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New
Directions for the Sustainable Agriculture Movement: A Conversation
about Strategy
January 2005 and beyond...
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Bob
Scowcroft
Bob Scowcroft currently serves as Executive Director of the Organic
Farming Research Foundation, a national organization, based in Santa
Cruz, California. OFRF’s purpose is to foster the improvement
and widespread adoption of organic farming practices. It was co-founded
by Bob Scowcroft and a number of certified organic farmers in 1990.
OFRF has awarded over $1,500,000 in support of 230 organic research
and education projects since 1990. OFRF has an active policy and
technical program and it disseminates information on all sectors
of the organic product industry to the public at large. Bob averages
200 media interviews and over 40 conference presentations on all
subjects “organic” per year. He sits on six Non-governmental
Organizations Advisory Boards. Prior to working for OFRF, he was
the first full time Executive Director of California Certified Organic
Farmers (1987-1992); before that he served as Friends of the Earth’s
national organizer with a primary focus on pesticide reduction and
organic farming advocacy (1979-1985).
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Bob
Scowcroft,
Organic Farming Research Foundation,
Santa Cruz, CA
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Notes
on the Asilomar Declaration for Sustainable Agriculture
It was 1990.
The Organic Foods Production Act had not been yet approved by
Congress. Dr. Roberta Cook had just published a report suggesting
that the organic food economy surpassed $89 Million. The new California
state law was in its own final stages of passage and implementation.
Somewhere between 30-40 “definitions” of sustainable
agriculture had been published and argued over. (Now there might
be over 250.) The San Francisco Chronicle front-paged a story
saying the Marina Safeway had quietly added six feet of certified
organic lettuce and herbs, and it was the first introduction of
fresh organic produce into a supermarket they knew of. (It was
re-run as national news on the wire the next week.) The grape
boycott was on. A small number of professors were publishing papers
and books on “Agroecology”. EcoFarm was ten years
old. I was 16.
One can’t
focus on the future until one has a solid grasp of the past. One
of our collective failures has been the lack of attention paid
to our written and oral history. Only two or three of the participants
in the “ Asilomar Declaration” discussion are here
today. Several have passed away. Others have left the sustainable/agriculture
universe. Who has collected their papers? Where is the Center
for Organic History Research? Who is collecting the oral histories
of these and many other important attendees? In order for the
Next Asilomar Declaration to make any sense, to make any sense
of place, time, era and context, a whole host of people must be
contacted, their papers collected, and our “history”
published.
So, when
I was asked to join this panel I thought I would use the Seven
Challenges component of the Declaration as a way to layout a number
of thoughts – probably almost all of which could serve as
individual topics for further discussion. In the seven minutes
allocated to me, here are my comments and lets see where they
lead us later this afternoon (and for years to come):
1. Promote
and sustain healthy rural communities:
A rural community in California is very different than one in
Georgia. We need to use the language of “organic jobs”,
resource management, tax policy, water and fair wages in a manner
that clearly frames the need/role of family farmers in each
of our “rural food sheds”. We need to be at county
planning meetings, water board hearings and rural community
budget hearings and then share our experiences with other activists
state wide (CaSAWG?). Like the Clamshell Alliances and affinity
groups of old, we need to then share our local experiences on
a national and international level.
2. Expand
opportunities for new and existing farmers to prosper using
sustainable systems:
This is a weak “Challenge”, but could call for new
farmer training, valued added research, new crop production,
cost reduction, and other “free-market” and governmental
assistance to increase grower income. Once again I don’t
see any clearing house “location” or organization
that can collect these experiences, put them in context and
offer an assessment of them to the grower community. We do not
have our own “Think Tank” doing this work although
bits and pieces of it are already available. We rarely if ever
speak in “economic” terms. We have no strategic
plan to access our fair share of the state/federal/local “development
funds”.
3.
Inspire the public to value safe and healthful food:
We sure blew this one…note the rise of Fast Food Nation
and the “Obesity Epidemic”; clearly “TV and
brand ID and marketing” have far outstripped our ability
to get our message out. The only place we have been successful
is through “food scares” (their term not mine) and
farmers markets. Taste wins every time along with some relative
connection to the conventional marketplace price. At 2% of the
food economy we have a long way to go. If we had a billion dollars
to go on TV, I would suggest that a better strategy would be to
get our organic think tank “ducks”, our grassroots
lists, bottle our evangelical fervor and articulate when the “public’s
value” ends and the dollars and cents costs begin. We need
revolutionary economists. (Short term…while our think tanks
explore the outer edges of different economies/barter/coop/local
dollars systems where farmers are central to their success.)
4. Foster
an ethic of land stewardship and humanness in the treatment
of farm animals
While I think we’ve been a bit more successful “fostering
the ethic…”, we have been overwhelmed by market
forces and political greed. The special interests have bought
and sold certain committee chairs and the White House for their
short term gain. We need to be more creative (OFRF’s Congressional
Organic Caucus could be an example) with our policy work but
at least in the short term, we need to get down in the mud in
our state legislatures and federal electoral politics. We will
never have the $$$ for a PAC (nor do I think we should have
one) but we could form a League of Sustainable Agriculture voters
(like League of Conservation Voters) and hold certain elected
officials accountable for their votes in DC.
5. Expand knowledge and access to information about sustainable
agriculture
We’ve done relatively well with this one and will soon be
doing better…thanks to the Web and the explosion of farmer
conferences. Now we need to publish more of it in Spanish and
translate more of it from French, German and the Scandinavian
languages.
6. Reform
the relationship among government, industry and agriculture
Throw out and start again would be more like it….though
even here I feel like we’re making in-roads but have had
little time or energy to strategically assess each of our resources
and “fields of activity”. Work on the farm bill
has been impressive (over the last 20 years) and we’re
already gearing up for the next one. Certain agencies are beginning
to devote a small (very small) percentage of funds and staffing
expertise to the sustainable/organic world and that is good.
These people are our stewards of the governmental largess, and
we should welcome them with open arms. EPA’s partnership
grants w/OFRF are a good example; ARS’s organic research
commitment is another; ERS’s organic economic work sets
the stage. This slash and burn budget environment can actually
be made to work for us in that most of the current government
programs are not to our liking. Many will need to show outside
support to be maintained, and we should endorse certain cuts
all the while raising funds from the philanthropic community
to leverage the bricks and mortar already out there.
7. Redefine the role of U.S. agriculture in the global community
This is a life’s work all on its own. The Slow Food Congress
in Turin might have inadvertently started a very different tact
in doing that by just “introducing” 5,000 farmers
and activists to each other and encouraging them to take those
“meetings” home with them and share their experiences
with their fellow growers.
My own 8th
challenge is to become personally responsible for your own organic
food basket, to reach out and collect our history, capture critiques
like this workshop, bequeath our children the joy of eating, sharing
a table and growing something, and read what the poets of agriculture
are saying.
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Ecological
Farming Association • 406 Main Street Ste. 313 •
Watsonville, CA 95076
ph. 831-763-2111 • fax. 831-763-2112 • info@eco-farm.org
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