October 12, 2011: Global (all sites)
The Right To Choose What We Eat
Does an individual really have the right to eat whatever he or she wants to eat? This is the fundamental question behind Rural Vermont’s “Food Sovereignty” campaign.
Rural Vermont, the statewide advocacy group dedicated to advancing economic justice for Vermont farmers through advocacy and education, is ramping up a campaign to encourage towns and villages to consider the issue of food sovereignty at their 2012 town meetings, according to Robb Kidd, an organizer with the group.
Sovereignty means to have supreme authority. Considering the issue of food sovereignty, Rural Vermont takes this position: “We declare the right of communities to produce, process, sell and purchase local foods. In recognition of Vermont’s traditional agricultural systems, we assert these vital principles as the foundation of local Food Sovereignty.”
This current effort stems from Rural Vermont’s past statewide advocacy work on issues including the right to buy and sell raw milk and meat processing regulation. Much of Rural Vermont’s work focuses on ways consumers can purchase food directly from farmers.
“In a lot of our work, we’re running into legislative dead ends and federal rules and regulations that don’t allow any more growth in the market,” Kidd says. Kidd notes that the recently-released Farm-to-Plate plan reports that only five percent of the food consumed in Vermont is produced in Vermont.
“How are we going to change that?” Kidd asks. “Big food trucks still rumble into Montpelier daily.”
In order for Vermonters to be able to buy more food from their farmer-neighbors, some regulations, both state and federal, will have to change, Kidd notes. The first step is educating more people about the issues.
“Even though there’s a lot of support from Vermont politicians, we feel there needs to be a vast culture change,” Kidd says. “One way to do this is in communities themselves. This campaign is about bringing the message to town halls, to get this issue talked about on a greater level.”
Town Meeting Day discussions serve to inform a greater number of Vermonters on the details of a particular issue, Kidd says, citing past Town Meeting Day topics such as nuclear power.
Rural Vermont is encouraging towns and villages to consider a Food Sovereignty resolution at their town meeting in 2012, and to adopt resolution language that speaks specifically to the individual community’s history and direction regarding food and agriculture. “For example, a town may have had a slaughter facility and want to address that issue,” Kidd says.
As a first step, Kidd has convened a group of Montpelier residents to draft a food sovereignty petition to present to Montpelier voters on Town Meeting Day in March 2012. It reads:
“We, the Montpelier community, are concerned about our ability to grow, buy, sell, and eat local foods – our local food sovereignty. As growing uncertainty develops around industrial agriculture’s ability to provide food that is safe, healthy, natural, humane, and compatible with the planet’s changing environment, we as a community are choosing a different path of sourcing food:
We choose foods that are healthy and natural instead of those reliant on pesticides, fossil fuels, or genetic modification.
We choose a local food system that benefits our neighbors and communities, not the industrial food system that exploits local resources to benefit multinational corporations.
We choose food produced locally and diversely, instead of fossil fuel dependent, global, mono-cultured foods.
And whereas the Farm-to-Plate report highlights the local food shortfalls and a strategic plan to overcome these shortcomings, we as an individual community within Vermont need to exceed the current statewide local food consumption rate of only five percent.
Therefore, we the citizens of Montpelier declare our right to grow and process local foods. Furthermore, we assert our right to directly sell and purchase these foods both between and from our friends and neighbors. In recognition of Vermont’s commitment to freedom and unity, we assert this vital right as the foundation of our local food sovereignty.”
The Montpelier group continues to meet to discuss how to build support for this petition.
Kidd hopes that the Montpelier petition will build momentum that will spread to other communities. A lot of people are interested, he says. “I could see 15-50 towns taking it on,” Kidd estimates. “Ideally, I’d like to have 250 towns take it on,” he says. “Even if they all rejected it, they’d have had a conversation about it.”
With this campaign, Rural Vermont aims to build grassroots community support that would enable legislators to take a stronger stand on tough agricultural issues, Kidd says. “We want to give legislators the political capital to make tougher decisions or address issues that aren’t being addressed now.”
Kidd introduced the food sovereignty campaign at last week’s Growing Local Fest in Montpelier. Many attendees were supportive of the effort.
“This is an issue that unites left and right, because there is nothing more fundamental than feeding ourselves,” said Josh Schlossberg of East Montpelier.
Rich Scharf of Duxbury agreed: “The decisions about what we are going to eat, need to be made by us, the citizens.”
Sylvia Fagin writes about local food and agriculture. Contact her via her blog “Aar, Naam ~ Come, Eat,” at sylviafagin.wordpress.com, or via email at sylviafagin
yahoo
com.
View the complete article at Montpelier Bridge
