Thomas Forster: 5 Reasons Why New York City is Ground Zero for Food System Change

posted by brooklynfoodconference, on June 23, 2009

Food Sovereignty Workshop

: Thomas Forster (photo courtesy of Thomas Forster)

Thomas Forster teaches food policy at the New School. He has worked closely with sustainable agriculture, nutrition, anti-hunger and school-food advocates on healthy local food provisions in the 2002 Farm Bill, 2004 Child Nutrition Reauthorization and the 2008 Farm Bill. Below are his remarks from the Food Sovereignty workshop.

It’s hard to follow such an illustrious lineup. This has really been wonderful. Part of my job, as Christina said about my work in general, is to make some links here. It’s music to my ears when DeVanie Jackson talks about how what Brooklyn Rescue Mission is doing is food sovereignty. Just a few years ago, this would not have been the case. John Kinsman (of (Family Farm Defenders) started one of the first rounds of exchange between farmers in the US: cash grade farmers, dairy farmers—just basic family farm agriculture meeting these global social movements. This started in the nineties in the Social Forum, which some of you may know about. That’s where these social movements began to articulate the analysis that we’ve heard from John Kinsman and Débora Nunes da Silva (Landless Peasants of Brazil).

Those principals are held among hundreds and millions of people, which we need to take stock with. You heard the call for a new model for food on a planetary and at all levels local. That’s been out there. You also heard the very eloquent statements about how it’s no longer a lifestyle issue.

That’s very important for the US alternative agricultural movements (there are many and they’re converging), because for 20 years the arrival of organic and even sustainability in agriculture has been more about choice that’s individual, more about market-driven options, less about life and death. For the rest of the world, these issues are life and death. People die because of choices that are not allowed rather than not made individually. That difference is a very important piece for the US, which shoves down our citizens’ throats that it’s all about individual choice—not about structural barriers like race, class, economic or whatever else. That debate is at the fulcrum of change right now.

The reason I came to New York—as Christina said, on the heels of the Farm Bill work and I have had a farm on the West Coast—is that New York is ground zero in this issue area. I’m going to give you five reasons why and invite you to get involved. You already are involved, but you can be on deck even more with just a little extra effort.

Next Saturday, DeVanie’s Brooklyn Rescue Mission—along with Hattie Carthan Garden and the East New York Farms—will host a UN delegate-filled bus on a city farm tour. It comes at the middle of a two-week-long debate that starts on Monday. A thousand people arrive tomorrow to work on these issues for two weeks in New York City. I’ll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute.

First, I’d like to pitch from analysis to action and give you the reasons why New York is really the place to be on all these issues:

New York City is the global center for the architecture on the global food system. We could spend a lot of time on why, but it’s basically because New York has Wall Street, UN headquarters, and the headquarters of certain key big foundations who were the architects of the dominant industrial model that were re-conceived in the seventies as the Green Revolution Take One got established. The institutional structure, the media support, the government support—this is Brain Trust City for that model. Even though Washington actually implemented it and maintained the Washington consensus for the IMF, the WTO and all the other institutions, this is where the idea factory is today and it was then.
New York City is an emerging food-systems reform center. I say that with no hyperbole. From local to state to federal to international—lining up all those levels with local people engaged in all those levels. That’s rare in the US. It’s not so rare in the developing world, interestingly enough. It’s more out in the developing world than the global south that you have that sophisticated lineup from local to national to federal to global. And activists can actually speak the languages at all those levels. That’s happening here.
New York City has a global media impact. We all know it. New York exports really powerful values—sometimes hitting people over the head, sometimes very subtly. No exception on the food system. The message—crafting that starts on Madison Ave. is carried on all the media channels. There’s an engine of productivity here, and it’s wonderful. New York is also the emerging center of an alternative messaging. This city has more food writers, filmmakers and youth voices that are getting out in the blogoshere. There’s more technical expertise on this in New York than in any other city in the US.
New York is at the center of a fast-evolving global financial collapse. That’s a really important reason. It’s a new one, but it’s not new. There is, as a result, a historic opportunity to bow to new ways to do business, to promote a new model for the food system. But unless we citizens are clear enough, sophisticated enough and organized across all sectors to say “It’s time,” it won’t happen. There has to be an outcry like we heard in the debate about the first Paulson bailout when huge numbers of us said “This sucks! This is just a bailout of the system that brought us all the problems.” Well, it’s not too clear whether the subsequent approaches have been any better, but at least there was an outcry. We don’t have that outcry about the food system from the US. We could, and I think we will. If we organize, we will.
New York is one of three global sites where the decisions are being made about a new planetary food-system structure. The other two sites are Geneva and Rome. It’s because of the UN system structure. All the food-based agencies are in Rome. Half the decision-making around the economic and social development programs happen in Geneva. The other half happen in New York City, UN headquarters. The global decision-making around how to manage the food crisis is right here. The global task force for UN system response to the food crisis is based in New York and Geneva. Rome was been out-placed a little a year ago after there were food riots in the capitals of 30 countries. It’s like what happens in the US when there’s a natural disaster. The states go to the Feds and say, “FEMA, help us. We need emergency status.” With the food riots, the member countries asked the UN in New York for help and the response was a Task Force on the Global Food Crisis. But it is a flawed response and is the subject of hot debate within all the UN system, all the UN member states and civil society.

Who in the US knows this debate is so hot? Not too many. If you want to find out more about it, you can go to Web sites where it is very out there and visible. One of them is right here with World Hunger Year (WHY). The US Working Group on the Food Crisis is a national, less-than-a-year-old response of civil society in the US to meet global civil society and have more than just a conversation and analysis, but also organize around certain things. Some of you may have been at the World Foodless Day [video] in October that WHY and many others organized in Manhattan. A lot has unfolded since then. There’s an opportunity for engagement every few months. Each one of these UN capitals has different things going on all the time. New York isn’t any exception. In March there was an important high-level panel on the human right to food.

But there is a converging going on outside of governments. In the US, it’s a convergence between community “food security” and “food justice” (a more recent emergence) around the right to food, access to food and the disparities that are class and race. It’s urban and rural, but there’s really an urban voice rising. Canada is talking about “food democracy.” And around the world, you have “food sovereignty.” All of these exist under this rights-based framework for food-systems reform. Again, New York is the place where that fusion is possible in ways that it isn’t possible in other parts of the world for lots and lots of reasons.

The Commission on Sustainable Development [About the CSD | 2009 Schedule] is, relative to other parts of the UN, very open to social movements in civil society. I’m a long-time worker in the CSD, along with my colleague, Arthur Getz from Heifer, another who goes back to the Earth Summit. The CSD was launched 17 years ago, so this is now CSD 17 opening its doors on Monday for two weeks. There are thousands of people involved. There are nine teams of civil society groups: workers in trade unions, women, youth, NGOs, local authorities (which is really important because cities and states are not member s of the UN, so they get to work on these issues. They’re one of these nine major groups.) These are trans-national sectors that are organized to influence government outcomes.

Why did I get into that? Because at this CSD, after many, many years of working on this without being able to talk to our own government very easily about many of these issues, we have a new day. For the first time the Secretary of Agriculture is sending his deputy [Kathleen Merrigan] to Mexico next week to work with something that is being called just to keep in the narrow shoals between some hot points: urban/rural partnerships for food security and vibrant markets. This is a frame that is actually very useful because we are talking about local and regional food systems. We’re talking about what farmers need for fair prices, what urban residents need for affordable food, that it has to be healthy, accessible. All those issues are under the CSD.

But what’s really important is that it’s about local authorities in partnership with civil society asking national governments of the world, “Listen, you guys can’t move as fast as we need to move.” (This was similar in the climate debate, by the way.) “So let cities and their partners at the ground level have more space to do what they need to do and more resources, more recognition, more enabling policy, which isn’t substance but could cost some dollars, something for new infrastructure.

New York is doing this in ways that are really powerful right now. For example, it’s calling for a half billion dollar redevelopment of Hunts Point, the largest distribution center for food in the country, perhaps globally. But we have to make food distribution work for farmers markets, for farm to school, for farm to hospital, for farmers who are small, who are family farmers, immigrant farmers marketing at bodegas as well as to the larger retail chain stores.

So if you’re interested, go to www.sustainablefoodmonitor.org where you can see events you can participate in.

Find Out What Happened at CSD-17

Official Summary. “Making urban market facilities accessible to regional and local producers will create urban-rural linkages that could slow rural-to-urban migration, stimulate local economic development, and strengthen food security.” (Vision statement from Chair Gerda Verburg) Full Summary (PDF)
Brooklyn Farms Teach UN Delegates Lessons on Sustainability. Sara Chrisman’s May 26th blog on civileats. more
Signs of Change or More of the Same: Notes from CSD 17. Notes from Peter Mann, Co-director of the WHY Global Movements Program. more
Overturning the False Solutions to the Food Crisis. The global food crisis should bring everyone together—governments, UN agencies, civil society and busines, says Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau, but mega ag is using the crisis to push for more mega ag. more

Sustainable Food Monitor. A project of IPSA (International Partners for Sustainable Agriculture). Many reports on CSD, plus related speeches and videos. more

Workshop Description: Food Sovereignty North and South: People’s Control over their Own Food. Food sovereignty—a people’s right to decide their agricultural and food policy—has become a guiding concept of farmers’ efforts to transform the worldfood system. Learn about organizations that are leading these efforts internationally.

Other Speakers: Débora Nunes da Silva (Landless Peasants of Brazil), John Kinsman (Family Farm Defenders), the Reverend DeVanie Jackson (Brooklyn Rescue Mission). Moderator: Christina Schiavoni (World Hunger Year)

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