Women farmers are leading the way in the sustainable ag revolution, as the CS Monitor noted last week. I first wrote about this movement back in 2005, and met one of its leaders when we traveled to Iowa in 2007: Denise O'Brien (pictured right, with me), founder of the Women, Food & Agriculture Network. Denise is just back from the Midwest Organic Farming Conference, where the mother of all treehuggers, Vandana Shiva, was one of the keynote speakers. We're pleased to share this dispatch from Eating Liberally's favorite farminist:
Obama's selection of GMO-lovin', bio-fuelish, feedlot-friendly Tom Vilsack for Secretary of Agriculture drew a resounding "Bleech!" from the blogosphere this week. Vilsack has a long history of Agribiz alliances that's giving progressive foodies a bad case of heartland heartburn.
Eating Liberally Food For Thought
by Kerry Trueman This week, a Q & A with our favorite Iowa farminist, sustainable agriculture advocate Denise O'Brien (pictured right, with me), who sets down her spade to take up our questions about all things ag, including the implications of Obama's remaining cabinet appointments:
KAT: Progressive foodies have been vigorously debating the "who should be Obama's Secretary of Agriculture?" question for several months now. There's been a movement to draft Michael Pollan, who has no interest in the job, and a letter to President-elect Obama, signed by nearly ninety luminaries in the good food movement galaxy, imploring him to buck the Big Ag/biotech brigade in favor of some more sustainably-minded candidates. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof weighed in on the subject this week with a terrific column explaining why this appointment is so critical.
This is all well and good, but we want to know what you think. Big Ag had a big fit back in 2006 when you ran for Iowa's Secretary of Ag and nearly beat your Republican opponent, a conventional commodity crop farmer. You went on to advise John Edwards about food and ag policy. What are you hoping for from this new administration?
Most folks are assuming that the catastrophic floods in Iowa are a natural disaster, caused simply by too much rainfall. But, leaving aside the question of whether climate change is partly to blame for all that rain, a growing number of environmental experts suspects that the flooding may have been caused in part by agricultural practices that have severely impaired the landscape's ability to absorb excess rainwater. As the Washington Post reported last Thursday, "Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed," and added that "Between 2007 and 2008, farmers took 106,000 acres of Iowa land out of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep farmland uncultivated...That land, if left untouched, probably would have been covered with perennial grasses with deep roots that help absorb water."
So now that we're looking at some four million acres of washed out crops, the New York Times reports that Senator Charles Grassley (R, Iowa) is calling on the USDA "to release tens of thousands of farmers from contracts under which they had promised to set aside huge tracts as natural habitat," so that they can plant more corn.
This sounds like a really bad idea if the loss of water-absorbing habitat is what made the floods so severe in the first place. But what do I know? I'm not an Iowa farmer. Happily, though, I know someone who is--Denise O'Brien, the organic farmer who ran for Secretary of Agriculture in Iowa in 2006 and nearly won, with 49% of the vote. So I asked Denise for her thoughts on what role industrial agriculture might have played in this disaster.
As luck would have it, Denise just had a letter to the editor published in Sunday's Des Moines Register addressing this very subject, so she forwarded it to me and I'm reprinting it here, in the hopes that more people will consider the possibility that these floods were as much an act of man as an act of God:
(kat: Iowa farminist & sustainable ag advocate Denise O'Brien, founder of the Women, Food & Agriculture Network, recently attended a meeting in Mexico City with Central American women farmers. Upon arriving, her contingent encountered a group of Mexican protesters who'd lost their land to a corrupt politican. Denise provided us with the following account--and photo:)
We came together in Mexico City on the day before All Souls Day, Halloween in the United States. Arriving from El Salvador, Iowa, Honduras, Georgia, Grenada, New York, Wisconsin and Mexico. Farmers, rural and urban women, activists and organizers all gathering to discuss and analyze what impact globalization has had on our communities, on our lives. Travel for some was long and difficult - having to come from remote areas and having experienced being robbed of all money and material goods. Coming with a sense of urgency to discover how our lives connected and how we could attempt to overcome the challenges in our communities.
Chilo, a wonderful anthropologist and activist, oriented us to the culture of the Day of the Dead. She explained how Christianity and Indigenous beliefs intersected to create an honoring of those who have come before us. The traditional mood for this holiday is bright with emphasis on celebrating and honoring the lives of the dead. This is because they think of The Day of the Dead as the continuation of life. They believe that death is not the end, but the beginning of a new stage in life. These people are usually Christians of Native American descent whose ancestors introduced indigenous ideas of life after death. Many questions were asked and some found it difficult to understand how this pagan event could have anything to do with Christian beliefs.
