 2025. What it means for food to be “Japanese” has changed over the decades alongside changing consumer preferences and decreasing domestic output. This is an issue the world over, as the Columbian exchange of the 21st century has seen hamburgers and big gulps from the U.S. in Mexico City, to Bangalore, to Riyadh, to Tokyo and beyond.

People Standing Near Restaurant chain

Once native to the United States, the seeds of McDonalds have now been sown across the globe thanks to the 21st century ship called globalization

 

In Brazil, food self-sufficiency, ecological damage, Indigenous rights, resource management, and economic concerns all come into consideration when we talk about food and agriculture. Perhaps, as has been suggested in the UK, farmers can be part of the solution. Something will have to change if Brazil is to remain ecologically viable for agriculture in the decades to come.

 

Person Digging on Soil Using Garden Shovel

Soils are both the lungs and the womb of our earth. They are responsible for the sustenance that comes out of them and our mistakes (C02) that go in

 

The Big Picture

In considering the food on our plates, Michael Pollan makes it sound simple. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.” While I don’t disagree with his prescription, the fact of the matter is that the food in the grocery store, and in markets around the globe, are products of, and tools in, the political ecology of the world food system. A system which is itself comprised of ecologies and systems.

The world has increasingly become a web of interconnectedness. Understanding it requires the ability to constantly look at micro and macro structures thereof. Our world food system is no different.

 

 

 

The food system is not failing people, it is working how it was invented  

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Before I took Political Science 385, the relationship between the food system and racism was not an explicit connection I made. I was in a bubble of ignorance, clouded by my own privilege of being considered white passing, socioeconomically privileged, and cis-male. I asked myself, “how could the [United States] food system possibly be racist? – it’s food, right? It was not until I stepped back, flipped through a couple of history books, and put myself in a different vantage point that I connected the dots: the United States is built on oppression and systemic racism, the food system is just one of the many layers that it lurks.

Systemic racism can be traced back to the very creation of the United States. The brutal colonization of the indigenous population for their land, forced slave labor and unjust laws stripping people of color from land ownership are just the beginning of injustice that minorities have faced in our food system. The very backbone of our modern-day food system has been created by the very populations that are left behind.

Not only has the entire system been built on oppression, the very laws that are meant to protect people from harm has had a long history of dismantling Black and Brown empowerment. Before Jim Crow laws were enacted in the United States, African American’s owned 13 million acres of land in 1902, by the end of 1997 years of Jim Crow, they only owned 2 million acres. White land owners now pass on their externalities to people of color, while they reap the benefits of their new found land. Many working longer hours for lower wages than their white counter parts.

There is so much more happening behind the scenes than the average consumer might think. Buying something as simple as an avocado, a banana, or chocolate, it is easy to forget about the hundreds of miles, hours, and workers it took to get where it is now. The food system is not a farm to table concept like people may think, it is much more complex and inner connected.

One thing that I will always hold close to me from this class is that you cannot look at one part of the system and generalize about the whole. The history of oppression in agriculture cannot survive on its own, it is interdependent on a long and brutal history of colonization, institutionally racist laws, biased social norms, and labor.

The food system is not failing people, it is working how it was intended.

Work Cited:

Food Justice & Racism in the Food System

New Research Explores the Ongoing Impact of Racism on the U.S. Farming Landscape

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-15686731/cocoa-farms-in-ivory-coast-still-using-child-labour

Alien Land Laws in California (1913 & 1920)

Photos: https://communityfoodfunders.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/History-of-Racism-and-Resistance-in-the-Food-System-Visual-Timeline.pdf

Racism in the Food System

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Systematic racism is the basis of every aspect of the USA and the food system has no exception. In the 1600s, the first enslaved people were brought from Africa to America and were forced into labor. This included working on sugar, cotton, rice, and tobacco plantations. This brought on a sense of superiority to the white Americans, seeing anyone who is different from them as less than. The exploitation of many people of color were used to keep the social hierarchy going and it kept money in the white man’s pocket. This past of the United States has helped create the racist laws, actions, and institutions that are here today.

Now that forced labor is seen as immoral, even though it is still happening in the present, people have found a more covert way of keeping people of color oppressed. This is shown through wage gaps, the job market, the housing market, and so much more. A majority of minorities cannot find good-paying jobs with the only reason being simply that they are not white. Because of that, they find themselves working in factories, farms, and other jobs seen as undesirable and underpaying. This means that all the food being put on people’s tables are most likely being harvested or packed by people of color. While they are doing all of the hard labor, it is usually the white people that are in charge, gaining massive amounts of wealth.

Because of the unjust treatment of minorities, it makes it more difficult for them to support their families. It is harder to buy basic necessities, which can lead to a multitude of problems. This cycle continues on through generations because nothing is there to pass on to their children. However, most white people have the privilege and wealth to live healthy and have opportunities to pass onto generations of their families.

These disparities have magnified during the pandemic. For example, the wealthy have enough money to stop working while the poor continue to work in factories, farms or other underpaid jobs to keep food on America’s table and to keep their families afloat. Along with that, the systematic racism in the health care system keeps a lot of people of color from getting access to testing for COVID or getting treatment. 

Racism and oppression are at the very base of what America was built upon. With that, the food system cannot be ignored in this equation. It is often looked upon as a basic process of the way it gets to your fridges and pantries, but it is not that simple.

Fair Trade & Free Trade, Praxis & Protest

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The Community Alliance for Global Justice (CAGJ) is a fitting organization to pair with our course because they do an amalgamation of work, spanning all sorts of different topics and issues with the central goal of spreading sustainability, democracy, fair agricultural practice, and social justice. They don’t do one thing, the same way this class isn’t about one subject. It’s more about a set of values and goals that guide you from topic to topic, issue to issue.

(CAGJ Facebook Page)

Our fundraising work and Fair Trade project did little to further my understanding of systems thinking. I’m coming away from the project with a vastly deeper understanding of the Fair Trade model and its benefits but I don’t feel like the work helped me to better understand the way world trade works all that much. I don’t mean this in a bad way though because it was work. Moreover, it was a service. It was unpaid and somewhat thankless intern work, not done for our own personal growth but for a greater cause. Cold-calling local businesses weakened by the global pandemic and asking for small donations for a fundraising event that they may not even be able to attend did little to further my formal education, but it taught me a valuable lesson about how the topics of our class can look in the real world, not to mention during a crisis. Nonprofit work isn’t always glamorous and that’s a valuable lesson when seeking a degree in the social sciences.

Front page of the Seattle Times from December 1, 1999. (Mark Harrison / The Seattle Times)

The obvious parallel between our project and course material is the Fair Trade research we did for CAGJ’s website. Our research was mostly surface-level, just getting a solid overview of the Fair Trade model and listing different products and brands, however our knowledge of the deeply rooted problems of the free trade model came in handy. “The Real Reasons for Hunger” by Vandana Shiva and “Agricultural Trade Liberalization” by Jennifer Clapp helped me understand the need for such a model brought on by the unjust trade policies by the WTO. Early in the quarter, not knowing what would take place a month later, our CAGJ supervisors had us watch a documentary about Seattle’s 1999 WTO protests, which, after telling us how bad Seattle police are at handling demonstrations, showed how effective protest can be. The 1999 protests prevented the WTO from holding negotiations and forced the world to examine the costs of globalization. Now shockingly similar photos have come out of the last two weeks, and already major police reforms have been promised.

Downtown Seattle, May 30, 2020 (Matt M. McKnight/Crosscut)

So much of our class was focused on the macro – the big picture of the global food system and the endless moving parts that make it tick. Our project focused on the micro. One Seattle nonprofit with a staff small enough you could count them on your hands, doing what they can to stay afloat while educating their community on a better way to exchange goods. You can’t solve a problem without understanding the system it’s a part of, and you can’t understand the system without getting to know the individual actors working within it.

A Reflection of Food Politics and Working with Landesa

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For the Group Project, my group of five worked with the NGO Landesa which strives to work with farmers in poor countries to help them know and hold their land rights. What we were tasked with doing is creating infographics to put onto Landesa’s social media to better inform people, especially young adults, of what they do. This was a very interesting experience for me because what my group got to works on is heavily tied to what we have discussed in our class throughout the year especially regarding systems thinking.

How Landesa tries to make a difference in the world directly ties with concepts brought up specifically in two of our classes. The first is that of food sovereignty and more specifically land sovereignty, which Marc Edleman discusses in his essay. He mentions that access to land rights helps provide even distribution of land and provide greater access to resources (923). Landesa is working directly with communities to better raise them up from the bottom because it will help them create their own economic opportunities for themselves. The next concept the ties Landesa directly to our class is their fight for land rights specifically for women. Julia Whitling mentions in her article, “When women are provided with the same inputs, assets, and technical assistance as men, their yields could increase by as much as 20-30 percent, which translates to a reduction in the number of undernourished people in the world by 12-17 percent” (2019). This shows the importance of Landesa’s work in because it can make such a big impact in poor and unequal communities.

It truly was a pleasure to work with Landesa especially because we got to see the approach that they took. In my contribution to Landesa’s social media I focus on their belief in better education as a solution to addressing land rights issues. This goes directly along with systems thinking because better education often means better understanding of land rights which that will lead to greater economic growth of the communities. It was great to learn just how much Landesa’s work described what us as a class often hoped for to bring change to poor communities without access to food.

 

One of my infographics

 

Sources

Marc Edelman et al. “Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty.”  Journal of Peasant Studies: Global Agrarian Transformations 41, 6, 2014, pp. 911–931.

Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Hungry for Equality: Examining the Gender Gap in Food  Security

Photo credit: thechicagocouncil.org/blog/global-food-thought/hungry-equality-examining-gender-gap-food-security

Slow Food Washington

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The action group I was a part of worked with Slow Food Washington to help gather resources to inform the SF community about Washington House Bill 2777 (SHB 2777), also known as the “Tamale Bill.” Slow Food is an international organization that promotes its three pillars of “Good, Clean, and Fair Food for All” through community engagements. The legislature created by another non-profit Ventures Marketplace permits home cooks to legally sell food without a commercial kitchen which directly aligns with Slow Food’s mission for fairness as it supports local businesses. Our role was to create a digital toolkit to engage the SF Washington community about SHB 2777.

The first page of our rough draft of the digital toolkit

Highlighting the importance of relationships with community members and other organizations in order to enact collective change, the project provided me a window into how a fairly large organization operates and the importance of communication. I learned tangible ways to get involved such as donating, volunteering time, or working with people in the community to create positive change.

Slow Food started as a wide-scale movement against the globalization of Western fast food and now as an organization, its mission is to support marginalized communities in taking active roles in the food system. My involvement in this project shaped my understanding of the importance of food sovereignty in local communities. Monica White, the author of Freedom Farmers, also shares a similar sentiment about the importance of food sovereignty through community-led organizations. White illustrates the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network’s successes in creating food security and economic autonomy through community farming. (White, 127)

All SF chapters are volunteer-driven communities working on different campaigns and initiatives important respective to their own needs in regards to food.

COVID-19 has disrupted the global economy and the food system, exposing weak links such as working conditions, overproduction, and trade deals leading. In a broader lens, allowing community members to start their own business out of their kitchen is one of the many ways communities can build toward food sovereignty. SHB 2777 and other campaigns like it proves that within a living system comes evolution and adaptation to challenging circumstances. This state legislature is one of many examples of how people’s direct relationship to food creates a personal, deeper understanding of the entirety of the world’s food system.

Also, just a few of the many resources out there to get involved in regards to the abolishment of the police: https://linktr.ee/acab

 

Work Cited:

White, M.M (2018). Drawing on the Past toward a Food Sovereign Future. Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (pp. 117-140) Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press.

 

The Importance of Standing Together Against Injustice Anywhere

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“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” those are the now iconic words from the deeply moving letter from Birmingham jail written by MLK Jr. in 1963.

While those words are powerful by themselves, just as powerful is the sentence which follows it: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” While MLK Jr. was specifically talking about racism in America and the necessity of all people to stand up for injustice wherever they see it, I think that the idea presented resonates at a much deeper level. As we have learned through systems thinking throughout this quarter, we are all connected in many more ways than we think.

We are connected to the cacao farmers in West Africa who grow the beans that become our chocolate but who can’t afford the finished product,

We are connected to the meat packers in the Midwest who are dying of Covid-19 because of a lack of adequate protection,

We are connected to the communities who can’t drink their water because they live downstream from under-regulated dairy CAFO’s in our very own Washington state.

Global food system, Criminal Justice System, Contaminated Water Systems, all just different names for the same oppressive system fueled by the colonial legacy of institutionalized racism. We may have abolished slavery 155 years ago, but most of our food is still picked, packed, and shipped by black and brown hands. We are all part of a system which consumes marginalized bodies, and which leaves those who benefit from it confused, guilty, and angry; A system which has injustice as its very core.

So, what can we do? How we can possibly break out from these systems that entwine, confine, but hopefully won’t continue to define us.

Through my group project with the Center for Food Safety working on building a social media campaign to demand the stronger regulation of dairy CAFO’s within Washington communities, I got a glimpse of the power of the collective. Individually, none of us had the skills or the energy to create a platform on which this issue could be addressed, yet together through the synergy of our skills and knowledge we were able to create a comprehensive platform that included social media pages, petitions, lobby tool kits, and letters to the editor.

Society so often tries to divide us, because a people divided are easier to suppress, but when we awaken to the injustices which surround us and come together in the form of collective action we can challenge the very fabric of society. In the words of Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” In these unprecedented times it is crucial we come together and use our collective leverage to make a difference because if we don’t, who will?

 

The End ENVIR 385

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My group had the opportunity to work with Landesa, a non-profit organization where their focus is to promote, empower, and secure land rights for millions of the world’s poorest in order to provide opportunity and social justice. Because Landesa works on a more broader range, my group wanted to focus our action project specifically on women’s land rights and food security and connect them with pandemics like the one we are currently in, COVID-19. In order to spread awareness with our topic and research we took on the social media approach.

We learned through our research that women in the areas we looked into make up the majority of the agricultural workforce, and because of the gender disparity that is demonstrated in these areas, and with the current system, women are left in a vulnerable state when pandemics strike their communities. Case studies that have been done in developing countries have shown that with support, women can have great economic and ecological impacts which helps build resilience in their communities.

Through our course we talked about the systems theory. This explains that we are all part of a system(s), and if one part of the system undergo a change then the other parts of that system will be affected. Landesa is performing under this idea, and that their organization is in hope trying to create change in society and rid of the unsustainable systems that are around us.

This theory is demonstrated greatly under our food system. Structural racism lives in this system, while many others as well. However, since our group focused of food security I believe it is necessary to focus on the food system as well. POC often receive low wages in the food industry, and because of this they are forced to face many disadvantages such as hunger. Part of this problem is that there is great disparity between consumers and the food chain since many do not truly know what the process is in order to get the food they are receiving. After this course, I grew to understand more about the food system and the corrupt attributes that take place. Through our action project and tying that with the systems theory, it is crucial that there needs to be more awareness especially with the BLM movement that is currently happening, and for everybody to keep protesting and doing what they can in order to affect our system in the ways that will reach an outcome where we see change for a better future for the POC.

ENVIR 385 Reflection

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For my project, we worked with Landesa and linked their goals to the relevant UN Sustainable Development goals and then created infographics based on those.

 

We created a survey to figure out what peoples preferred ways of learning on social media were. We could saw exactly what our targeted audience wanted to see in educational social media posts.

 

Knowing that these infographics I made would be seen by an audience for advocacy and educational purposes was really meaningful to me.

This made me evaluate how important knowledge and education is. We made the infographics because there are people who may not know the information we do. Education is one of the only ways for people to gain more insight on a topic. By creating the infographics I was facilitating the viewers learning. This gave me a great sense of accomplishment when I completed my infographics.

This knowledge can be applied to what’s happening in our lives right now. The Black Lives Matter movement has been going on for years. The murder of George Floyd has sparked decades of built up oppression, inequality, and unjust treatment of people of color to be brought to light through protests. The protests have been larger and on a wider scale than we have seen before. I believe that by completing the Landesa project, it caused me to have a different understanding on the importance of advocacy during this time. Landesa asked us to create social media posts for a reason; social media is one of the most powerful tools we have in modern day. Doing this project caused me to be more vocal during this time. It made me understand that by posting on social media

According to neoreach.com

I actually can engage people. If I post informational pictures, stories, and statistics it can promote education and conversation, which is the first step that people need to collectively get together and fight a truly devastating problem that people in this country shouldn’t be facing. It may not feel like you will make much difference by posting, but that’s the benefit of social media, your post could reach anyone, and that one post could be what causes a change.

 

I wanted to connect my learning this quarter to what is currently going on in our society as this has been my primary focus over the past few weeks.