June 2012

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the controversial Citizens United ruling by striking down a Montana law limiting corporate campaign spending. The ruling is a win for agribusiness and food companies exerting their influence over elections and government, and a loss for those advocating or farmers, the environment and consumers.

As we wrote earlier this month, there’s not an issue at the intersection of food, agriculture and government policy that doesn’t run into the enormous political influence of big corporations. Whether it is the Farm Bill, international trade or food safety, corporate influence in U.S. politics and within government is reaching unprecedented levels.

The Citizen United ruling, and accompanying Super PACs, have changed the game and are undermining our democracy. Corporate spending on elections is now unlimited and virtually unregulated at the federal level. The Supreme Court ruling on Monday clarified that the Citizens United decision also applies to state and local elections. Get ready for even more campaign attack ads.

If we want a responsive government that reflects the interests of all farmers, workers and the environment we have to fight back. There is a growing movement pushing for local resolutions in support of a Constitutional Amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling. IATP supports that initiative and the United for the People campaign that is challenging corporate influence in our political system. 

Today is the last day of the U.N Conference on Sustainable Development that is taking place in Rio de Janiero from June 20 to 22 of June. Over 100 heads of states (with a notable absence of Barack Obama), and governments are in Rio, participating in the plenary meetings and High-level Round Tables as a prelude to adopting the negotiation document. On the final day of the last preparatory committee, on the evening of June 15, the negotiations had come to a standstill. Brazil however, as a host nation, did not want Rio+20 to end in failure. As we suspected, Brazil opted to provide the negotiators with a new, watered-down draft that would cause minimal disagreements. 

Brazil’s draft was negotiated over for the next four days and the new document. “The Future We Want,” was agreed upon by June 19, a day before the heads of states arrived and was called the “final draft text.” Before the high-level segment even started we had a text that was adopted by the negotiators, all but waiting for the endorsement of the final plenary. By the end of the day today we will know to what extent this document is tweaked to accommodate the interests of specific constituencies, but as of now the document remains more or less unchanged.

From June 16 to 19, the Brazilian government organized a series of sustainability dialogues, including those on water food and energy. The discussion on food security had an exceptionally strong panel with several advocates of agroecolgy. However, what was said in the dialogues was not reflected in the negotiating text and it is disappointing to see no reference to agroecology in this final draft.

When the Heads of State of the G-20 countries meet in Los Cabos, Mexico on June 18–19, they will have plenty to discuss—not least, the fragile global economy and the instability of international finance. Food security is on their agenda as well. Yet after the intense focus on agriculture and food security under the leadership of France, both ahead of and during its time as host of the G-20 in 2011, this year’s efforts are low-key.

The host government, Mexico, is preoccupied with national elections in July. The President chose to advance the Heads of State summit to mid-June, ahead of the election, rather than wait for later in the year, when G-20 summits are more normally held. The change of program has left the different working groups without much time to do their work. Mexico also chose a much narrower set of issues for the Agricultural Ministers’ contribution this year: agricultural productivity growth, with a linked focus on small family farms.

From north to south, Mexican farmers are facing some of the most severe climate instability they’ve ever confronted. The northern states are suffering from what the Mexican government has called the worst drought the country has ever experienced; rain just won’t fall, and the crops that have been planted have dried up. In the south, they’ve had year after year of devastating floods, the result of which has been devastating topsoil loss on the uniformly hilly terrain.

Elias Ventura, a small-holder corn farmer in the state of Oaxaca, told me about the hopelessness of this situation when we sat next to each other yesterday at the seminar IATP is co-hosting this week in Mexico City, “New Paradigms and Public Policies for Agriculture and Global Food Systems,” in advance of next week’s G-20 meeting in Los Cabos, Mexico. He said that he’s had either too much rain, or not enough, and that getting a good harvest under the unpredictable new weather extremes (that he said are the result of climate change) seemed like an impossibility. I asked him if the Mexican government provided any support when his crops failed and he gave me a resolute “No.” Not only would he be without the income that the crop would provide, but his community would have to adjust to a sharp decrease in food availability. This challenge Mexican farmers and rural communities face in the wake of climate change stands in stark contrast to the risk-management program the U.S. Senate has proposed for the 2012 Farm Bill, which would guarantee up to 90 percent of farmers’ revenue if crops fail or prices fall, but there are some similarities.

Duking it out this spring to be crowned "Scourge of the 21st Century": the dual public health epidemics of obesity and antibiotic resistance.

Obesity, the reigning champion, costs the nation more than $190 billion per year in direct treatment costs alone—a figure more than $40 billion higher than estimates from just two years ago. It's an epidemic creating a future where many of our children will live shorter, more disabled lives than our own. Maybe no other health problem drives America harder towards fiscal insolvency.

Just last month, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention: Solving the Weight of the Nation. The new report highlights the monumental task before us. There are a constellation of factors in our collective food system that, together, contribute to the epidemic. They include the ubiquitous marketing of junk food to children; school and other child environments where it's simply easier and more convenient to eat junk food or drink sugar-sweetened beverages than it is to drink water or to eat healthy foods, like fruits and vegetables; and agricultural research and policy (read: the Farm Bill) that fails to ensure "an optimal mix of crops and farming methods for meeting the Dietary Guidelines for Americans," i.e., national guidelines for what constitutes healthy eating.

The IOM report reinforces that there is no magic bullet solution; rather, we must work to tackle all these factors at the same time. Simply put, they constitute a failed system, and we can't afford not to act.