On September 24–26, 2012, hundreds of food justice advocates gathered in Minneapolis for the Food + Justice = Democracy conference. One of the primary features of the conference was the use of a People’s Movement Assembly process to craft principles around food justice. View and comment on the draft Principles of Food Justice or read a summary of the conference and its aims below. Join IATP for a post-conference webinar to review the outcomes and plan for moving forward on November 15. RSVP now.

The U.S food system has never been just, fair or healthy. This is a shocking statement to some, but to the vast majority of people of color and tribal nations in the United States this has always been a reality. This sentiment was the thread connecting many of the conversations throughout all three days of IATP’s Food + Justice = Democracy conference last month in Minneapolis.

African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos experience higher incidence of chronic diseases, higher mortality, and poorer overall health outcomes. To address the health disparities that those communities face, we must recognize their experience in the overall analysis of the problem of a failed food and agriculture system.  

Contemporary food movements emphasize the return to and protection of the family farm. This emphasis paints a pristine picture of America that is foreign to many communities of color. Grounding the brokenness of the food system solely in this perspective ignores the history of Native Americans and their removal from native land that prepared the country for the arrival of European immigrants. This analysis also ignores the enslavement of Africans and the unpaid labor force that created much of the wealth for corporate America. It cannot be one analysis over the other: We must have an analysis that represents the reality of all communities.

The call for food justice is a call for inclusion of every community, ethnic group, class and gender identity.

The Food + Justice = Democracy conference provided an opportunity to issue that call and bring together as many strands of the food movement as possible and unite our voices to call for an end to injustice in our food system.

Reframing the narrative of the food system is no easy task. It requires incorporating the truth about our food system and facilitating a deep engagement with the communities that feel most exploited. The space and opportunities to engage are limited.

The Food + Justice = Democracy conference organized around narratives instead of traditional presentations, and peoples movement assemblies (PMA) instead of workshops. The idea was to maximize the brain power of 300+ activists from around the country by coming together to find the spark of the movement for food justice—an ambitious endeavor seeking to ignite conversations with the purpose of crafting a cohesive public policy agenda for food justice.

The conference reframed the industrial food and agriculture narrative into five critical assumptions:

1. Recognizing that colonialism created historical trauma for communities of color and tribal nations in the United States. 
2. Dissecting the social construct of race in the United States and seeking to understand how this construct obscures an analysis of the food system that includes class and gender.
3. Acknowledging that all disparities, including health disparities, must be examined through the lens of historical trauma in order to promote healthy lifestyles.
4. Striving to frame the movement for food justice within the experience of marginalized and often invisible people (whether by race, class or gender) in the United States.
5. Creating a national vision of a fair, just and healthy food system is vital in order to rally the food movement body politic.

The conference structure used narratives to deliver a new framework. This process allowed conference attendees to hear presentation that highlighted the complexities of racial, ethic, class and gender identity and their impact on the food system.

Narratives that describe the lives of African Americans, Native Americans, Hmong and Latino communities were shared without forfeiting the added layers of class and gender. This proved a much more dynamic and instructive way to discuss disparities in America.

The PMAs

The conference used People Movement Assemblies (PMAs) to help conference attendees develop a national vision for the food system based on justice. PMAs were lightly structured conversations led by groups and activists that are working toward a food justice.

The PMAs were divided into these areas:

1. Historical Trauma
2. Land
3. Toxic Free and Climate Justice
4. Labor and Immigration
5. Local Food Systems, Community Development and Public Infrastructure
6. Hunger Relief

Each PMA was tasked with creating a set of principles that captured the vision of what a fair, just and healthy food system would do for our communities under that category. The principles of food justice, in draft form, will travel around the country to solicit input from every community that wants to talk about organizing for food justice.

To get involved in the process moving forward, read and share your comments on the draft principles. Also, watch for details on upcoming opportunities, including a webinar on November 15, and a Facebook chat hosted by IATP.

View and comment on the draft Principles of Food Justice.

World Food Day is an event perhaps best known to those already advocating to end hunger in their own countries and around the globe. That seems like such an obvious goal, and yet how to achieve it is subject to vigorous debate. This year we’re in the middle of the third global food price crisis since 2008. It seems likely that those crises will become the upward swings of ever more unstable prices unless we make some serious shifts in policy and practice.

To begin with, it’s about time we abandon the idea that the problem of global hunger is simply about producing enough food. Increasing the volume of food production is important, but who has access to that food, and who controls how it is grown is even more vital. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) reports that 70 percent of rural people live in poverty. Many of those people are themselves farmers who are also facing new threats to their ability to feed their families and their communities.

Over the last few years there has been a resurgence of interest and activism on the issue of large-scale farmland acquisition in the Global South. Conflicts between small-scale farmers or farm workers and foreign investors have been raging for decades, if not centuries. The pace and scope of those acquisitions, however, is new. In the decades preceding the food price crisis of 2007-08, new international trade and investment agreements created the legal conditions for land grabs, but low and falling commodity prices depressed the demand for farmland in developing countries. When food prices spiked, there was a rush of new investments by corporations, financial investors and sovereign wealth funds, many of which are not directly involved in food production. Vast amounts of land, perhaps equal to the size of Western Europe, have been leased or sold, often without the knowledge or consent of the communities who will be most affected by those decisions.

There are several overlapping challenges here. Land tenure laws are unclear in many countries and often don’t serve to protect small-scale farmers’ interests. Under the customary laws prevalent in many African countries, for example, community elders might sign off on land deals without consulting the people farming those lands, or decisions can be made far up the line in remote bureaucracies. In any case, the assumption that these lands are somehow vacant, blank slates, just waiting for new investments, is often flatly wrong, and expanding industrial agricultural production (often for export) in delicate ecosystems (where farmers may practice shifting cultivation) can have devastating social and environmental impacts.

The failure of international trade rules is a big part of the problem, since they often prohibit governments from taking actions to protect local food supplies and rural communities. The sharp swings in agricultural commodity prices also undermine confidence in the trading system, creating incentives for governments and companies to acquire land abroad to protect their perceived interests. The investment rules contained in the trade agreements (or established as conditions of trade agreements, as in the case of Mexico) protect investors against any changes in rules to prioritize local land ownership, or even to ensure that the investments serve food security or environmental goals.

Those rules also favor banks, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and other investors looking for the next new target for innovative investments, or a means to diversify funding portfolios. The increased demand for biofuels, also driven in large part by rules set in the U.S. and Europe, creates new incentives for investors interested in taking advantage of this huge new market. In many cases, firms purchase land outright or lease it for decades into the future. They are assuming that land prices will continue to rise as pressure for food production increases, and that assumption itself, and the volume of new investments, puts upward pressure on land prices and therefore even greater pressure on farmers around the world.

So the problem is not just, or even primarily, about finding new ways to grow more food, but rather changing the rules of the game so that farmers, whether in Kenya or Kansas, have the right conditions to grow what makes sense to feed their families and their communities. Finding better ways to make sure that farmers can stay on their land is part of the solution. Earlier this year, the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) approved new voluntary guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of Food Security. This week, governments and civil society are debating the next steps in a process to build on the guidelines at the national and international levels.

Farmers around the world are finding ways to respond to increasing climate chaos by diversifying crops, strengthening soils and other agroecological approaches. Without rules that ensure they can stay on the land to make those changes, World Food Day will continue to be about mourning the dire situation of global hunger rather than, one day, celebrating progress in better food systems and the right to food.

 Judge Robert L. Wilkins of the Washington, D.C., district court.

Last week a U.S. federal judge struck down a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rule designed to prevent excessive speculation in agricultural and non-agricultural commodities by Wall Street and its biggest corporate clients. A growing body of peer-reviewed research and public interest analysis has shown how the dominance of financial institution speculation in commodity markets has resulted in structurally higher and more volatile prices. The position limit rule restricts the amount of contracts that can be held by any one trader and its affiliates during a given time period. The rule was scheduled to go into effect on October 12. Agribusiness firms, such as Archer Daniel Midlands and Bunge Ltd., are among the non-banks seeking to delay and weaken rules on over-the-counter  trades (OTC) that are privately negotiated and not reported to regulatory authorities.

IATP, as a member of the Commodity Markets Oversight Coalition (CMOC), has advocated the extension of CFTC position limit rules to include OTC trades. As CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler has stated in dozens of speeches, most recently on October 1 at the Bank of England, the lack of regulation of the OTC markets was a major factor in the financial service industry crisis of 2008-09, triggering the Great Recession in which we are still ensnared.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act authorizes the CFTC to set limits on what percentage of specified commodity contracts can be held by any one entity and its affiliates. The purpose of the position limits rule is to reduce or prevent financial speculation in excess of the liquidity needs of the commodity producers, processors and transporters that are protecting themselves against sudden price increases or decreases in the commodities covered by the rule.

Agricultural contracts, when bundled into commodity index funds, are bet to increase prices, regardless of supply and demand fundamentals. The “weight of money” of unlimited positions drives prices higher than can be explained by market fundamentals. As the banks “roll” in and out of contracts, price volatility increases beyond supply and demand related volatility. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) regards price volatility as a major driver of increased rates of hunger, particularly in developing countries.

According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (not a regulator of these contracts), during the first quarter of 2012, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank and Bank of America were counterparties to 57.3 percent of all OTC contracts. The "Big Four" were dealmakers in 93 percent of all derivatives contracts (OTC plus regulated contracts). These banks, major beneficiaries of the $29 trillion Federal Reserve Bank emergency loan program (which rescued them from bankruptcy), strongly oppose a position limit rule that would reduce their control over the OTC market. (A September 2012 Bank for International Settlements report stated “...we find no evidence that rescued banks reduced the riskiness of their new lending.”)  They joined other bank and non-bank members of the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) in a lawsuit to prevent the implementation of the position limit rule.

On September 28, Judge Robert Wilkins of the Washington, D.C., district court, declared that the CFTC had misinterpreted the Dodd-Frank legislation by not making the rule respond to “ambiguities” he found in the law. Among these ambiguities was whether, as the plaintiffs argued, the words “as appropriate” qualified the “shall” authorizing the CFTC to set position limits only if appropriate, or whether, as the CFTC argued, “as appropriate” applied to the amount of position limits that Congress categorically had obliged the agency to set. Judges customarily defer to federal agency interpretations when the judges find ambiguities in laws. However, Judge Wilkins chose to side with the plaintiff’s claim that “as appropriate” qualified “shall” to mean that the CFTC was not obliged to set position limits. Judge Wilkins, again concurring with the ISDA et al., further ruled the CFTC was obliged to conduct a “necessity finding,” which likely would entail a “complete” cost-benefit analysis demanded by the plaintiffs, before the position limit rule could go into effect. In a 43-page order, he nullified the rule and required the CFTC to revise it in “further proceedings consistent with this Opinion.”

Judge Wilkins rejected the validity of Friend of the Court brief filed by some Democratic Party members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate that affirmed there was no ambiguity in the law and legislative history to authorize the CFTC to set and enforce position limits. Instead, Judge Wilkins concurred with the ISDA and SIFMA argument that the CFTC had to demonstrate that position limits are both “necessary” and “appropriate” to prevent or reduce excessive speculation before it could set, implement and enforce them.

Again, concurring with the plaintiff’s arguments, Wilkins criticized the CFTC for not having conducted “necessity findings” based on cost-benefit analyses for each and every position rule covered contract, as the agency had done for a handful of agricultural contracts from 1938 to 1956. During that time exchanges were required to report all agricultural contract data daily to the CFTC’s predecessor agency. Remarkably, Wilkins ignored the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which authorized the CFTC not to require reporting of OTC data for position limit surveillance by regulators.  The contract specific reported OTC data that would factor into the “complete” cost-benefit analyses the judge and Wall Street demand to justify position limits do not exist as a result of CFMA market deregulation. OTC and index trader data reported monthly to the CFTC since July 2010, as a result of Dodd-Frank, could well be regarded by the judge as an insufficient basis for “complete” cost-benefit analyses.  

John Kemp, Reuters’ peerless commodity markets analyst, has suggested that the most likely viable future for a position limits rule is not judicial but legislative. He proposes that a new bill might pass judicial muster by removing the words “necessity” and “appropriate” from the Dodd-Frank text to clarify the CFTC’s unambiguous authority to set and enforce position limits. Such a bill would be attached by Dodd-Frank supportive legislators to a must-pass piece of legislation, most likely an appropriations bill to keep the government operating.

Kemp is right to forecast that an appeal to the Washington, D.C. Court of Appeals very likely would be in vain. Much of Judge Wilkins’ ruling is justified by reference to Court of Appeals law. As Floyd Norris commented recently in The New York Times, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) efforts to implement Dodd-Frank have been struck down by the Court of Appeals. There is no reason to think that the court would defer to the CFTC’s authority and competence to implement and enforce a position limits rule.

The CFTC could consider answering Judge Wilkins’ challenge by requesting an expedited ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on the position limits rule. Judge Wilkins charged “the agency failed to brings its expertise and experience to bear when interpreting the statute and offered no explanation for how its interpretation comported with the policy objectives of the Act” (at 42). Wilkins reproached the CFTC for relying on a defense that parsed the plain-text meaning of the terms of the Dodd-Frank provisions that authorized the agency to set position limits. Why shouldn’t the CFTC respond to this accusation by showing the Supreme Court how the costs and benefits of industry self-regulation under CFMA failed to achieve the policy objectives of the Commodity Exchange Act, while the historical limits in the rule had achieved those objectives?

Judge Wilkins chose to disregard Dodd-Frank’s legislative history in his decision that Congress did not require the CFTC authority to set and enforce position limits. The Supreme Court could not so readily dismiss legislative history, given its obligation to review appeals within the framework of the U.S. Constitution. For example, the Supreme Court likely would review Judge Wilkins’ ruling to determine whether the CFTC had interpreted Dodd-Frank within the constitutional “Necessary and Proper” clause, and the clause that gives Congress the authority to regulate commerce. Would it be “necessary and proper” for the CFTC to conduct a “necessity test,” documented by a “complete” cost-benefit analysis, before implementing the position limit rule, rather than, as Dodd-Frank requires, providing Congress with a cost-benefit analysis after the rule had been in effect for sufficient time to gather position data and analyze compliance with the rule?

However the CFTC decides to respond to Judge Wilkins’ order, the damage to investors from exchange-managed “position accountability” and other nostrums of financial self-regulation continue to mount. Friend of the Court briefs to a CFTC request for an expedited Supreme Court ruling on the position limit rule should present the costs of deregulation (the benefits for the plaintiffs being well established), as well as the costs and benefits of regulation. Such a presentation can only approximate the “complete” cost-benefit analysis that Judge Wilkins’ order all but requires of a CFTC hamstrung by the CFMA and its exemptions, exclusions, waivers and “no action” letters on Bush administration CFTC rule violations.

There is no certainty that a Supreme Court ruling would establish that the CFTC can set and enforce position limits without doing pre-implementation, cost-benefit analyses, as if OTC and energy trading regulatory evasion authorized by the CFMA had never disappeared the 2000–2010 data needed for such analyses. A more robust presentation on the failure of “position accountability” to prevent excessive speculation, together with detailed costs of that failure, might tip the scales of justice in favor of a ruling that it is “necessary and proper” for the CFTC to set position limits. 

Used under creative commons license from Happy Sleepy.

On Wednesday, September 26 Governor Jerry Brown of California signed the bill AB 685, into law, establishing the policy that every person in California has the right to safe, clean, affordable and accessible water. This is a historic moment in the U.S. debate over the right to water.

The U.S. federal government has not recognized water as a human right, but this policy initiative at the state level could become a turning point as far as water policy and politics goes. It is indeed a step in the right direction, given the concerns about “right to water” violations in California which were raised by the U.N. Special Rapporteur Catalina de Albuquerque following her visit to the United States in 2010.

The bill was authored by assembly member Mike Eng (D-Alhambra) and was co-sponsored by Safe Water Alliance, a coalition which includes many of our allies, and has been advocating for right to water in California for several years. The reach of the bill is extensive, and would help address some of the issues raised in the U.N. report, which identified specific cases where people were denied access to water or had to spend a large percentage of their income to secure water for domestic use.

The bill would “require all relevant state agencies, including the Department of Water Resources, State Water Resources Control Board, and State Department of Public Health, to employ all reasonable means to implement this state policy. Those state agencies would be required to revise, adopt, or establish policies, regulations and grant criteria to further this state policy, to the extent that those actions do not affect eligibility for federal funds.”

Not surprisingly the bill was opposed by almost all established (and powerful) water interests in the state. These include groups such as Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA), which called on the Governor to veto the bill. They were concerned that the bill will prohibit water agencies from turning off the tap of a customer who does not pay the bill, irrespective of her or his ability to pay. Some farm and industrial interests also opposed the bill, fearing that it would add to the regulations with which they have to comply. However, these fears are misplaced, as pointed out by the Safe Water Alliance, “as AB 685 merely underscores what is already required by the” existing “policies and regulations to protect the State’s water resources relied upon as a source of drinking water.”

On World Water Day earlier this year, reflecting on what is at stake in recognizing the right to water, I wrote that “in the absence of effective regulatory frameworks, safeguards and the clear recognition of water as a fundamental human right, corporate interests will continue to supersede marginalized, low-income communities and smallholder farmers.”  While the right to water is now enshrined in international law and in the constitution of several countries (including Bolivia, Congo, Ecuador, South Africa, Uganda and Uruguay), and national legislations of many others, we still have a long way to go globally. At the Food + Justice=Democracy conference last week in Minneapolis, local activists from around the country insisted that policies don’t always need to start at the federal level, they can follow a bottom up approach too.

California has created history by becoming the very first state in the U.S. to recognize human right to water; it need not remain the only state to do so. The way is now open for other states to follow suit.