Drafting the Food Declaration

Getting the grassroots behind sustainable policy, one signature at a time.

By Genevieve Slocum

The sustainable food movement may be closer than ever to redirecting national farm policy, thanks to an initiative of the California-based nonprofit Roots of Change. Under the leadership of Michael R. Dimock, president, the group recently drafted and began promoting its Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture.

The group’s ultimate goal for the declaration-whose official release is scheduled for sometime in 2009--is to arrive at the desks of policymakers with 1 million signatures to create a fundamental ideological shift for the next Farm Bill.

The declaration’s draft, now posted on a separate website, (www.fooddeclaration.org) is in an initial trial period to gaug feedback. The powerful statement is what Dimock calls a “preamble to the next food and farm policy in the United States” that calls for a dramatic change from a system merely “focused on creating cheap calories.”

Since the trial launch at the San Francisco Slow Food event in late August, the document has 5,550 endorsements on display at its website.

Dimock, the founding chairman of Slow Food USA (www.slowfoodusa.org), wanted a tool to spark public action on national policy. His goal was for it serve three audiences by being:

• useful for policy experts both within and outside government,
• backed by a diverse constituency of stakeholders
• connected to the interests of the heartland.

The declaration fulfills that function by articulating in broad terms principles of environmental and social sustainability. It emphasizes the importance of transforming the food system to make its benefits equitable, end exploitation of land and labor, protect finite resources, remove fossil fuels from the food chain, and foster “diversity in all its relevant forms: diversity of domestic and wild species; diversity of foods, flavors and traditions; diversity of ownership.”

It calls for moving beyond the industrial model of food production built on cheap oil, and for keeping health and responsibility in mind when reformulating food production. As argued in its introduction, “Ahead lie rising energy and food costs, a changing climate, declining water supplies, a growing population, and the paradox of widespread hunger and obesity. …. We believe that the food system must be reorganized on a foundation of health: for our communities, for people, for animals, and for the natural world….Governments have a duty to protect people from malnutrition, unsafe food, and exploitation, and to protect the land and water on which we depend from degradation.”

The declaration embodies the Roots of Change mission, which is “to create a sustainable food system in California, the nation’s largest producer of food and agricultural products, by the year 2030.” This mission is driven by the belief that “multiple environmental, social and economic problems in California can be addressed simultaneously by a comprehensive transition to a sustainable food system.”

Its website (www.rocnetwork.org) urges activists and farmers who want to make a difference to become locally oriented – learn how to be a “locavore” with a minimal environmental footprint, plant a garden, and get to know food producers. Roots of Change describes itself as “a collaboration of community, nonprofit, philanthropic, government, and business organizations” working to fund and assist initiatives in sustainability.

Building momentum

Roots of Change organized a group of “original framers,” including author Michael Pollan, former Deputy Secretary of the USDA Richard Rominger, and chef Alice Waters, and others, who, according to the Declaration’s website, “would to represent many facets of the challenge: animal welfare to health and ecology, and farming to labor and social justice. The declaration continues to benefit from diverse feedback on its current version, considered to be the final draft.

The declaration’s trial online posting will last 90 days through the end of November. This gives the drafting team a chance to gauge the response, make sure its language is widely understood, and to confirm that it captures a broad consensus by stakeholders. On December 1, the team will write the final document incorporating feedback and run a web-based viral campaign to step up the collection of endorsements.

Meanwhile, a team of policy experts will develop a specific policy agenda based on the declaration’s principles, and a team of organizers will plan a Washington event for the fall of 2009 to formally deliver the declaration and policy agenda to lawmakers.

Dimock’s speech at the Slow Food event introducing the declaration made an eloquent case for a new beginning. He contended that fresh agricultural policy should take a lesson from failures of the past, that “there have been unintended consequences for rural communities, for human and ecological health, for farmers and workers, for domestic and wild species.

“Our current policies are now squeezing the life out of our nation, by extracting the wealth from our soils and rural communities, by draining the health from our children, and by degrading the complexity and vitality of our ecosystem and food supply…,” said Dimock.

He said Roots of Change wants to get a minimum of 300,000 supporting signatures during the 2009 circulation of the declaration, from Americans “all across the nation, small towns and big towns, rural and urban, from every political party, religious group, and ethnicity… Today marks the beginning of a journey and we hope you, and all those you know, will join us.”