Book. They did not even graduate from high school. His father encouraged them if they had some interesting project, he would say stay home and do that do not go to school. He knew how bright they were. Wilbur was a genius. Orville was very bright and inventive mechanically, but he did not have the reach of mind that wilbur had. They loved music. They loved books. Nathaniel hawthorne was orvilles favorite writer. Catherine loved sir walter scott. Their brothers gave her a bust of sir walter scott. They were living in this little house with no running water, no indoor plumbing and they are giving a bust of a great english literary giant to their sister for her birthday present. There is a lot of hope in that. I think what i would like to get to know even more about was the sense of purpose they had. It sounds like a bad pun, but high purpose. Not something ordinary a bigger idea. Nothing was going to stop them. Sunday night at 8 00 eastern and pacific on cspans q a. The Harvard Food Law Society and the food literacy project hosted a conference on food law. Two antihunger activists talking about food access is a human right. We will hear from Molly Anderson and the author of the book diet for a small planet. This is an hour and a half. Host hi, everyone. We are going to get started. If you have a cell phone on, please turn it off. Thank you. As i think you are all aware this is one of our keynote talks entitled, the human rights of food. We have two amazing speakers with us today Molly Anderson. She is currently at the college of the atlantic. She teaches about hunger, Food Security, Food Sovereignty system dynamics, sustainability metrics, and how industrialized countries will move to a postpetroleum food system. She is part of an International Panel of experts on the food system. There is a film that was prepared for this conference that we will be showing tomorrow as part of the keynote, and hopefully be putting it online for all of you. We are also joined by the coauthor of 18 books, including the 3 million copy diet for a small planet. She was named by gourmet magazine as one of 25 people who have changed the way america eats. She won a silver medal from the independent book publisher awards. She is the cofounder of three organizations, including food first and the small planet institute, which she leads with her daughter, anna. She also heads of fund that channels resources to democratic programs worldwide. Police join me in welcoming both of our speakers and we will start with ms. Anderson. [applause] molly thank you and good afternoon to all of you. It is a real honor to copresent with frankie. I see her as one of the pioneers of food justice. She brought our attention a long time ago to ways that policies and eating patterns in this country are affecting the prospects of justice for people in poor countries and what we can learn from people in other countries. Im delighted to be here. I want to start with a few observations about why food justice seems to be rising to right now, why it is on so many peoples minds. I think first is the growing awareness of racism and racial inequity in this country. Ferguson was certainly a flash point for that. With ferguson came the realization, for many of us, that black youths were being massacred by state forces with virtual impunity. This has been going on for a long time, continuing an ugly legacy of lynching in this country. I think food justice is also benefiting from the attention to global inequity in access to resources. At this point, 80 people have the same wealth as the bottom 3. 5 billion in the world. Oxfam, in its many incarnations, has been raising awareness aboutnequity and doing a pretty good job. I think there has also been a maturation of efforts in this country to address food issues. Its related to a global upsurge in demands for Food Sovereignty. I will be coming back to Food Sovereignty, but first, i want to talk about what i mean by maturation of the conversation. How has the conversation about food justice changed over the last few decades . When i worked in the boston area, local food was exploding on the national scene. Many people saw localism, direct marketing, farmers markets as a pathway to justice because finally farmers would stand a better chance of Getting Better economic returns, and customers would be reconnected with farmers. The conversation moves on to healthy food as people realize that local food is not particularly accessible to many low Income Customers due to cost and availability. I think it is well intentioned but sometimes goes astray from what low Income Customers really want and need. Its a kind of colorblind policy. Hardly anybody in the United States is eating enough fresh fruits and vegetables, so better accessibility to healthy food, the argument goes, is going to help everyone. Then people said wait a minute. Its not just healthy food, its their food, affordable food, green food, humane food, food raised with humane practices. And we saw the conversation moving on to real food and good food, and i think there will be a presentation i am not sure if she is here yet, but talking about real food tomorrow. Then we started paying attention to the systematic barriers and underlying causes of food problems. These are some of the reports coming out over the past decade. We have been looking at root causes, not just symptoms, like lack of access to healthy food and this shifted the conversation into issues of food power, the concentration of wealth and power in the food system nationally, and why corporations have increasing control over what we eat as well as how they have greater control over let me escape from that over the International Food system as well. We see this playing out in free trade agreements now. With strands from Food Sovereignty, the discussion now, i think, is moving into issues of food governance, food democracy, and who decides what people eat. This is a recent publication on deepening food democracy. Going back to my title, how is food justice connected to the right to food . What does food justice really require of all of us sitting here . As i see it, food justice requires first of all, attention to the history of structural violence and oppression in our country. These are the words of policy link. Racial discrimination that continues to work out and working conditions that is the real reality of our food systems now. Current food systems have been shaped by historical practices and policies that systemically oppressed communities of color. Doing food justice also requires Greater Transparency about economic and social consequences of food system practices. Who is getting richer from these practices . Who is getting poorer . This goes back to the idea that 80 people fit on one bus. They are making money from food systems and the sale of food. It requires accountability to those who have not been well served by our food system. This accountability is served by constant reflection on the root causes of food injustice. Its incumbent on white people to understand the many ways we may be benefiting from quite white people to understand the many ways we may be in a fitting from injustice. It means making opportunities for meaningful voice and engagement by those who have not then heard, who have borne the most costs of the third not been heard, who have borne the most costs of the food system. Finally, it requires partnerships in solidarity with low income communities and communities of color. I am not talking about Charitable Services or providing what we think they want. Im talking about engagement to truly learn from impoverished communities and communities of color, and to support them. In 2008, i try to envision an alternative to marketbased solutions, which seemed to be sucking all the air out of the room at that time. And to some extent continue to do so. These marketbased solutions included direct marketing, labels, and new ways to give consumers more choice so they could vote with their forks. It seemed obvious to me that the market was never going to deliver justice and obvious that local foods were not necessarily environmentally beneficial or fair. So i wrote a paper on rightsbased food systems. The basic idea is that our current food system violates human rights on every front, farmers, workers, citizens hungry people, and food system reform means a transformation of the conditions two conditions under which all human rights are for filled. Of course, the rights of animals and the rights of nature are already being violated, but there is not as clear an agreement about with these rights are. Human rights, in contrast, our agreedupon International Goals ever since 1948 and the universal declaration on human rights, which our first lady at the time, eleanor roosevelt, was instrumental in helping to craft. Cases have been brought to National Courts to protect the rights to food successfully. Human rights are indivisible and inalienable. Because of this, it seems to me that rightsbased food systems might have the potential to be a unifying goal across different Food Movements, to bridge groups that were fighting each other, that were working in isolation for their own independent goals, also fighting with each other for funding and for legislative attention. I wanted them to be working together better. But rights raised food systems did not get much attention. Heifer international briefly considered revising their food program around this concept, but otherwise, it didnt even seem to ripple the water, which got me thinking about, why not . The first thing i went to was the lack of understanding in the United States of economic, cultural, and social rights. The United States is horribly separated from other countries in ratifying human rights treaties and conventions. This goes back to 1966 and the cold war. Two covenants on human rights were developed. The United States took a position that economic and cultural rights were best met by the market. The United States wanted to distinguish itself from socialist countries. This reflects, i think, a fundamental misunderstanding. You cannot just cherry pick human rights. We have abundant evidence that the market does not work in this way to provide these kind of rights. It has to be directed by an reined in by public policy. Unlike most other countries in the world, we lacked basic Public Policies to ensure economic, social, cultural rights. For those of you in the back this map is showing the countries who have endorsed this covenant, and those that havent. You see that the United States has failed to ratify the covenant. In terms of food, the United States still uses a charitable approach to address Food Insecurity. Assistance programs are a wonderful stopgap, but they are doled out at the whim of congress, and congress is pretty meanspirited right now. Ngos have pioneered programs to increase access to food that range from bounty box in boston or other voucher systems that low income people can use, to Better School options and cleaning, to healthy food prescriptions underwritten by Health Insurance plans. Recently, there is a lot of interest in redirecting food that was otherwise going to be wasted onto the plates of low income people. These are wellintentioned programs, but this is not a rightsbased approach. Poor people need and want to exactly the same food rich people want. They really dont want our food waste. Poor children, in particular [applause] they need guaranteed access to healthy food in order to grow into healthy adults. Yet, according to the latest usda data that is available, one in five children in the United States lives in a food insecure household that does not have guaranteed access to healthy food at all times. In half of these households, children as well as adults are food insecure, going without the food they need. While local programs can definitely improve access to healthy food for limited populations they will not result , they will never result in the elimination of hunger and Food Insecurity. Other countries that have recognized the right to food on a National Scale and are using rightsbased approaches to improve their food systems have shown dramatic results, dramatic increases in Food Insecurity even when the country is far less wealthy than the United States. In the United States, household Food Insecurity rates have remained static or increased since reliable measures were implemented in the mid1990s. Unlike brazil a great example which frankie will be coming unlike brazil a great example which frankie will be coming back to the United States does not have federal programs to eliminate hunger and Food Insecurity, but only to dampen the most corrosive effects. This is not right. This probably occurred to you folks already, but the other obvious reason why the idea of rightsbased foods systems never took office because it didnt have the support of people on the ground. It was just my idea expressed in an academic paper in a journal and social change doesnt happen that way. It doesnt happen because some academic comes up with an idea. It happens because a group of people find a common cause. Thats where i want to focus for the rest of my talk. The place i see this happening most visibly today is the global level, in the committee on world Food Security. Since 2009, the committee on world Food Security has become the premier International Forum for discussion of issues of Food Security. The cfs was reformed in 2009 so that the people who are on the front lines of hunger, the people who are working with Civil Society through social movements made up of smallscale workers, fishers, farmers, women, indigenous people, urban poor, use, landless people, are all working together and speaking on food issues in this global forum. They have full participation in every activity up to voting, and which is reserved for member countries. This is appropriate because it is the National Governments that are responsible for implementing policies to protect hungry people. All of the decisions and recommendations of the committee on world Food Security must be congruent with the right to food. This is part of the reform. The decisions must consider the best evidence, which is assembled through a panel of high level experts with equitable gender and regional representation, and from Civil Society organizations. Every year, the committee on world Food Security has grown. In october 2014, this was the breakdown. Nearly 800 representatives of the committee on world Food Security stakeholder groups, thats governments, Civil Society, the private sector, International Regional organizations, nearly 800 people showed up for this big weeklong meeting in rome. It included 223 individuals from 127 different Civil Society organizations and academic institutions. I was there. I brought eight students along and they had a wonderful time. The Civil Society mechanism, the organizing body for Civil Society, had 151 individuals from 80 organizations. The private sector had 91 individuals from 71 organizations. Again, their representation is growing every year. You are probably wondering well, what do you talk about for a whole week . Some of the things they talked about you can find a report online some of the things they talked about was the progress made since the 10 years internationally guidelines were created. They talked about accountability. They talked about the critical importance of smallscale farmers to feed the world, and are basically the people feeding the world now. They talked about the kinds of investment needed in agriculture, and how that investment should be regulated. They talked about the role of fisheries and aqua culture in Food Insecurity, and what can be done with food waste. The committee on world Food Security, beyond these separate topics, allowed conflicts in worldview and conflicts in how people interpret the evidence before us. Scientific evidence is not cut and dry, really. It allows conflicts to be aired and discussed with the people who are actually suffering from hunger able to say here is how we see it and here is how we are impacted by these policies that you people are implementing. Food sovereignty is one of the banners under which Civil Society organizations organize the committee on world Food Security and around the world. Food sovereignty is an International Movement started by smallscale farmers. Increasingly, it is being adopted by other groups. Its advocates include millions of small scale farmers and fishers joined by colleges of agriculture, womens rights, and indigenous peoples. Detailing what Food Sovereignty means in practice is rich and exciting. There were two fantastic conferences over the last calendar year, one in yell at yale, and one in the netherlands. They brought together practitioners and academics, and there was a recent conference in mali that came out with a declaration on agriecology as the preferred practice for smallscale farmers around the world. Its a vision of a system that people want, in harmony with nature, and in harmony with each other. This work is beginning in the United States and may eventually result in an enlightened food policy, such as the one that has been developed by our neighbors in the north, in canada. This is resetting the table, and there are several other examples of food policy that have then developed. A really wonderful contrast to the farm bill. Before turning the floor over to frankie, i want to lead you leave you with just a few thoughts. First, the United States has much to learn from other countries in their approaches to food justice, in particular, the United States would benefit from studying how other countries have implemented the right to food. It is no mystery. Steps have been laid out clearly in many documents including the voluntary guidelines on implementing the right to food established in 2004. It is simply a matter of political will and national priorities. As we work on food justice, we need a clear vision of the kind of society we want. This vision can draw from the concept of Food Sovereignty, but our vision will be unique. The vision and the action to make the vision real must be shared across different races, kinds of people, and interest groups. We simply cannot afford to be split into factions and to fight against each other. The struggle for healthy food is joined at the hip with struggles for debt free, open access higher education. For affordable housing. For Climate Change. Mitigation and adaptation. For health. For living wages. For public transportation. For womens rights. For voters rights. For Campaign Finance reform. All of these movements are inseparable. What this means practically is that you need to find people who share your values, your passions, your heart, and figure out what you can do together to make a difference. Start working, even if you dont have all the answers. Evaluate who is benefiting from your work and who is suffering and keep trying to make spaces for people who are being left out of your vision. Keep working until you can see Real Progress toward food democracy and the right to food. I want to thank all of you for the work that you are doing and for being here for this conference, and i would like to turn things over to frankie. [applause] francis molly, thank you so much for your unending leadership. I am so delighted to share the podium with you. So. I want to share with you three parts this afternoon. First, i want to recognize that in humanitys path to making food a protected right, which, arguably, i think should be the most basic of all since we cannot enjoy other human rights without it, i want to start at square one. What is the extent of the problem we are hoping to solve . Then i would like to take you with me to a delightful moment in my life when i would see an taste food as a human right in brazil. Finally, briefly, i want to share with you one of the lessons i am learning and how what are the lessons i am learning and how they have changed me. Are you having trouble hearing me . Should i give up on this . I will give up on this. [laughter] all of you on cspan watching this, i hope you forgive me. Molly and i were part of what i think of as an International Cabal starting in 2012 of people who found ourselves incredibly disturbed by the realization that humanity still lacks a meaningful measure of hunger. Here is what happened. We sought messages coming through the media from agricultural saw messages coming through the media from Agricultural Organizations that were so positive. We were hearing we are well on our way to meeting millennial goals. If we just have a small uptick in economic growth, we will be there. We learned by 2014 that developing countries had cut the share of hungry people by 42 compared to 1990. That sounds like amazing progress. Amazing progress. Yes, true, still 800 Million People hungry, but amazing progress. We felt something was off, so we dug deeper. We realized it was measuring progress by the number of hungry people, rather than the percentage of population, which i personally feel is a more accurate measure. If you tell a hungry person you are a smaller share of the total, it is not going to make them less hungry. We looked at the number, and we realize that if we took progress measured by the number of hungry people rather than the percentage, the drop since 1990 is not 42 , but 21 . Then we asked, is it widespread over the world . If you take china out of the picture, the actual drop in the number of hungry people in the developing world since 1990 is about 7 . Yes, it is progress, but not nearly what the world needs in this single measure of calorie deficiency. If we look at the fao measure and this is what we really honed in on, how the Food Agricultural Organization at the u. N. Defines hunger you have to be below a very low minimum for more than a year. Think of what that means. You could be below that minimum for only the entire lean season between harvests, and you are not counted as hungry. You could be pregnant and go through your entire pregnancy below that level, and you still would not be captured through that measure of hunger. It seems entirely too strict because we know that even shortterm hunger can have devastating effects on a developing fetus, on anyone compromised by disease, and on children. We realized, too, that there is another big reason why the Standard Measure used by the food and Agricultural Organization is limited. It is strictly about calories. And as we know, and molly strongly alluded to, we know that calories and nutrition are disconnecting in the world today. I recommend a new study in lancet that looked at this globally and said that worldwide, poor Nutritional Foods are outpacing any improvements in most regions of the world. So, what happening then is that calories and nutrition are very separate things. One could be getting more than enough calories and not have the nutrition that we need. Of course, that is true in the United States, where Something Like 40 of the calories that our children eat are nutritionally empty. That now lets look at the applications for a country like india. Now, officially, with the calorie measure of hunger, one in seven indians is hungry. But if you look at nutrition think for a minute that it is almost unbelievable, four in five children under the age of two are anemic, half of all indian women with incredible implications in childbearing are anemic. It also did like numbers to me until i talked to a doctor in rural india who said he observed a change in the last few decades. He said now i treat about 2000 patients a month who are poor farmers. He said the amazing thing is most of them have enough calories, but 60 of them are either diabetic or suffering heart conditions. 60 . So, what i am suggesting is that the world desperately needs a more accurate estimation of the crisis. Hats off to fao for continuing to expand supplements to the calorie measure. You can find on their website a suite of indicators and news about what is called the voice of the hungry, which is interviewbased, my experience of hunger way of looking at the problem. Nonetheless, there is only one measure, the calorie count measure, the comes up with 800 million, that the public hears. So, i am taking a very radical stand with you this afternoon. Because the world lacks a meaningful comprehensive measure, i am arguing for a stand and that we can grab right now that gets us a lot closer to the actual extent of the crisis of nutrition. I am arguing that there is one already. Today, one in four of the worlds children are stunted. Stunting is caused by lack of food, poor quality food, and unsanitary water because if you have bacteria, they can interfere with your bodys capacity to absorb the nutrients so that even if you each nutritious food, you cant get the nutrients. Of course, if we think of stunting as just a childhood condition, it seems wild to say this should be a standin for the extent of hunger in the world for all of us. But in truth, stunting effects people for a lifetime. It is a condition that leads to a weakened immune system cognitive impairment, and reproductive problems. So, because it has afflicted generations and because the conditions bring lifelong harm any person designated as a child should be counted throughout their lives designated as a child as stunted should be counted throughout their lives under a heading of nutritional deprivation. In other words, if you look at it this way, one quarter of the worlds people are suffering from nutritional deprivation 1. 8 billion people. Now, the extent of nutritional deprivation is still incomplete. The term, for example, vitamin a deficiency, means blindness for about a quarter for million children every year. Iron deficiency is linked to one in five maternal deaths. Those are not captured in this but it is still closer than what we have now. I would say the term nutritional deprivation, the concept, seems useful particularly also because it captures at least a portion of both calorie and nutrient deficiency, and it also suggests that the problem is not just being deficient as a passive state of deficiency, but being actively deprived by power and equity throughout the world. That is where my journey has taken me, trying to get my head around the extent of the problem. I would love it if you disagree with me and want to argue with me and show me another way. That would be great. But it leads me believing that the extent of the problem is about at least twice as big as the official number that we hear of the official count of hungry people in the world. So, i am saying the world desperately needs a better tool. So, now i am going to sing the second stanza of my song today. I would like to take you to a place in the world that has really taken to heart everything molly is talking about, the idea, the reality of making food. The key to it in brazil, the language, the framing of it, is always stated as the goal being food and nutritional security, food and nutritional security, recognizing the disconnect that is growing throughout the world. As many of you know, in 2010 brazil added the right to adequate food into its constitution, as have about two dozen countries. This was a result of social activism that began in the 1980s. An estimated 7000 committees were working on everything from income generation to Early Harvest support programs. It was social mobilization which observers say is the essential trigger to policy commitments, that made the right to food begin for real when the president was elected in 2003 and announced his zero hunger campaign. He pledged that by the end of his term, everyone in brazil would be hunger free. He did not quite achieve that. But one city symbolizes a lot of the rightsbased approach molly was talking about and what it really means. Before i go into the good news i want to acknowledge that there is a take opposition to what i am about to described by those who are privilege about to describe i those who are privileged and feel threatened. But remember, democracy is becoming, not being. Its essence is eternal struggle. So, i want to tell you what i saw firsthand that so changed my life. My daughter and i traveled to write a book. My daughter anna and i. What i am going to describe could happen in any city. For example, it happened because a mayor in 1993 ran on a platform of food as a right. He was elected. His official said to the citizens, look, if you are too poor to buy enough food in the market, youre still a citizen. I am still accountable to you. I am going to make the market work for you. What he did is put together a city agency that was advised by a Civil Society council that represented everybody from farmers to universities, to business and religious leaders labor, and they came up with literally dozens of initiatives. For example, you can walk to a downtown bus stop and in many parts of the city you will see that the city has made available a corner on city land for free to a farmer if they will come in and sell their produce at the inner city at prices that poor people can afford. No middle person to take a cut. The farmers are delighted. They told us, beaming, that they have many more customers, so they were making a much higher profit even though they were selling their food at a much lower price. That was called direct from the countryside. On a larger scale, they had something called abc markets which in portuguese translates to food 4 less basically. There are now about three dozen of these. Heres the deal. The city says to the grocer, you can have this spot for your Grocery Store at a reduced price if you will keep 20 items essential for health at a lower than market price that people in the neighborhood can afford. Then you can charge market price for everything else. Grocers loved it and they lined up to have these markets. There are now 36 of them. Then there are what are called peoples restaurants. They are the farthest thing you could imagine from a soup kitchen. Anna and i had lunch in one. Beautiful, open space, healthy food, delightful smells. Its government subsidized, . 50 and me . 50 a meal, and everyone is welcome. We met a woman with her children who really needed it. We met a soldier who was going to get married and eight there to save money. We met an elderly gentleman who ate there every day because he wanted companionship. As we left, on the walls were pinned the days newspapers. If you could not afford a newspaper, you could still know what was going on in your community. But the beauty of it is that there was no stigma. It was where you want to be. It was a happening place. Another initiative there are many more of these, but one that struck us was that the government could help keep the market honest. City government teamed up with university to track the prices of these basic commodities and where you could go, what store had the lowest cost for those commodities. They posted the result of the survey at bus stops and they would announce it over the radio. You know how it is in our country, that the poorest communities often have the highest prices, but this was a way to push against that kind of price gouging. These and many more initiatives. What do they produce . Let me tell you a couple of things. These kinds of initiatives along with a federal program and Income Transfer Program to the poorest in brazil, the city, in 12 years, cut the child death rate by 72 . That has to be an historic rate of social change. 72 . How much did it cost . Well, it cost about 2 of the city budget. I calculated it. Dont quote me, but it was about a penny a day per resident of the city. This courageous innovation i believe courage is contagious. People have been visiting. Most recently, delegates from namibia, african mayors are coming to see how they can learn and take lessons home to africa. So, those are the lessons we need to take to heart. I want to take you to the final conversation that my daughter and i had with the coordinator of these many programs. Since she was a student, she had been passionate about food justice. What she said to us will never leave me. She said, behind all of these changes that you see, all of them, there is a new social mentality. That mentality is that good food for all of us is just like education or like health care. It is a public good. Its a shift in consciousness. She said secondly that because people in government are behaving the way we are, this idea that government is an incompetent interference is diminishing, and people are realizing that the state is not have to provide everything. It can be a convener, setting the rules and allowing citizens to come up with their own solutions. So, i was thrilled. She kept going and going in portuguese, and i dont speak a word of it, and i was trying to be patient, until at one point her eyes teared up. And she kept going, and i cannot help myself then. I nudged the interpreter and said what made her tear up . He stopped her and he said, she said, i know how much hunger there was in the world, but what i didnt know, and what upsets me so, is how easy it is to end it. You can imagine, because i still am tearing up, that i have been thinking about those words ever since. Trying to figure out what she really meant. I want to go back and talk to her and see if i am right. I realize she was not saying her job is easy. She wasnt saying these things had happened overnight, because they havent. What she was saying is that ending hunger is doable, its possible, its possible. Its possible if we create communities where the city feels accountable to all of the citizens, and the citizens feel doubly accountable to themselves, to have to come up with a solution, and to Holding Officials Accountable as well. So, what is that called . I call it democracy. I also realized that we dont have one. We dont have one. We have privately held government, which should be an oxymoron, but unfortunately isnt. In an International Ranking, a project carried out by a professor at the kennedy school, an International Ranking of electoral integrity, the u. S. Ranks 35th behind mexico. So, the key lesson from brazil and this citys story, for me, is about democracy. What is democracy, and how do we make it . As i hinted at earlier, what made real the right to food emerged from the 1980s onward. The Food Movement joined forces with labor, religious leaders, and others, to create a powerful Political Movement. It was Strong Enough, that when elected, the president created the zero hunger campaign. That is what made this city possible. The lesson for me today is this. To succeed in ending the outrage of nutritional deprivation in a world of food abundance, we too must and can build a broad Political Movement, what i like to call living democracy. Democracy is not something we have. It is something we do. This is where my heart is heading me. This is where i am headed personally. If you want to integrate the commitments you already have into this broader canopy of hope, i will let you know that i would love to connect with you if you want to talk to me afterwards or connect with me via the small planet website. I will close again with the lines we had on the first screen, the lessons and and i brought back from our journey to brazil. Hope is not what we find in evidence, it is what we become in action together. Thank you so very much. Thank you. [applause] host thank you both so much. Frankie and molly are going to take questions. If you would like to ask them, we ask that you line up in the aisles where there are two microphones. Brad i am fred wilson, and iowa farmer. I did not hear a lot about the right to be paid fairly on the farm site. My understanding is that most of the hungry are farmers or others in a economy. You talk about reform, how about land share and farming reform where we get paid fairly . My look at the Food Movement today and at the history of the Food Movement is that it hasnt done much on the issue of what the wto africa group calls for a price floor instead of writing a check. Just like we have a minimum wage. I just want to raise all of that. Molly i would agree completely, brad. The right to decent compensation for your labor is one of the recognized human rights. Farmers in this country are certainly not enjoying it. Brad for example, a place at the table film talked about cheaper vegetable prices without talking about if that is fair for farmers. Molly the perception of the tension between affordable food and good prices for farmers i am really looking forward to seeing that specific question explored. Thanks for bringing that up. Speaker thank you both for being here. I appreciate your work and that you are focusing on one of the problems that is the source of some of the most significant suffering in the world today. I have a question about the right to food that you both discussed. I suppose it might be a little different than political or civil rights in the sense that the latter requires the government not to interfere or do something, whereas the right to food requires the government to do something. I wonder what moral significance, if any, you attribute to that distinction. Molly i can start to answer that, and i am sure Molly Frankie has something to add. The right to food is the right to respect, protect, fulfill. First of all, simply respecting and protecting peoples ability to grow their own food and to secure the foods they want in the ways they want to get it thats the beginning of it. The government is not obligated to feed people, except under an emergency situation. Its one of the misconceptions of this country that is very common about the right to food. It doesnt mean that everybody lines up and gets a free hand from the government. Its that the government backs out and prevents all of the ways that corporations in this country are interfering with peoples ability to eat the food they want raised in the way they want it to be raised. Frankie i think the brazil story really captures what you are saying. The approach is not to create a giveaway. It was to enable people to access the market. If you are a citizen if you are hungry, you are still a citizen, and you still need us the government, to make sure the market serves two. The market becomes simply a tool in which we set our boundaries. It is a tool in which we set of values boundaries so that everyone can have access. In fact, i think we should change the meaning of the word free market, to mean access to that which meets our basic needs. What i love about the brazil example is it seems like they got that at a cellular level. Speaker thank you. I commend you both on your work. The concept of democracy came up a lot in both of your talks. I think putting it in a lens where democracy is how do i put this . Im sorry, but i feel like personally, that saying we dont live in a democracy undervalues and devalues the movements that have happened up to this point in this country. And so your talks are a lot about inclusivity and working together. So i feel like both of your talks, while they are wonderful and your work is wonderful, it is it exclusive. What about the government and the private sector and why dont you feel like it can be art of the conversation . [laughter] speaker frankie has thought so deeply about this, i really want to give her a chance to talk first. Frances i love your question and i resonate with it. I highly recommend a book by harvey kaye, the four freedoms where he takes us back to the great generation embodiment of the best of the democratic tradition in this country. I want to honor that by saying that right now, when i say privately held government, i just mean that most americans believe 80 of us, a very inclusive percentage believe that corporations have too much power over our Public Private power over public decisionmaking. Thats what im trying to name while definitely honoring the incredible courage that has brought us so much progress and that the backsliding is just terribly frightful. I want to shock us into, we can do better and we know we can do better in this country, to call us to be better because i want to be proud of my country. Molly i can hardly add to that, but its the passion and the way that people would put their lives on the line for so long that may our corporate so hideous to me. We have backslid, and ever since Citizens United and really before that, we dont have a government that is truly by the people, for the people, of the people. Frances this is not anticorporate. It is anticontrol of public decisionmaking, public power, is a that absolutely believe in market economies in which corporations play a role, but its the publics role to make decisions, that is the distinction. Speaker and if you wouldnt mind identifying who you are when you ask questions. I run an Organization Called lets talk about food. You have both been icons for as long as ive known your names. In frankies case, since i was in high school, i think. In our Current Situation in america, where being poor is kind of demonized at the central level, im how completely do you maintain your optimism and what can it group of young people do to take specific steps to start moving from a charitybased approach to a rightsbased approach. Speaker i can tell you very simply and quickly how i keep my optimism. Its by working with young people. Thats why work with colleges and universities, because young people are our hope and they still have that optimism and truly believe that change is possible. You had laid out so many different steps that people can be taking, but perhaps you would like to give a few. Frances i want to make a distinction that helps me. I dont call myself an optimist and i certainly am not a pessimist. I am a dyed in the wool possibleist. Shifting to that perspective, i realize that the nature of life has changed. And therefore how hubristic, how incredibly prideful it would be to say no, we cant do that. How crazy that would be. So much of everything i told you today about brazil, for example, i would never have predicted when i was the age of the young people that i work with. I would have said no, thats not going to happen. Brazil would be the last country to ever change. It was under such tight control. So that is one approach. I guess very practically, at least once a week, find a story of something that totally shocks you that you thought was never possible, and we try to specialize in that, but just to remind you that its not possible to know all that is possible. And that the only choice we dont have is whether to change the world. Because everything you are doing, somebody is watching. Every purchase you make is rippling through the marketplace. Your choice of your profession and how you model it in front of your peers. All of that is changing the world. I try to keep that idea live that yes, the only choice we dont have is whether to change the world. And your organization is lets talk about food. Thats exactly the kind of thing that i believe that we gain courage in community, and there are studies showing this. If we have our friends with us we literally judge the hill to be less steep. Anything you all are doing to create that kind of connection you building courage. People taking risks, having your ideas and breaking free of the Charity Model into the rights of democracy model. Those are the key of, it takes some work to find these examples and spread them. Telling a story is a revolutionary act. Christine im christine and i work with a food nonprofit called chefs collaborative. Its been a blast, but my lifelong kind of learning is food justice and mostly how it intersects with economic justice. Its very deeply intertwined, as you know much better than i do. I guess my question was, and i was kind of like ruminating over this when you were talking, how the City Government was able to create this robust local economy and local market when we have such a demanding and rampantly running Global Market which has in the past caused a lot of famine, for example. In the late 1800s in india where there was a huge famine, but it wasnt because there wasnt enough food, it was because the free market caused all the grain to bypass all the People Living there to england instead. So like how they were able to were they just not connected to the local market . Im not very familiar with that situation. Frances i cant claim to know enough to answer your question well, but i bet more research has been done. A canadian scholar, cecilia rocha, has written a lot about it. I bet your question could be entered more fully. My impression was that i wasnt hearing so much about the regulation of corporate agribusiness as much as it was creating alternatives that were helping the small farmer, and thats also true now on a national level, one third of the food that supplies schools has to be supplied by small, local farmers. So its that kind of ring to give a leg up to the small local producer, rather than maybe they are also doing some kind of rule setting regarding corporate power, but they have School Gardens and Community Gardens and they do cooking classes and lessons, all of that sort of thing as well. They take groundup eggshells, very highly nutritious, and lace flour for little kids in preschool, just really created. That was total waste product before, and they realize there were something they could do that could add no cost. I would love to know more. Keep in touch if you learn the answer to your question, because i wish i knew it. So basically you are saying that the City Government has the power and legitimacy to implement all these acts. Frances remember it brought together this counsel that was representative of all sectors, including businesses that came up with all these ideas and help to implement them. So it had to be of benefit to a lot of people to work. That was the beauty of it. Thats what adriana was telling us, that this spirit that government doesnt have to do for, that government can enable citizens to come up with solutions. And that was the spirit, and it had to do with trust. And the trust is so broken down in our government level, and how do we rebuild that trust . Part of it is removing the power of private wealth that makes us believe that we can trust what is really happening in our bodies of governance. Thank you. For none noernando my name is fernando. My question is for frances. I think you told us to a little about brazil. Its a beautiful story. What you didnt say is that is basically, its highly related to the fact that there is a long tradition of claiming not only the land but the food system. It is important to say in the context of the country, you were trying to give us an example of something that we can actually do in the u. S. , but nevertheless, its very complicated to understand the Land Movement in brazil. It is really about differentiating the type of farmers that we have in the u. S. When i think about farmers in brazil or in mexico, i think about people who produce food for themselves in the communities. When i think about farmers in the u. S. , my question is, what do you think about the difference between the farmers in the u. S. And the farmers in the south . Frances im delighted that you raised msb, because part of what we looked at has had a profound impact on my sense of possibility. It led to a Political Movement Strong Enough to actually elect a leader that was going to begin the zero hunger program. I just apologize, i was worried about having so much to say in so little time. But i totally agree that the Workers Movement is probably the largest social movement in our entire hemisphere and has achieved Something Like one third of a million families on 20 million acres of land and has inspired much more land redistribution than that and has created a whole organic feed line and has trained farmers in agro ecology methods. So it definitely needed more attention than what i said today because it is a central player in what became the right to ive got to get it right, food and nutritional security in brazil. If any dont know about the land Workers Movement. There is a website that is very rich and very inspiring in terms of what they have been able to achieve against all sorts of odds, including the murder of over 1500 of their members because of the resistance by the landed elite in brazil, so hats off to the mst. Michelle my name is michelle. Im a lawyer from quebec, canada and im a student at notre dame law school. We are talking about the human rights of food. You mentioned that resetting the Table Program in canada, but unfortunately, we still dont have it in canada, and the u. S. , no ways to bring suits or claims in front of tribunals for violation of the rights of food. So i was wondering if you had some suggestions on ways to do that our work towards that. Thank you. Frances i dont personally, and im not a lawyer. Im not sure how in the cases in which people have brought cases before tribunals, im not sure they created that framework. I know that the legal power exists at the International Level and i know the first place i would be going to look for examples are guidelines of how to make that happen, fion is an International Organization is promoting the right to food around the world. A great website and they really keep you uptodate on what is happening in terms of legal actions around the world. I wish i could give you a better answer. Elizabeth im elizabeth henderson, an organic farmer. One of the simplest ways to make sure that people got good food would be to raise the minimum wage. On april 15, all of you can join in on the demonstrations and strikes that are going to be happening all over the country by fast food workers. Im sure there are people who are going to be doing it here in boston. Having huge numbers of you here participating in support for lowwage workers who are pushing for a minimum wage of 15 an hour, which would be a very nice way for the farmers to grow the food that you eat. I never made that much as a farmer, so we need to have a movement of all the workers together, farmers, farmworkers and other food workers. From the farmworker panel that we had this morning comes request to you and for this conference for next year, to have more workers speaking at this conference. [applause] molly thanks so much for raising that. An extremely important fight thats going on right now. I should save 15 an hour is not a living wage here, not close to it. Especially for a person who is trying to support a child. So it should be adjusted, i know its tricky to be working that out, and it would be an incredible advantage over what we have now, but i would like to see this minimum Wage Campaign be on an incremental scale, so that it becomes tidier with what the real cost of living is. Frances its true that 15 still does not bring a minimum wage up to where it would have been if it kept up with inflation, like 30 years ago, is that correct . So we are still behind with that. James i am with boston food and farm, we are working on Community Food planning and project development. But i want to start by thanking both of you for your passionate and thoughtful talk, particularly molly, i want to thank you for setting the context of your talk with the fight on institutional racism, an important context for food justice discussion. My real question though is, you said you have a strong trust for market economies. I am a social interviewer entrepreneur. At the same time, when you have companies that are law required by law to create profits, i wonder what your perspectives are on the new institutions that we need for Food Sovereignty. I dont know what led you to think i was a fan of the market we have to today. What will which will by definition create poverty. What could happen in a living democracy and in places that have more genuine democratic ability. They create rules around the Market Exchange. What would happen if we had an epa that really tested pesticides, for example, and really kept out those that are dangerous. It really doesnt take a phd in political science, i dont think, to understand that yes, Market Exchange is a handy tool. We dont want to have everything centrally distributed, and yes we have to put boundaries around it. What is fair, what is unfair and we have to have the commons returned. There was a beautiful article about the cost of coal and the fact that coal producers dont pay any of the social, human, or environmental costs, and they are not paying a fair price for that. The work of peter barnes, for example, the idea that all this pollution happens and yet its free to pollute the sky, that is common for all of us. These are conceptual tools and regulatory tools that we can use to make the market work to serve our life and other species. Thats all i meant in terms of the market. I dont think anybody today is advocating complete state control. So its a question of how to we get a democratic accountability in our governance so that we can set those rules that work and can be enforced. That is the key, right . Good afternoon. Im an attorney in philadelphia working on land security and land Poverty Issues with Community Gardeners and farmers. I wanted to come back to the question of social, economic and cultural rights, because we obviously are not familiar with how to do that. The work that is happening across issue, more work around the right to food needs to happen, but theres a lot of work around immigrant rights and environmental justice, etc. And point folks to the work for example, of advocates for human rights, bringing up a petition to the Interamerican Commission for human rights to work on a local level to establish local human rights. We can do this if we continue to push the human rights narrative. In the food justice context, we havent come far enough. I just want to raise those as markers for folks to further this work. Frances thanks, those are all excellent resources. I think we have one more question. I was curious, and i was thinking, frankie, that you might refer to the book diet for a hot planet to speak about the relationship between racial equity, food justice, and Climate Change, given the role of industrial agriculture and agribusiness in creating a hot planet. Frances the book is diet for a hot planet and also in the work that im finishing, we have a key chapter on Climate Change, that Climate Change did not have to mean more hunger. That nexis referred to is so real that people, as you all know, im sure, that are already impacted the most by Climate Change, and i particularly get an image of bangladesh and thousands of people moving into dakka every year or every day because of the rising waters. On the one hand, people have already seriously impacted Climate Change, and that reality is not part of the consciousness of most of us. At the same time, what were so excited to share in our new book is that really small for farmers in the south fork climate heroes, if we would just get behind them. Because it precisely is their work in developing agro ecological practices that potentially can greatly increase the sequestration of carbon, that if we really got behind them, they are seriously a big part of the solution. So its just a tragic combination that they are now suffering the most, and yet they could advance us all particularly in the country of niger, if you follow this at all, the poorest in the human index of development, yet through agroforestry, the integration of crops and trade has reclaimed about 200 million acres im sorry, has renurtured the growth of 200 million new trees on 12. 5 million acres and has addressed Food Insecurity by doing that for about 2. 5 Million People. We found that people are coming back to villages who had left because now they can feed their families. And all these trees, of course that is addressing Climate Change. So they are trying to take that now into 15 countries in the flank of the Sahara Desert called the hell part of the world. What were trying to do is sound the alarm
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