Seattle Community Meeting & People's Summit
Last week I attended the community meeting of the Community Alliance for Global Justice (CAGJ) in Seattle. The evening included great food, provocative conversation, and a report back from Community Food Security Coalition's 13th Annual Conference, From Commodity to Community: Food Politics and Projects in the Heartland. The meeting was held at the New Hope Baptist Church in the central district and featured an Ethiopian veggie feast from Mesob restaurant. Being one who can never turn down Ethiopian food (it was excellent) I attended and met some really cool people and learned a lot.
Community to Community
CAGJ is a Seattle-based coalition of people and organizations working to promote "social justice, environmental sustainability, democracy and self-determination". Their roots trace back to the organizing behind the infamous "Battle in Seattle" WTO protests of 1999. In the search for meaningful ways to continue the work that was started in that year, the CAGJ was born, and today continues with a strong focus in the multi-faceted arena of food sovereignty and food justice. At this year's conference the CAGJ was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 1st Annual Food Sovereignty Prize, for their work in the community.
Good Food, the Movie
I got to the meeting a little early, so I made myself useful by helping set out the food, and soon enough people started showing up. Sitting at the table with me I was pleased to find Mark, Bill, and Melissa, producers of Good Food, The Movie, an official selection of the Seattle Film Festival. I'd been following their story for a long time so it was really cool to sit and talk with them. I asked Mark at one point, what was the premise of the film, and he explained that they'd realized that simply "there are people doing good stuff", and they wanted to make a film about it. They'd started out with an idea to look at sustainable agriculture world-wide, but found that they could focus just on the local region, and in fact sustainability is an issue that must be looked at from a local perspective. The question they wanted to leave with you the viewer is, what does it take to build a local food system, after 60 years of an industrial agriculture system?
Good Food, the Movie - PBS network premiere, Wed. Nov. 12, 10 p.m. KCTS Seattle
If you don't live in the Seattle area you can still purchase the film from their official web site, but be sure to ask your local PBS station to air the film. It's people like you who will make this important movie a success.
Community Food Conference
The 13th annual conference of the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) was held at Des Moines, Iowa, Oct. 10-13, timed to coincide with the World Food Prize and Iowa Hunger Summit conferences. More on these in a bit. The conference program is well worth reading, and attendees from the CAGJ talked a lot about the workshops, plenaries, and the incredible networking. Luminaries attending included Secretary of Agriculture and former Iowa governor ('99-'07) Tom Vilsack, who spoke and took questions from a skeptical audience. Vilsack got a question from Jeffrey Smith, author of the book Seeds of Deception, who asked about suppressed research into genetically modified foods. Vilsack danced around the question with industry-speak about feeding a hungry planet and got some boos from the audience.
Boulder County Beet Battle
Cynthia Torres, of CFSC Boulder was there to talk about her work with the Boulder County Food & Agriculture Policy Council, which was tasked with making recommendations on the disposition of 24,000 acres of public farm land. GMO sugar beet seed producer Monsanto was working hard to convert the land to GM production, having already secured 95% of sugar beet production. Eventually, despite a deck clearly stacked in Monsanto's favor, the council voted no, helping farmers to instead focus on ways to use the existing infrastructure to find alternative crops.
Mattapan Food Desert
Another inspiring story from the conference was the Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition. Mattapan is a community of over 40,000 souls on the outskirts of Boston. A largely immigrant community, Mattapan has no groceries and the highest obesity rate in the Boston area. The coalition set out to bring a Farmers Market to the community and develop a fitness program, and confronted local businesses on providing better food choices to the community, even getting a restaurant to stop advertising its "Heart Attack Sub".
Food Policy Council
CAGJ also works with the CFSC and the local Seattle/King County Acting Food Policy Council (AFPC), which is working to develop a regional Food Policy Council (FPC). If at this point your head starts to swim in the alphabet soup of acronyms that's behind the food movement, you're not alone! Even the panelists mentioned that (A) we need better names for all these things, and (B) it's kind of frustrating to be overwhelmed with so much information and yet make such slow progress. But the good news is that the FPC seems to be working. The FPC basically sits between the grassroots and government, and normally meetings of this sort end up in paralysis, with lots of agencies in attendance but nobody able to actually do anything. Some people at the meeting had just been to the local FPC meeting and said that, amazingly, they got a lot of work done. There's supposed to be a report out soon, so watch for that on the AFPC web site.
AGRA Watch
Juxtaposed against the conference was the World Food Prize, the biotech conference keynoted by Bill Gates. The Gates Foundation is pouring money into biotech as a solution to the food crisis, particularly in Africa. Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) was formed by the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and is chaired Kofi Annan. Agra is known as "the new Mafia in Africa". More charitably, CAGJ's Agra Watch feels that "Gates failed to look at issues on the ground before investing". Attendees of both conferences got to intermingle and had some interesting exchanges.
Food Rebellion
The US Working Group on the Food Crisis had a network event featuring Food Rebellions co-author Eric Holt-Giménez. They talked about the perceptions behind the words "sovereignty" and "justice". Here in the north we talk about justice because sovereignty carries no meaning. In the global south, that has always known hegemony, the word has profound meaning that everyone instinctively understands.
People's Summit
To mark the anniversary of the 1999 WTO riots, CAGJ is now working on the People's Summit, aka Seattle Plus 10, to be held from November 27th through December 5th. Events will include workshops, teach-ins, strategy sessions, and a mock trial to help prepare for the US Justice Departments investigations into anti-trust activities in the dairy, meat, and seed industries (yay!). Perhaps most exciting, Democracy Now's Amy Goodman will be speaking at Town Hall November 27th, in a benefit for KBCS radio (one of my favorite stations).
Amy Goodman will be speaking at Town Hall Nov. 27
Please be sure to bookmark and follow the summit and share with your friends. If you can make it to Seattle, I hope to see you at the summit!
Posted by LocaVori on November 1, 2009 at 7:33 p.m..
