Upstream - The Political Economy of Food with Eric Holt-Gimenez

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

In this Conversation, we spoke with Eric Holt-Gimenez, author of the book, “A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism: Understanding the Political Economy of What We Eat.” Why does hunger exist? What are the causes of food insecurity? Why do those in working in the food system, from the farmers who till the soil to the server who places your meal on the table, receive largely unlivable wages? Eric’s answer to these questions is simple: capitalism. Together we trace a line from the enclosures of the early 17th century to the present, looking at how food was commodified and how the market capitalist economic system has done a great job of overproducing food, and a poor one of distributing it equitably.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of our listeners and fans. Visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to chip in a one-time or monthly donation. Thank you. I think that the food system is still pivotal in terms of our entire political economic system. And I say that recognizing that we can't change the food system without changing the system of capitalism. It's impossible to change one without changing the other. So it's interlinked. But the food system has tremendous leverage in the types of social and economic transformations which we need in this country and in the world. So the main problem is overproduction.

Capitalism overproduces to begin with, but food production especially tends towards overproduction. So I think we need to go back to the lessons from the original New Deal and update them to include provisions around labor, around race, reparations, and around the environment. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. An interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. In this conversation, we spoke with Eric Holt Jimenez, author of the book, A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism, Understanding the Political Economy of What We Eat. Why does hunger exist? What are the causes of food insecurity? Why do those working in the food system, from the farmers who till the soil to the server who places your meal on the table,

receive largely unlivable wages. Eric's answer to these questions is simple. Capitalism. Together we trace a line from the enclosures of the early 17th century to the present, looking at how food was commodified and how the market capitalist economic system has done a great job of overproducing food and a poor one of distributing it equitably. Portions of this interview were originally published as a written Q&A by truthout.org. Unfortunately, the Zoom gods were not looking down on us during this conversation with Eric. Please excuse the rough audio at the beginning of the interview. We promise it gets better about 20 minutes in. And now, here's Robert in conversation with Eric Holt Jimenez. Hi, Eric. Welcome to Upstream. To start, I'm wondering if you could just briefly introduce yourself for our listeners. Yeah, my name is Eric Holt Jimenez. I'm retired and I'm a former executive director

at Food First, Institute for Food and Development Policy. I was there for 14 years. And prior to that, I taught a little bit and I worked in D.C. for a couple of years. But mostly I was in Latin America for over 20 years as an agroecologist working with farmers movements, specifically the Campesino a Campesino, the farmer to farmer movement for sustainable agriculture. So that's kind of where my grounding comes from. Aside from that, I was brought up on farms and ranches in Northern California. Great. Thanks for that. So in 2017, you wrote a book titled A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism, Understanding the Political Economy of What We Eat. And so, yeah, I'm wondering if you could just sort of explain to us what compelled you to write this book.

The reason I wrote A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism is because after working for about a decade with the food movement in the United States, I realized that many food activists wanted to change the food system without, I thought, really understanding what kind of food system we have, which is a capitalist food system. And it didn't seem to me like we should be trying to change something without understanding what it is. And as I began to write the book, I began to see even more clearly for myself just how our food system and capitalism have co-evolved over the last couple hundred years. And so then was very interested in explaining sort of the strategic importance of the food system within the capitalist system and how we

might go about changing them. Because I don't think that once you know that, you can possibly propose that we change the food system in isolation of the larger economic system and political system in which it is embedded, which is capitalism. So we really have to do both. Before we dive deeper into your book, I wanted to start by sort of situating our conversation within our current major crisis, COVID and the pandemic. I'm wondering if you could talk about how COVID and the pandemic have impacted our food system, how we produce and distribute food. And later, maybe we can zoom out more and talk about the more general problems in our food system more broadly. But yeah, just to start, can you contextualize what's sort of alive right now in terms of what's going on with COVID in the food system? I think one of the most remarkable things about what COVID has done to the food system is that it has helped to perpetuate it as it is. I mean, I don't think that COVID has significantly changed our food system at all,

other than to exacerbate some of the inequities and externalities. And what I mean by that is when the lockdowns first hit, there was tremendous disruption to the food supply chain globally, but especially in the United States. And so, first of all, restaurants were closing, and so food wasn't being sold to restaurants, food wasn't being distributed to schools and other institutions. And so it was backing up all the way down the supply chain to the point where you had farmers dumping milk, all kinds of culling going on, especially within the pork industry and the poultry industry, immediately we began to see that food and farm workers were some of the first to get sick, seriously ill, in large part because our processing plants, especially meat processing plants, refused to shut down and refused to socially distance,

basically calculating that there were enough poor immigrant workers that they could draw from. They could simply sacrifice the workers that they had because there'd always someone to take their place. One would see the same thing in restaurants. I mean, we talk about waiters and waitresses, but most of the people in the back of the house, even the fanciest restaurants, are people of color, are immigrants, very vulnerable populations who lost their jobs. So we see tremendous disruption in the food supply chain, but it adjusts itself very quickly, actually. We don't see scarcities. There's some panic buying, but once that was over with, you know, we don't really see scarcities in the United States or on a global scale. There's plenty of food to go around,

but what we do see is the people who work within the food system are sick, dying, out of work, and food insecure. Now, this was true before COVID, but it's worse now. We also see tremendous concentration going on in the industry as before, but worse. So you see huge conglomerates like, you know, Walmart and Amazon have actually, Walmart and Amazon have actually, unsurprisingly, made a killing with COVID. People are ordering food, people are stocking up. So I would say that COVID hasn't significantly changed our food system at all. And it's made parts of it worse for a lot of people along with, you know, the economy. But basically, it's more and worse of the same. Yeah, okay. So zooming out, I think it would be helpful to take a historical look at our food system. The first chapter of your book begins with a sort of broad historical review of how the capitalist food system actually came into being.

So I'm wondering, yeah, can you walk us through this history and, you know, also sort of explain how food became a commodity? Sure. You know, there are different ways to tell this story. And the way I tell it is very much through an agrarian lens. But basically, you know, very much through an agrarian lens. But basically, you know, food becomes a commodity when labor becomes a commodity. And workers have to use the money from their salaries to buy their food, right? And so food needs to be produced in a form

which can be easily distributed to different industrial centers. And how we get to that from, you know, sort of the pre-industrial and pre-capitalist, more mercantilist period before is that most of the world, back in the 1500s, 1600s, were peasants. Most people grew their own food. And there was a lot of barter. And there was a bit of exchange. You know, food's been bought and sold for a long time

before capitalism, but nothing on the scale of a commodity. But the minute that the world begins to industrialize, you know, particularly what we know now as Great Britain begins to industrialize. They have a couple of problems and they solve it in ways which profoundly both depend on and impact the food system. thing is they need workers and they need wool for their looms because they're making textiles for sale, you know, in global markets. And they can't get the peasantry to produce enough wool because the peasantry is growing food. They're practicing shifting forms of agriculture. You know, they're not interested and they don't need money. So they don't really need to produce a lot of wool in order to get money because they're largely self-provisioning. So what happens is, and they also need labor. They need some people to come and work in these

factories, which were so terrible, they called them the satanic mills, and they couldn't get people to come and work. So basically, Britain comes up with this idea called the enclosures. And what the enclosures did was they enclosed the commons. These were common areas that villages used for plants, for firewood, but particularly for grazing, And we're under very sort of tight village management, very longstanding sets of rules. And we're ancient. Well, the first thing that happens is that those are enclosed by large landowners. The villagers all of a sudden lose access to their resources. The villagers all of a sudden lose access to their resources.

And the second thing that happens is that villagers are taxed and have to pay money to use the land that they've been using for centuries. So they need money and they have fewer resources to rely on for their livelihoods. So they end up going into the factories to work, essentially. And there's a long period where it's very nebulous, where people are in factories, they're still on farms and whatnot. And so we see the countryside subsidizes what becomes the Industrial Revolution with very cheap labor. And it's cheap because peasants are mostly self-provisioning. You don't have to feed them as much because they can get so much of their food from the land. And then very cheap products as well. So the larger land, land begins to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands as peasants are moved off the lands, sometimes quite forcibly through debt, coercion, violence, get them into the factories. And then more and more, you know, wool is produced instead of food.

And so you begin to see this shift and how industry and capital starts to become dominant in the Western world, certainly. And then that, through imperialism, is basically exported around the world. But I think what's important is to realize that the Industrial Revolution would never have happened had it not been for this tremendous subsidy from the peasantry, cheap food and cheap labor. And that meant that people had to start buying their food. So that's sort of like the beginning of the revolution in the relations of productions and politics and everything that leads to capitalism, the formation

of different classes, you know, like the bourgeoisie, the industrialists, etc. And what's remarkable is that many analysts thought, very famous theoreticians thought, that the peasantry was going to disappear and that very soon we would just have, you know, highly mechanized farms. Farms become industrialized. We have highly mechanized farms. People would work in factories and the peasantry would disappear. Actually, that never happened. We have as many peasants on the planet today as we did

at the turn of the Industrial Revolution. We have a lot more people in the world, so the percentage is much less. But still, a good third, if not more, of the people on this planet make their living from farming. And most of them are very small farms, semi-capitalized small farms. small farms, semi-capitalized small farms. And on a quarter of the world's agricultural land, these farmers produced nearly three quarters, somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the world's food. The poor feed the poor on this planet. And that has tremendous implications for many of the things that we see today happening in agriculture with GMOs, for example, for the large monopolies that control the food system. There's a really interesting example in the book that I would love for you to talk about a little

bit. You use the potato as an illustration of early capitalism's impact on our relationship with food. And so, yeah, can you talk about the potato famine and sort of situate that within the framework of your broader analysis? Yeah, the Irish potato famine, also known as the Great Hunger of 1845, has some very interesting and horrifying explanations, which fly in the face of sort of the Malthusian understandings, which are peddled around the world today in terms of hunger and famine. In other words, people go hungry because there's not enough food. And this has almost never been the case. And a good example is the Irish potato famine. What happened was that

the Spanish brought back potatoes from Latin America of the 1200 or whatever varieties of potatoes from the Andes. They brought back just a couple. And the potato made its way around Europe because it was so much more efficient in terms of producing the calories that people needed. It had a number of advantages over grains, none the least of which was that potatoes could be stored in the ground. And by storing them in the ground, you could protect your potatoes from tax collectors or from marauding armies that came through and wanted to take your crop. They wouldn't go out and dig them up. So the peasantry really liked potatoes and provided them a tremendous amount of calories and starch and whatnot.

But what happened in Ireland was there was only one kind of potato. There was only one variety. became infested with a strain of Phytophthora, a fungus, a must, that spread very quickly throughout Ireland and in the course of seven years, I think, destroyed three quarters of the potato crop. Now, this was devastating because most Irish people ate mostly potatoes. Now, why did most Irish people eat mostly potatoes? Because they had been colonized by the British. And most British landowners, there were British landowners and Anglo-Irish landowners that controlled most of the land in Ireland. And most of the Irish, particularly the Catholic Irish, we would call them like sharecroppers. They were crofters and cottagers and didn't own their land and didn't own their

cottages for that matter, and subsisted on potatoes. So what at one point was the bulwark of the Andean civilization becomes in in fact, food for exploited peoples who are very vulnerable on the brink of disaster anyway, because they've lost their land, because they're very poor, can only scratch out a living growing potatoes. And even that would not have led to the famine had it not been for the fact that the landowners in English Crown made sure that food was exported from Ireland at the height of the crisis. So you can see right there that food is a commodity, follows the logic of the market. So if poor people are starving, food doesn't go in that direction. It goes to wherever people can pay for the food, which was not in rural Ireland.

So that's where we have the Great Hunger, and it's estimated a million people starved to death, another million emigrated. Many came to the United States. It's very interesting at the time because there were laws called the Corn Laws. Now, those Corn Laws basically protected the production of large landowners in the British Isles from cheap imports, right? These were tariffs. So they kept food out. So when the famine first begins, these Corn Law laws are in place to protect the profits of the local landowners who start exporting their crops because the markets are better outside of Britain and outside of Ireland, and very little food can come in. The industrialists who saw their workforce dying decided it was a good time to do away with those laws. And so you see this fight between the landed bourgeoisie, the agrarian bourgeoisie, and the new capitalist industrialists, where the industrialists want free trade. And the landed aristocracy basically wants to protect their prices for their goods, right, for their farm products. So they finally do away with those laws, the corn laws, and then, you know, food starts to come in, but people are too poor to buy it, even at that.

So it doesn't really solve the problem. But encapsulated in all of that, I think we see the same contradictions. Back in the mid 19th century, we see the same things happening today. So the great hunger has been a way for quite some time of explaining what's wrong with a capitalist food system. Yeah, absolutely. That's a really interesting example. I'm also wondering if you talk about the Green Revolution and sort of if you could explain what the Green Revolution was and, you know, situate it within sort of this false sense of scarcity that capitalism has created in our food system. To understand the Green Revolution, we also have to take a step back to the 18th century, actually, and look at the enclosures again. Because along with the enclosures came what's called British high farming.

And British high farming came about because the new systems of production, after you kick most of the peasants off the land right and so now you have these large landowners engaging in food production and fiber production they basically exhausted their soils and so this was a terrible crisis throughout fertility the loss of fertility was a crisis throughout the western world and they solved it by importing guano, which is bird shit. And so you had what's called the Guano Wars. Countries were fighting for these different islands, particularly around South America, that had a mile's worth of guano stacked up on the rocks. And this guano was then mined with slave labor and then sent back to Europe to replenish the exhausted fields following the enclosures. And this is the first green revolution, as far as I'm concerned, because then you have this, the advent of what's called high farming.

And this was seen as a modern technological way of farming, which required more land. It required capital because you had to buy the inputs. And it actually required less labor because there was less rotating and whatnot, and you didn't have to grow green manures and these types of things. You just hit it with guano. So that's really kind of the first green revolution, and that same model then is used. And of course, the justification for this was population is growing, and this is shortly after the time when Malthus was writing. He basically said that the population growth rate was exponential and the rate of increase in food production was linear. And when those lines cross, then you get famine. And of course, he wanted great population control

against poor people who he blamed for the growth in population. But the justification for English high farming then is it's more efficient and we can feed our population. Well, in the 60s, we had this sort of the same dynamic. The 60s, early 70s, Paul Ehrlich writes The Population Bomb. And basically, he and his wife, who was never given credit for co-writing the book, but they posit that Malthus is right, that the world population is exploding, that we need to double production over the next generation, and we need to limit population growth. And there's a lot of China bashing starts going on. And so the Green Revolution is introduced.

There's a lot of China bashing starts going on. And so the Green Revolution is introduced. And what the Green Revolution is basically is to take the fertilizers and pesticides that the United States had been using after World War II and export them around the world and get other countries and farmers to buy them and increase production, increase productivity. Well, this is actually where Food First got started because Frances Moore LePay, one of the co-founders of Food First, looked into this issue. And she found that, in fact, the world was producing one and a half times more than enough food for every man, woman, and child on the planet. So it didn't make sense that scarcity was the problem. And yet, it was the justification

for spreading the Green Revolution. And I should say, the Green Revolution was a campaign. And it was a campaign from Ford and Rockefeller, because Ford and Rockefeller basically sold Rockefeller because Ford and Rockefeller basically sold machinery and inputs like fertilizers and pesticides to farmers in the United States and in Europe. And they had saturated their markets. The farm sector could not absorb all of the inputs and all of the machinery which was being produced. And so these had to find new markets. And this is very much a condition of capitalism. Capitalism has to constantly expand and find new markets. And so the driving force behind the Green Revolution was not hunger at all, because there was more than enough food to go around. The driving force behind the Green Revolution was the need for agro-industry to find new markets for their products.

And that model, very similar to the model of British high farming, is being reinstated constantly. So that's why supposedly we need GMOs, it's why supposedly we need precision farming, satellite agriculture, all these things, is because supposedly the population is growing so fast that we need to produce more food. Well, it doesn't appear as though anybody is groveling before the facts on this because the rate of population growth has plummeted. One can sort of forgive Paul Ehrlich because when he wrote the population bomb, the rate of population growth was 2.1 or 2%. And you get these huge curves of upward population.

Well, now the world population is crashing. And it doesn't look like we're even going to reach the 12 billion, which was projected just a couple of years ago. Now it looks like 8 or 9 billion is going to be the leveling off for population. So you can't argue that we need to double production because we already produced too much to begin with. So this is really sort of how capital politicizes the discourse around hunger in order to colonize new markets. I mentioned earlier that most of the food in the world is produced by peasants. Now, they're not doing well because they have little postage stamp parcels of land. They can barely produce enough to feed themselves, if that. of land. They can barely produce enough to feed themselves, if that. And they sell their product on the market and they sell it cheap because they're poor. Now, even though they feed over

half the world, they're also most of the world's hungry. And I should say, today is International Women's Day, which is when I'm being interviewed. Most of the farmers in the world are women. And these women produce most of the food in the world. And yet women and girls make up most of the world's hungry people. So these types of contradictions only emerge when there's a fight over a market. And the market share is the peasantry producing nearly three quarters of the world's food. Capital wants that share. Capital wants that market.

And that's what the new green revolution is about. And that's what the information revolution is about. That's what the GMO revolution is about. It's about capturing the markets which are controlled by the peasantry. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It really seems to be mainly an issue of distribution over production. Capitalism is great at producing things, but it sucks at distributing them in an equitable way. And it's interesting, you also brought up the ideas of Thomas Malthus a number of times and his ideas on overpopulation, which have very racist roots, I think. So it's articulated fairly well in a book I read recently

by Raj Patel and Jason Moore called History of the World and Seven Cheap Things. And this sort of goes well into my next question. You write that capitalism co-evolved with inequality. And actually, chapter five of your book is titled Power and Privilege in the Food System, Chapter five of your book is titled Power and Privilege in the Food System, Gender, Race and Class. And yeah, I'm wondering if you could maybe just unpack this chapter a little bit for our listeners. Yes, of course. Well, it was fashionable for a while to say things like, you know, there was a system of slavery. But then after slavery, you know, we get modern liberal democracies and we get free enterprise and capitalism and whatnot, as if they were somehow separated by, you know, the

Emancipation Proclamation or something like that. And I think that there is enough recent scholarship to debunk that position. I mean, basically, and the case of slavery in the United States is probably one of the best examples, if not the best example. The use of enslaved labor, African enslaved labor, allows the United States as a country to accumulate a tremendous amount of wealth, you know, essentially stolen wealth. The land stolen from indigenous peoples and then the labor stolen from African people allows for a tremendous amount of value to be accumulated. Now, slave owners didn't keep this under their beds. They put it in banks. And these banks made loans to the government. And the government used the money to finance their army and finance

westward expansion and the massacre of indigenous people. And, you know, it's also important to realize that enslaved people were property and they could be mortgaged. You could take out loans on your slaves. They were commodities. So there is no fine dividing line between slavery and capitalism. In fact, many people argue that you could not have capitalism as it exists today without imperialism and genocide and without slavery, and certainly not without exploitation of working people. So you think about not just indentured servants, but laborers, immigrants, where they receive only a small portion of the value of their labor. The rest of the value of their labor becomes part of capital and is used by the capitalists to make more money. And so in this way, capitalism itself was tremendously dependent

on agriculture in order to finance industry, in order to finance their on agriculture in order to finance industry, in order to finance their banks, in order to finance their expansion around the world. And that's still true to this day, which is why there's such a fight over agriculture itself. You know, it's a $6 trillion a year industry just in monetary terms, but in terms of political economy and hegemony and power, it's worth much, much more. We'll be right back with Eric Holt Jimenez, author of the book, A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism, Understanding the Political Economy of What we eat. And that is go down to Walmart and stir yourself some food The first thing you'll need is a long, sure receipt

To make it apparent that you've got it all complete And the next item you're gonna wanna take Is a reusable grocery bag to fill up along the way And your main concern as you're walking along Is try your very best and remain calm Act just like you do this every day And respond to the workers if they agree along the way Start with your items that are the biggest first.

It's just frozen dinners and drinks that quench your thirst. And then at the top, you're going to want a place. The smallest and the lightest, are you doing great? Yeah! And after you have your necessities You're gonna walk through a closed aisle Most likely 13 And then you're gonna take out that receipt

And head for the exit Though not too hastily Avoid eye contact as you make for the street And now you're professional bona fide thieves Yeah! That was Steal from Walmart by Fire Ant Season. Now back to our conversation with Eric Holt Jimenez. You've touched upon this quite a bit,

but maybe just a little bit more explicitly, if we could sort of look at the labor side of the food system and trace the line from, you know, this historical exclusion of farm workers from labor laws in the United States to the present state. What are some of the problems in the food system when it comes to workers and farmers? And has there been much improvement since some of those workers have been brought back into labor laws, but there still just seems like there are just so many challenges for those who are working in the food system. So I grew up on farms and ranches. And through a good part of my college years, I worked on farms and ranches. And so I understand that an eight-hour day is a hard thing to enforce.

It's largely sunup to sundown. You're working very hard. The whole family is out there. It's a family farm. Kids are working from the time they're very small. I mean, I started working when I was 10. So one can understand how agriculture has to be treated differently. However, the way it's being treated differently is exactly wrong. And so originally, labor laws didn't apply to

agriculture because farmers were afraid, well, what, I'm going to have to start only working eight hours a day, or my family's only going to work eight hours a day, and I have to pay my kids. I mean, there was a number of things that they argued about, which could have been taken care of fairly easily, not by exempting them for all laws, labor laws. The most, I would say, effective way that agriculture avoids labor laws and regulation and scrutiny is by hiring people who are undocumented and who fall outside of the system and who are vulnerable and are not able to easily challenge abuses on the farm, who are technically not even able to form unions, who, you know, I mean, they do against great odds. But the point being that there's sort of a myth in this country that, well, you know, Americans don't really like to work in the fields anymore, and they're,

they don't work that well. And, you know, there may be some, there's truth to that because we've forgotten how, but that doesn't mean that we can or should exploit people who come across the border to basically keep our food system running. I mean, our food system would fall tomorrow without immigrant labor, without undocumented labor, it would fall tomorrow. I mean, we wouldn't get the products out of the fields. We wouldn't get anything processed in the plants. And to a large degree, we wouldn't get our food served or cooked. So I think that the biggest challenge for labor and agriculture today is, in fact, immigration. And, you know, ironically, you know, it's Ronald Reagan who gave the last amnesty.

And the minute folks got amnesty, they got the hell out of agriculture, you know, that this didn't want to be farm workers anymore. And so the point is that on one hand, we need to regularize status, immigration status for workers. And then we have to begin applying fair, equitable labor regulation to agriculture and have to begin paying farm workers a fair wage, not just a living wage, but a fair wage. Yeah. A few years ago, I was asked to write a piece and I don't have any expertise and I learned a lot on the food system when I wrote this piece. But yeah, a piece on food justice in New York's Hudson Valley. And one of the first people that I spoke with said that she really thought that the main issue in our food system is that Americans are just not willing to pay enough for food, that food is too cheap, and that we should be paying more.

And I'm wondering if you had any thoughts on that line of reasoning. Well, this is a very complex issue. And I mean, it's got a lot of facets to it. You know, what is food really worth? And see, the way we value food today is by the market. So that's, you know, the supply and demand. and that establishes the price of food. That has little relation to the true cost of production, particularly if you factor in the environmental externalities or the social externalities. So that's the first problem there. There's been plenty of studies that show that if you pay workers a fair wage, whether it's McDonald's or it's picking strawberries for Driscoll, the increase in the amount to the consumer is negligible. The other thing is that, I mean, if you compare what we pay for food to Europe. So Europe pays a lot more for food, but most Europeans don't have to

pay as much for education or health or housing. So, you know, so the costs work themselves out. The reason we have cheap food historically is so that employers didn't have to pay so much to their workers. I talked about the tremendous subsidy of the peasantry to industry. That's where it started. And that continues today. And, you know, there are ways to deal with this. And we have had moments in the history of this country where at least the price to the farmer was on par with what they needed to cover their costs and make a good living. Like right after World War I, we had what was called parity. And with parity, farmers could make a good living because the price covered their costs of production. So for example, a bushel of wheat would get you two gallons of gasoline in the

early 20s. After the market crash and we go into the depression, it's going to take you seven bushels of wheat to buy a gallon of gasoline. So farmers lose parity. And it wasn't until Roosevelt institutes the New Deal that they begin to get parity back. That was one of the demands. We want parity. And so when Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, he starts with agriculture and food. And he sops up the surpluses and turns that into food aid and then pays farmers a fair price for their food, but then limits production. Because something I have alluded to, but we haven't really talked about in any depth, is the problem, not just regarding the true cause of hunger, but in terms of environmental

destruction and the tremendous inequities which we find in our food system is overproduction, is capitalist overproduction. We produce too much food. And when we produce too much food, we do so because we don't have to pay for what it's worth. We don't have to pay the destruction that it causes in the environment, at least the agricultural sector doesn't have to, and because of competition, what happens in agriculture is that farmers have to invest a tremendous amount of resources and money and time up front before they see any returns. So just to get a seed in the ground. And then you have to wait and pray for months for a crop and favorable market conditions and favorable weather conditions

and whatnot. And then you pay back your loans and hopefully you make a profit. Well, most years you don't, but you're counting on those years that you do. But if the price goes down, what are you going to do? Farmers produce more because they have a lot of fixed costs, upfront costs. So they produce more the next year to recover their losses. Well, if you produce more, that just creates more overproduction and the price goes lower again. And we've basically had overproduction for the last hundred years. If you look at the food price index, it's been dropping ever since before World War II. And what that means is there's always been too much food. And that's still the case today. So we have to pay farmers a fair price so they can pay farm workers a fair price.

We have to control over production. So we need supply management. We need quotas. And we have to have some environmental regulation to make sure that the production that is happening isn't causing other costs and other damages, which we may not be able to pay for, like climate change. So this is where a lot of folks like myself are arguing for a new deal and looking at the Green New Deal and insisting that if we're really serious about the Green New Deal, it's got to include a section on agriculture which controls overproduction, which dismantles these farms like the confined animal feedlot operations, the CAFOs, that produce so much waste and environmental externalities. And we have to pay farmers a fair price, which covers their costs

so that a farming family can live. I mean, we're losing all of our family farmers in this country. And it's a tremendous concentration of land. Bill Gates is now the biggest agricultural landowner in the country. And we are basically putting the entire, not just our food system, but the entire ecological system at risk of collapse because of the way we farm and the way we process and distribute our food. I didn't know that about Bill Gates. That's really not expected and a little worrisome for sure. So yeah, I guess just my last sort of question, you mentioned, you know, the Green New Deal and

some of the policies that could potentially be put in place that would help solve a lot of these issues. I guess, yeah, just as a final thought, if there's, you know, something that you wanted to sort of end with, that I haven't brought up yet. And also, you know, this show is called Upstream, because we generally want to go upstream to explore sort of the root causes of the many challenges we're facing today. So yeah, if you had any final thoughts, or if you were to go upstream, and I think you've done a fantastic job of looking at systemic root causes so far. But yeah, just, you know, sort of a final thought encapsulated in your opinion, what's what are the main problems with our food system? And really,

most importantly, you know, how can they be addressed in sort of a very systemic upstream sort of way? I think that the food system is still pivotal in terms of our entire political economic system. And I say that recognizing that we can't change the food system without changing the system of capitalism. It's impossible to change one without changing the other. So it's interlinked, but the food system has tremendous leverage in the types

of social and economic transformations which we need in this country and in the world. So I'll go back to the main problem. The main problem is overproduction. Capitalism overproduces to begin with, but food production especially tends towards overproduction. So I think we need to go back to the lessons from the original New Deal and update them to include provisions around labor, around race, reparations, and around the environment. So in some ways, it's very simple. In other words, doing it will be very complicated. It's very simple. Say the farmer, okay, we will buy X tons of wheat or corn, whatever it is, at this price, which is a fair price, but we won't buy one bushel more. And that's basically

a quota. And so you get to produce this much. And we can figure it out with the parity price index. This is how much you need to make a good living. But you cannot contaminate your groundwater. You can't poison your workers. You have to pay them fairly. In other words, a set of social and environmental conditions for a guaranteed price at a level of production, which we can actually absorb. That way the price won't drop too much and we can put some in reserve and we can pay farmers to keep it in reserve because we need reserves just as a matter of measure for food stability, food system stability. If we start there, you would find a number of things happening. You will find that these large industrial farms will not be able to compete. A green new deal with green and fair parity index will favor family farms. And the wealth from those farms will circulate locally and help to rebuild our rural communities that are suffering so much. There are studies that show that that type of

wealth can circulate up to seven more times within the community if it's not siphoned off by agribusiness and by some of these huge monopolies. The next thing we have to do is we need to, at the very least, apply our antitrust laws. We need to break up the monopolies. We need to break up the grain monopolies, the fertilizer monopolies, the machine monopolies. And that will provide opportunities for other forms and other levels of investment and business.

will make a huge difference. The United States doesn't have to feed the world. We don't have to be overproducing all this food and destroying markets around the world, which basically then destroying farming systems around the world. So they become dependent on food aid from the US. We don't have to do that. Those are all political decisions, political military hegemonic decisions that have nothing to do with a fair, just, sustainable food system. So I think that parity, as I've described it, is critical. Now, what's the problem for getting to parity? Back in the 1930s, somewhere around half of the people in the United States farmed. So farmers were a strong political group. You didn't want to get farmers too mad at you. Farmers today are in the minority. They have absolutely no political power. And we have more people in prison than we have on the land. saying, particularly the farm justice movement, the farm justice movement, the food justice movement, they have to build alliances, broad alliances, climate justice movement, and beyond the justice

movements. I mean, for example, I think that organic farmers, family farmers need to build alliances with conventional farmers, not just with consumers, but with conventional family farmers to demand parity, demand fairness in the countryside. So we need to go through a period of very strong alliance building. And that also means building alliances and taking action outside of just the food system. I mean, there are a whole host of issues which impact the food system, particularly around climate and environment and labor, with whom we need to build alliances in order to create the political will to introduce the type of transformative legislation and policies which we desperately need. legislation and policies which we desperately need. And so there are barriers to doing that. Otherwise, we would have already done it. But some of the biggest barriers basically are the ones we've had for centuries now. Racism, sexism, classism. If we don't confront these things straight on within our movements and within our organizations and within ourselves, then we're not going to be able to build the strong alliances that we need to create the social movements or political will to make the changes that we need, like introducing parity.

introducing parity. Well, thanks so much, Eric. I really love that, and I love the way that your work zooms out to really connect our food system with all of these different social, political, economic, and ecological issues in such a comprehensive way.

And I just want to thank you again so much for being on Upstream with me today. I really appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without support from our listeners and fans.

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field recordings, and other things to help us keep this project going. We're currently working on our next documentary episode, Feminism for the 99%. If you're part

of an organization that would like to sponsor this upcoming episode, please reach out to us. You can learn more about our sponsorship packages at upstreampodcast.org forward slash sponsorship. Thank you. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Always Flowers blooming from our bones that break Into the morning we run To the shoreline Calling us to speak the sight

Blades under the earth and frost Casting ghostly shadows Tall like giants child As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea Thank you. Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, Sveta, S, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, © transcript Emily Beynon