“I’m in Western Kansas, I have a meat company in Colorado Springs and so you all know that I’m in the Fox News, Rush Limbaugh land,” said Mike Callicrate. “We hear about Occupy Wall Street not in a good way. So what I say to people: What I see happening with Occupy Wall Street is a transition taking place, from people being these ravenous, aggressive, price shopping consumers transitioning and transforming into citizens.”
He says we need antitrust laws to prevent monopolization. Of the four companies that supply eighty percent of meat in this country as other alluded to by others, Callicrate highlighted a nationalized Brazilian company, JBS, which he says contributes to the decline of family farms. “In the last thirty years we have lost ninety percent of our pork producers. In the last thirty years we’ve lost over forty percent of our ranchers; we’ve lost over eighty percent of our dairymen because of big, corporate, abusive power."
Calcitrate was one of two farmer-speakers that has been involved in legal battles with a major food company. In 1996 Callicrate and other ranchers sued IBP (now Tyson) for violating anti-competition laws set under the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act. Although the case was won, it was later reversed. The ranchers were in turn forced to pay 80 thousand dollars for Tyson’s legal expenses. When it was subsequently taken to Supreme Court, it lost precedence to an Anna Nicole Smith case, he says.
Jim Gerritson, a seed farmer from Maine and president of Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, has led a suit of 83 plaintiffs against the major food company, Monsanto. “If you take the memberships of all the 83 plaintiffs, we represent over 300 thousand people." The case involves the contamination of local farms by GMO seeds from Monsanto. The case began last winter at a federal court in Manhattan, he says, by a public patent foundation. The way Monsanto sees it, he says, family farmers are subject to patent infringement litigation if Monsanto’s GMO seed goes from “Monsanto’s side of the fence” to theirs and the farmers don’t pay royalties for it. “We may end up losing our farms through bankruptcy just trying to clear our names.” Gerritson says that a lawyer has found substance to say that Monsanto has filed mistakes while filing their patents and that the patents issued to them by the U.S. Patent Office are invalid.
It was apparent that most of the people there in La Plaza Cultural on 9th Street between avenues B and C were not just the people from Zuccotti Park but were particularly active in the food justice movement. Though some of these people had come from farms elsewhere in the Northeast, others were active in urban farming and food policy, and most people were young. “We all know that the average farmer in this country is 57 years old,” said Severine von Tscharner, a Hudson Valley farmer behind the film, The Greenhornes. “Twenty percent don’t know who that land they’re farming will go towards. We’re here to say we want to farm that land; we want to farm it well and sustainably and we don’t want anymore corn.” Tscharner says that the amount of young farmers under 35 recently went in a two year period from “a mere three percent of farmers to six percent of farmers.” Though this drew applause from the crowd, it was still not enough for Tscharner, who believes that we need young people to take on the challenge. “Maybe you would consider this project of reclaiming our land: reclaiming Main Street, starting businesses and becoming very practically involved in the every day logistics of fixing America.” In addition, she said, they can take part in national Farm Bill politics, which “is coming up next year.”
If the most macro-political diagnosis given to the food system is that the one percent of food producers have all the power and abuse it, then some of the more micro diagnoses include the staggering health problems in low-income communities. Karen Washington has been bringing food justice to Tremont in The Bronx for over twenty years establishing community gardens and since 2003, a farmers market. The Bronx is “one of the poorest congressional districts in the country,” Washington says. “Yet, I’m only a block, a mile away from the biggest, industrial food terminal in Hunts Point. A place where I cannot get that food. But yet the people in my neighborhood are starving... are the statistics that you hear when it comes to hypertension, diabetes and heart disease.” Washington challenges the concept that “poor people don’t want to have good food; poor people can’t afford to eat good food.” Washington insists that communities should be educated on why carrots at the farmers market may cost two dollars instead of 99 cents, that a farmer traveled 500 miles to get there, had to pay tolls et cetera.
Likewise, Jalal Akbar Sabur of the Freedom Food Alliance spoke to building solidarity between food justice communities, farmers and farm-workers. He said that the day prior people from Occupy The Bronx were arrested in trying to protect the Morning Glory Farm. This was just an example of issues that people on different parts of the food justice and food enthusiast spectrum should be aware of if they are to help each other, according to Sabur. “A lot of times the farmer in Iowa doesn’t know that the kid in the hood is getting stopped and frisked everyday... I understand that farmers can barely survive making a living, that they have to work a job outside of the farm... We want to make sure that the foodies understand what the farm-workers go through and that the CIW,” (Coalition for Immokalee Workers) “in Florida, that they’re working on a farm and they can’t get equal rights.”
Fracking entered the arena as someone in the crowd mentioned that big drilling companies have been leasing up farmland all over America such as in the southern tier of New York and in Pennsylvania. “Those of us who are running farms in different parts of the region,” said Severine von Tscharner, “are having to compete with the drillers and are then surrounded by the tanks and the effluent and the pipelines and the huge rigs of trucks, the millions of gallons of contaminated, radioactive water that are pumped out of these [gas] wells and the fumes that are in the wind and when you’re trying to grow gorgeous produce it’s not so wonderful.” Natural gas companies may offer several hundreds of dollars per acre to many thousands. She elaborated on Hurricane Irene and how that devastated upstate farms, that it made it even more difficult to compete with those leases.
Just as the Occupy movement has a reputation for being extremely general in its motives and visions, the food justice movement itself is too large for one act. As it wound down so that the march could commence people chucked in other things such as vegetarianism and veganism, GMO labeling and greenwashing in the food business. The congregation then marched southeast to march through another green space that looked like a converted lot. The East Village and Lower East Side have various community gardens and substantial food activism.
Comments