Standing room only crowd fills storied Gaston Hall on Georgetown University campus for exciting conversation on future of food!
With a line-up including Prince Charles, Eric Schlosser, Wendell Berry, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Senator Jon Tester, Will Allen, Vandana Shiva, Panera Bread founder Ron Shaich, and the CIW, there was little room for doubt that the Future of Food Conference, put on by Washington Post Live, would be a lively conversation about the problems of the current food system and the many solutions proposed or already underway to build a better, cleaner, fairer food industry.
But it was the crowd — most of whom came first and foremost to hear the man pictured here on the right, Britain’s Prince Charles, who is a lifelong defender of the sustainable food movement and a highly respected organic farmer in his own right — that made the day-long event as exciting as it was. Audience participation livened up panel discussions and even created some heated exchanges, including the extended back and forth between Secretary Vilsack and the well-informed, feisty crowd of sustainable food enthusiasts, which was one of the day’s many high points.
The highest point of all, of course, was the Prince’s keynote speech, a thorough critique of the ills and shortcomings of the food system today and a clarion call for a more honest economic analysis of the true costs and benefits of conventional agricultural production. Here’s an excerpt:
| “… Ladies and gentlemen, I am a historian, not an economist, but what I am hinting at here is that it is surely time to grasp one of the biggest nettles of all and re-assess what has become a fundamental aspect of our entire economic model. As far as I can see, responding to the problems we have with a “business as usual” approach towards the way in which we measure G.D.P. offers us only short-term relief. It does not promise a long-term cure. Why? Because we cannot possibly maintain the approach in the long-term if we continue to consume our planet as rapaciously as we are doing. Capitalism depends upon capital, but our capital ultimately depends upon the health of Nature’s capital. Whether we like it or not, the two are in fact inseparable…
… We need to include in the bottom line the true costs of food production – the true financial costs and the true costs to the Earth. It is what I suppose you could call “Accounting for Sustainability,” a name I gave to a project I set up six years ago, initially to encourage businesses to expand their accounting process so that it incorporates the interconnected impact of financial, environmental and social elements on their long-term performance. What if Accounting for Sustainability was applied to the agricultural sector? This was certainly the implicit suggestion in a recent and very important study by the U.N. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, or T.E.E.B., assessed the multi-trillion dollar importance to the world’s economy of the natural world and concluded that the present system of national accounts needs to be upgraded rapidly so they include the health of natural capital, and thereby accurately reflect how the services offered by natural ecosystems are performing – let alone are paid for. Incidentally, to create a genuine market for such services – in the same way as a carbon market has been created – could conceivably make a substantial contribution to reducing poverty in the developing world.” read more |
You can find the text of Prince Charles’ speech in its entirety here. You can also find a four-minute video excerpt of his speech here (“Prince Charles on what makes farming sustainable”), along with several other video excerpts from the day’s events (including a brief snippet of the CIW’s participation in the panel entitled, “Impact on Ordinary People”).The CIW — represented by two of its co-founders, Lucas Benitez and Greg Asbed — held its own in the stellar setting, picking up on the final words of Eric Schlosser’s stirring introductory speech (“A food system based on poverty and exploitation will never be sustainable”), and driving home the point that any discussion of a sustainable food “movement” is incomplete if it does not demand unqualified respect for human rights of the farmworkers who plant, cultivate, and harvest our food.
Here is an excerpt of comments prepared by the CIW for the conference:
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“… Today, if you are looking for the most immediate cause of farmworkers’ increasing poverty — and the most correctable — your search is best directed to the marketplace. Farmworkers toil at the very bottom of a food supply chain that is every day more and more top-heavy, and this unprecedented consolidation of market power at the top of the retail food industry has created an unrelenting downward pressure on prices — and therefore wages and working conditions — at the bottom. And the bottom of the “bottom” in the food supply chain is the person picking fruit in the fields. The retail food giants today – companies like, but not limited to, WalMart — buy tens of millions of pounds of tomatoes a year. At those historically unprecedented volumes, they are buying an ever-bigger share of any single grower’s production and are therefore able to leverage that tremendous market power to demand ever-lower prices from their suppliers. Yet those suppliers, at the same time, are faced with rising input costs for diesel fuel, tractors, land, and pesticides. Caught in this cost/price squeeze, the only place growers can turn to maintain shrinking margins is to labor. In 1992, according to USDA statistics, the farm share of the US consumer dollar spent on tomatoes was 40.8%. 40 cents of every dollar spent at the cash register on tomatoes went back to the farmer in 1992. By the end of the decade, that number had fallen to 20.5%. Farms lost fully half of their share of the retail price to the retailers themselves. Today, while growers have managed to stop the bleeding and recover some of their lost share, the overall picture is the same: Increasingly unequal bargaining relations mean that, when farmers bring their crops to market, the buyers almost always win. And the farmworkers pay the price. In its excellent working paper entitled, “Ending Walmart’s Rural Stranglehold,” the United Food and Commercial Workers quoted none other than John Tyson of Tyson foods who, when confronted by an activist farmer on the untenably low price paid for meat to the farm, said, “Walmart’s the problem. They dictate the price to us and we have no choice but to pay you less.” That exact same dynamic – that exact same unequal bargaining relationship – exists at the next level down the chain, between the farmer, or grower, and his labor. And so the cut in pay is passed along to the last person, the picker, after whom there is no one left to turn to in the chain. As a result, tomato picking piece rates have remained stagnant — and in real terms, wages have steadily fallen — over the past thirty years. This parallels exactly the rise of corporate food giants like WalMart, Kroger, Giant, Stop & Shop, and Publix (Florida’s largest privately held corporation), not to mention the fast-food industry where single chains combine the purchasing power of tens of thousands of restaurants. So, in short, WalMart makes farmworkers poor. But not just WalMart – all the major retail food brands that have grown at meteoric rates over the past 30 years have used the same volume purchasing strategy to drive their profits and growth at the expense of the workers who make that growth possible. That’s the problem. Now, what can be done? Well, here’s what we believe: What the retail food giants taketh away, they can giveth, too, … if properly motivated. If the cause of farmworker poverty lies, in significant part, in the overwhelming market power of the highly consolidated retail food chains, then the solution to farmworker poverty can be found there too…” read more |
You can read the CIW’s comments in their entirety here. And you can find the complete Washington Post Live coverage of the conference here. Finally, here and here are a couple of examples of the extensive blog coverage of the event.