For community rooted food economies

No matter who you are or where you come from, we are all impacted by how our food economy functions, for good or ill. It produces the food we eat today, stewards the land that will grow the food we will need tomorrow, and preserves – or pollutes – the air we breathe and the water we drink. The food economy also sustains the livelihoods of ourselves or our neighbors who, like anyone, just want a chance to earn a fair living in exchange for doing honorable work. In short, we all benefit when our food system is equitable, sustainable, and resilient.

But today, giant corporations dominate nearly every sector of our national food economy, and carefully shape its structure and rules to secure the greatest possible profits for themselves, while externalizing their costs, risks, and waste onto the rest of us. They argue that their business model is necessary because it produces cheap food efficiently.  That efficiency has a dark side: it also efficiently harms farmers and workers, hollows out our communities, and pollutes the land, air, and water we all rely on. In their rush to consolidate farms and food supply chains, today’s captains of industry have endangered the resilience of our food supply in times of crisis, much like their robber baron predecessors, whose excesses resulted in the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Once again, we should take to heart the lesson that no single corporation should be “too big to fail.”

We deserve something better. We deserve community rooted food economies that circulate abundance rather than extract wealth while leaving waste behind. We deserve farm and food businesses that equitably share power with all stakeholders, and value the common good more highly than profits. We deserve public institutions that value food access as a human right, truly provide for the common good, and ensure fairness for all. We deserve food economies that build regional food sovereignty, economic solidarity, and ecological resilience. That’s why we’re challenging corporate power by:

• Holding Corporations and corporate-captured government actors accountable for extractive unfair practices, and ensuring that farmers, workers and consumers are protected from corporate power abuse.
• Fighting to reverse corporate concentration in the food system through stronger antitrust enforcement and structural corporate reforms that give local food system stakeholders equitable shares of ownership, profits, and board power within corporations operating within the food system
• Advocating for structural policy transformation that decisively advantages production systems that give farmers the agency to produce equitable access to culturally relevant protein diets while delivering net-positive ecological impacts at scale.
• Fostering the formation of alternative regional socio-economic structures that equitably share food system power and profits amongst all stakeholders through grassroots power-building.

Contact Information

Melanie Canales, Challenging Corporate Power Project Manager, melanie@rafi.gameflow.design