The park estimates there are about 3 million visitors here each year. More than 50,000 names are etched in the granite wall including eight women. Announcer next, a look at food a ballot availability in the u. S. Host hi, everyone. We are going to get started. If you have a cell phone on, please turn it off. Thank you. As i think you are all aware this is one of our keynote talks, entitled, the human rights of food. We have an amazing speaker with us today, molly anderson. She is currently at the college of the atlantic. She teaches about hunger, sued security, Food Sovereignty system dynamics, Food Security, Food Sovereignty system dynamics, sustainability metrics, and how industrialized countries will move to a postpetroleum food system. She is part of an International Panel of experts on the food system. There is a film that was prepared for this conference that we will be showing tomorrow as part of the keynote, and hopefully be putting it online for all of you. We are also joined by the coauthor of 18 books, including the 3 million copy diet for a first love planet. She was named by gourmet magazine as one of 25 people who have changed the way america eats. She won a silver medal from the independent book publisher awards. She is the cofounder of three organizations, including food first and the small planet institute, which she leads with her daughter, anna. She also heads of fund that channels resources to democratic programs worldwide. [applause] molly thank you and good afternoon to all of you. It is a real honor to copresent with frankie. I see her as one of the pioneers of food justice. She brought our attention a long time ago to way that ways that policies and eating patterns in this country are affecting the prospects of justice for people in poor countries and what we can learn from people in other countries. Im delighted to be here. I want to start with a few observations about why food justice seems to be rising to the for right now, why it is on so many peoples minds. I think first is the growing awareness of racism and racial inequity in this country. Ferguson was certainly a flash point for that. With ferguson came the realization, for many of us, that black youths were being massacred by state forces with virtual impunity. This has been going on for a long time, continuing an ugly legacy of lynching in this country. I think food justice is also benefiting from the attention to global inequity in access to resources. At this point, 80 people have the same wealth as the bottom 3. 5 billion in the world. Oxfam, in its many incarnations, has been raising awareness about global inequity and doing a pretty good job i think there has also been a maturation of efforts in this country to address food issues. Its related to a global upsurge in demands for Food Sovereignty. I will be coming back to Food Sovereignty, but first, i want to talk about what i mean by maturation of the conversation. How has the conversation about food justice changed over the last few decades . When i worked in the boston area local food was exploding on the national scene. Many people saw localism, direct marketing, farmers markets as a pathway to justice because finally farmers would stand a better chance of Getting Better economic returns, and customers would be reconnected with farmers. The conversation moves on to healthy food as people realize that local food is not particularly accessible to many local many low Income Customers due to cost and availability. I think it is well intentioned but sometimes goes astray from what low Income Customers really want and need. Its a kind of colorblind policy. Hardly anybody in the United States is eating enough fresh fruits and vegetables, so better accessibility to healthy food, the argument goes, is going to help everyone. Then people said wait a minute. Its not just healthy food, its a their food, affordable food, green food, humane food, food raised with humane practices. And we saw the conversation moving on to real food and good food, and i think there will be a presentation i am not sure if she is. She is here yet, but talking about real food tomorrow. Then we started paying attention to the systematic barriers and underlying causes of food problems. These are some of the reports coming out over the past decade. We have been looking at root causes not just symptoms, like lack of access to healthy food and this shifted the conversation into issues of food power, the concentration of wealth and power in the food system nationally, and why corporations have increasing control over what we eat as well as how they have greater control over the International Food system as well. We see this playing out in free trade agreements now. With strands from Food Sovereignty, the discussion now, i think, is moving into issues of food governance food democracy, and who decides what people eat. This is a recent publication on deepening food democracy. Going back to my title how is food justice connected to the right to food . What does food justice really require of all of us sitting here . As i see it, food justice requires first of all attention to the history of structural violence and oppression in our country. These are the words of policy link. Current food systems have been shaped by historical practices and policies that systemically oppressed communities of color. Doing food justice also requires Greater Transparency about economic and social consequences of food system practices. Who is getting richer from these practices . Who is getting poorer . This goes back to the idea that 80 people fit on one bus. They are making money from food systems and the sale of food. It requires accountability to those who have not been well served by our food system. This accountability is served by constant reflection on the root causes of food injustice. Its incumbent on why people to understand the many ways we may be benefiting from quite whoite people to understand the many ways we may be in a fitting from injustice. It means making opportunities for meaningful voice and engagement by those who have not then heard, who have borne the most costs of the third not been heard, who have borne the most costs of the food system. Finally, it requires partnerships in solidarity with low income communities and communities of color. I am not talking about Charitable Services or providing what we think they want. I talking about engagement to truly learn from impoverished communities and communities of color, and to support them. In 2008, i try to envision an alternative to marketbased solutions, which seemed to be sucking all the air out of the room at that time. And to some extent continue to do so. These marketbased solutions included direct marketing labels, and new ways to give consumers more choice so they could vote with their forks. It seemed obvious to me that the market was never going to deliver justice and obvious that local foods were not necessarily environmentally beneficial or fair. So i wrote a paper on rightsbased food systems. The basic idea is that our current food system violates human rights on every front farmers, workers, citizens hungry people, and food system reform means a transformation of the conditions two conditions under which all human rights are for filled. Of course, the rights of animals and the rights of nature are already being violated, but there is not as clear an agreement about with these rights are. Human rights in contrast, our agreedupon International Goals ever since 1948 and the universal declaration on human rights, which our first lady at the time, eleanor roosevelt, was instrumental in helping to craft. Cases have been brought to National Courts to protect the rights to food successfully. Human rights are indivisible and inalienable. Because of this, it seems to me that rightsbased food systems might have the potential to be a unifying goal across different Food Movements, to bridge groups that were fighting each other, that were working in isolation for their own independent goals also fighting with each other for funding and for legislative attention. I wanted them to be working together better. But rights raised food systems did not get much attention. Heifer international briefly considered revising their food program around this concept but otherwise, it didnt even seem to ripple the water, which got me thinking about, why not . The first thing i went to was the lack of understanding in the United States of economic, cultural, and social rights. The United States is horribly separated from other countries in ratifying human rights treaties and conventions. This goes back to 1966 and the cold war. Two covenants on human rights were developed. The United States took a position that economic and coulter all rights were best met by the market. The United States cultural rights were best met by the market. The United States wanted to distinguish itself from socialist countries. This or flex, i think, a fundamental this reflects, i think, a fundamental misunderstanding. You cannot just cherry pick human rights. We have abundant evidence that the market does not work in this way to provide these kind of rights. It has to be directed by an reined in by public policy. Unlike most other countries in the world, we lacked basic Public Policies to ensure economic, social, cultural rights. For those of you in the back, this map is showing the countries who have an door step covenant, and those that havent. Use have endorsed this covenant, and those that havent. You see that the United States has failed to ratify the covenant. In terms of food, the United States still uses a charitable approach to address Food Insecurity. They are a wonderful stopgap but they are doled out at the whim of congress, and congress is pretty meanspirited right now. Ngos have pioneered programs to increase access to food that range from bounty box in boston or other voucher systems that low income people can use to Better School options and cleaning, to healthy food prescriptions underwritten by Health Insurance plans. Recently, there is a lot of interest in redirecting food that was otherwise going to be wasted onto the plates of low income people. These are wellintentioned programs, but this is not a rightsbased approach. Poor people need and want to exactly the same food rich people want. They really dont want our food waste. Or children, in particular [applause] they need guaranteed access to healthy food in order to grow into healthy adults. Yet, according to the latest usda data that is available, one in five children in the United States lives in a food insecure household that does not have guaranteed access to healthy food at all times. In half of these households, children as well as adults are food insecure, going without the food they need. While local programs can definitely improve access to healthy food for limited populations, they will not result they will never result in the elimination of hunger and Food Insecurity. Other countries that have recognized the right to food on a National Scale and are using rightsbased approaches to improve their food systems have shown dramatic results dramatic increases in Food Insecurity, even when the country is far less wealthy than the United States. In the United States, household Food Insecurity rates have remained static or increased since reliable measures were implemented in the mid1990s. Unlike brazil a great example which frankie will be coming back to the United States does not have federal programs to eliminate hunger and Food Insecurity, but only to dampen the most corrosive effects. This is not right. This probably occurred to you folks already, but the other obvious reason why the idea of rightsbased foods systems never took office because it didnt have the support of people on the ground. It was just my idea expressed in an academic paper in a journal and social change doesnt happen that way. It doesnt happen because some academic comes up with an idea. It happens because a group of people find a common cause. Thats where i want to focus for the rest of my talk. The place i hear this see this happening most visibly today is the global level, in the committee on world Food Security. Since 2009, the committee on world Food Security has become the premier International Forum for discussion of issues of Food Security. The cfs was reformed in 2009 so that the people who are on the front lines of hunger, the people who are working with Civil Society through social movements made up of smallscale workers fissures, farmers women, indigenous people, urban poor use landless people, are all working together and speaking on food issues in this global forum. They have full participation in every activity up to voting, which is reserved for member countries. This is appropriate because it is the National Governments that are responsible for implementing policies to protect hungry people. All of the decisions and recommendations of the committee on world Food Security must be congruent with the right to food. This is part of the reform. The decisions must consider the best evidence, which is assembled through a panel of high level experts with equitable gender and regional representation, and from Civil Society organizations. Every year the committee on world Food Security has grown. In 2014, this was the breakdown. Nearly 800 representatives of the committee on world Food Security stakeholder groups, thats governments Civil Society, the private sector, International Regional organizations, nearly 800 people showed up for this big weeklong meeting in rome. It included 223 individuals from 120 seven different Civil Society organizations and academic institutions. I was there. I brought eight students along and they had a wonderful time. The Civil Society mechanism, the organizing body for Civil Society, had 151 individuals from 80 organizations. The private sector had 91 individuals from 71 organizations. Again, their representation is growing every year. You are probably wondering well, what do you talk about for a whole week . Some of the things they talked about you can find a report online some of the things they talked about was the progress made since internationally guidelines were created. They talked about accountability. They talked about the critical importance of smallscale farmers to feed the world, and are basically the people feeding the world now. They talked about the kinds of investment needed in agriculture, and how that investment should be regulated. They talked about the role of fisheries and aqua culture in Food Insecurity, and what can be done with food waste. The committee on world Food Security beyond these separate topics, allowed conflicts in worldview and conflicts in how people interpret the evidence before us. Scientific evidence is not cut and dry, really. It allows conflicts to be aired and discussed with the people who are actually suffering from hunger able to say here is how we see it and here is how we are impacted by these policies that you people are implementing. Food sovereignty is one of the banners under which Civil Society organizations organize the committee on world Food Security and around the world. Food sovereignty is an International Movement started by smallscale farmers. Increasingly, it is being adopted by other groups. Its advocates include millions of small scale farmers and fishers joined by colleges of agriculture, womens rights, and indigenous peoples. Detailing what Food Sovereignty means in practice is rich and exciting. There were two fantastic conferences over the last calendar year, one in yell at yale, and one in the netherlands. They brought together practitioners and academics, and there was a recent conference in mali that came out with a declaration on agriumecology as the preferred practice for smallscale farmers around the world. Its a vision of a system that people want, in harmony with nature, and in harmony with each other. This work is beginning in the United States and may eventually result in an enlightened food policy, such as the one that has been developed by our neighbors in the north, in canada. This is resetting the table and there are several other examples of food policy that have then develop. A really have been developed. A really wonderful contrast to the farm bill. Before turning the floor over to frankie, i want to lead you leave you with just a few thoughts. First, the United States has much to learn from other