Thomas Linzey came to Fairfield about two years ago and spoke to a standing room only crowd of about 200-e00 people. (available online, google at MUM Thomas Linzey), He fired up the crowd, and about 40 people followed up for several months. They divided into 3 groups which did different analyses. Attendance dropped off after some time, but a smaller group kept meeting (middle phase) until a new leader (Tom Krystofiak sp?)emerged who inspired more folks about 8 months ago. Since then, 17 people have been meeting two hours every week and have drafted an ordinance (with CELDF help) for Fairfield. It consists of two parts:
Community Bill of Rights – describing community rights in a wonderfully inspiring way.
Insert your community’s “pain point” here – ie, what issue does the community feel is hurting people/the environment.that want to make illegal
In FF they chose CAFO’s (large hog confinement operations) as their “pain point” as these are a real issue in Jefferson County – several very large CAFOS have sprung up, and keep moving in. The FF group is running into two issues at the moment.:
Legal-ese: how to draft the document in such a way that corporations cannot fanagle their way out of the ordinance (eg, what is the definition of a corporation). They are working with CELDF lawyers on this.
Educating the public: There is a gap between what the ordinance wants to do and what the County Supervisors and residents of county want to do. The Supervisors are not on board (one is). They are curious as to how we in Iowa City have worked with our County Supervisors to get them on board. .
Second, they are working on ways to best educate the public… specifically, the farmers and rural folk. Jefferson County has a large rural population with high poverty/hunger rates. Working to educate themselves on the culture of the county. Many folks wouldn’t want this in their back yard but are laissez faire about it otherwise.
In addtion to Tom Lindzey, the group highly recommend Paul Cienfuegos from the Northwest as a consultant. He is very articulate and inspiring and does numerous workshops on pertinent tops (see below) – could come to speak with the Grannies/ maybe combine with FF.
Paul leads a diverse variety of workshops and other offerings – and not just about challenging corporate rule. He also have many decades of experience leading workshops which help people come to terms with their difficult feelings about the current state of our world, from despair and rage to grief and numbness. As well as teaching active listening skills to activists.
Posted inActivism, Education|Comments Off on Fairfield Community Rights Coalition (3 Jun 2015)
June 3, 2015 Phone call to Stacey Schmader, Administrative Director and National Democracy School Director (717) 498-0054; co-founder of Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) with Thomas Linzey.
Only one format now available for “live” Democracy School is one and one-half days: Friday evening 6:30-9:30 p.m. and Saturday 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Cost would include travel, housing, and honorarium for 2 lecturers. An estimate would be $4500 – $5000, but only actual costs would be included. This format focuses on community rights.
A new publication from CELDF is about to go to press. It is 24 pages printed on newsprint with color and is a community guide in 3 parts:
Introduction to community rights;
State by state community rights;
Building a movement for community rights.
The title is Common Sense: Community Rights Organizing. Stacey offered to send 200 copies to me once they are printed for circulation.
When asked what issue(s) were of current interest, I discussed our local issue of The Chauncey and urban sprawl and the Bakken pipeline that has been proposed. The pipeline seemed to better fit the model of environmental consequence. Stacey suggested that I contact Ben Price, National Organizing Director of CELDF to arrange a conference call. She indicated that CELDF is currently working with groups to oppose pipelines in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York by working with municipalities on ordinances.
When I asked about Thomas Linzey being available to speak, I was told that he was compiling an itinerary for travel through the end of 2015. Stacey encouraged me to get in touch if we might be interested in extending an invitation for him to speak in Iowa City so that we could be considered for his schedule.
June 10, 2015 Phone call to Ben Price, National Organizing Director CELDF (717) 254-3222 to follow up on possibility of scheduling Democracy School here in Iowa City sometime this fall. Suggested venue: Johnson County Extension Building is available Friday, November 13 and Saturday, November 14 as well as November 20th/21st.
Democracy School is generally only held where a community is doing active work on an issue, not simply for educational purposes.
We discussed the current petition for the Bakken pipeline, but it does not go through Johnson County as currently proposed. Ben would need to be in contact with representatives from a county affected by the pipeline that has a county board of supervisors who would be willing to support drafting an ordinance to block the pipeline.
He asked about Home Rule and I said that according to their website, Iowa is not a Home Rule state.
In order for him to become involved, we would need to find a core group in at least one county to discuss action in a conference call with Ben. The purpose of the call would be to consider working with the Board of Supervisors to draft an ordinance – a Community Bill of Rights. This effort could involve more than one county in the state.
We need to consider who might be most inclined to action and then have them set up a conference call with Ben.
Ed Fallon? List of 15 counties where pipeline is proposed?
June 11, 2015 Phone call to Stacey Schmader, Administrative Director and National Democracy School Director (717) 498-0054 to follow up on Thomas Linzey’s lecture schedule.
Cost would be travel and accommodations (actual) plus honorarium of $2500. This could include any small private discussions Thomas might have with individuals or groups at meals aside from his primary speaking engagement.
Availability is in November when he will be also traveling to Ohio and Virginia.
I requested either Nov 13/14 or 20/21 as that is when we know the Johnson County Extension Building is open for our use and would provide accessible and flexible seating and parking. I am not sure what the cost might be. Stacey will put us on the schedule for November and see which weekend works better.
Iowa Hawkeyes have home games on both November 14 (Minnesota) at 7:00 p.m. and November 21 (Purdue – senior day) time TBA.
The publication from CELDF – Common Sense: Community Rights Organizing is being printed June 12th and should be ready for distribution next week. We would have 200 copies to distribute to organizations and interested individuals to help promote Thomas and the work CELDF is doing.
Dates for the public hearing for the Bakken are projected to be in late 2015. The IUB set aside November 12 through December 2 for that purpose.
We need to identify other groups who are interested in bringing Thomas to Iowa and decide what our interests are in having him come.
Posted inCommunity Rights|TaggedDemocracy School|Comments Off on Mary Beth’s June 3, 2015 phone call to Stacey at Dem Sch Nat’l office
“A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.” — Wendell Berry What does it cost to buy your moral allegiance? Corporations can tempt us with good-sounding proposals.
When a representative from Dakota Access LLC, a subsidiary of Energy Transfer Partners, offered Hughie Tweedy “a $1,200 teenage prostitute,” he didn’t budge. Tweedy had repeatedly said he did not wish to have a pipeline built through his property.
The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation is looking into Tweedy’s allegations. His story reminds us that corporations can have distasteful moral flavors.
Tweedy’s story also reminds Iowans that Energy Transfer Partners is asking for our moral yes to build the 1,134-mile Bakken Pipeline. It will stretch from the oil fields of North Dakota to Illinois. It will pass through 18 Iowa counties.
Oil production in North Dakota now exceeds 1 million barrels per day through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. The corporation wants a way to move oil faster and supposedly safer.
It doesn’t take most of us long to conclude that offering prostitutes is not good corporate morality. What takes a little more thinking is whether the pipeline itself crosses ethical lines. What are the moral questions surrounding the Bakken Pipeline?
Do we know who is benefiting?
Amid all the talk of Iowa jobs and energy independence, let’s face it, it is the corporation that will benefit. Too often economic benefits end up in a few pockets. Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren has an estimated wealth of $7 billion.
Do we think about the real price of fossil fuel consumption?
As taxpayers, we subsidize oil companies. We not only pay for discounts on diesel and other fuels, we pay the cost of traffic congestion and accidents, the cost of air pollution and income lost because of ill health. We pay for the effects of climate change.
According to the International Monetary Fund, fossil fuel global subsidies will reach $5.3 trillion in 2015. That is $10 million a minute.
Nicholas Stern, a climate economist at the London School of Economics, says, “This very important analysis shatters the myth that fossil fuels are cheap by showing just how huge their real costs are.”
Fossil fuel energy costs remain well below their true price. If fossil fuels would pay their real costs, renewable energies could easily compete. Are we propping up an old system that we need to let die instead of encouraging pipeline construction? Imagine how our world would change if we started using $10 million a minute for clean renewable energy.
Do we care about the environment and our land?
The pipeline company is asking for a 150-foot-wide right of way during construction and then a 50-foot easement when it is complete. That is more than 20,600 acres. That is a lot of trees and land.
Tweedy has decided his land is valuable. He told his pipeline representative that he wouldn’t sell him one blade of grass for $1 million.
Although some argue that pipelines are safer, they are not without risks. According to data compiled by the International Energy Agency, U.S. pipelines spilled three times as much crude oil as trains over an eight year period. Although trains spills are more frequent, pipeline spills tend to be bigger.
Most of us find the offer of women in exchange for signing a pipeline agreement morally repulsive. Is it time to also find our obsessive oil consumption and our continued subsiding of it offensive? Let’s not be fooled by corporations and their money piles.
Writers’ Group member Jane Yoder-Short lives and writes in Kalona.
Climate change and cancer share a few surprising similarities
Earth Day and Mother’s Day have come and gone. We can forget about our Mother the Earth for almost a year, if we choose. This year’s observances have been extremely poignant for me. When you are diagnosed with ovarian cancer, you do not automatically assume you will have many more years to celebrate your relationship to our Mother Earth, or your children.
I continue insofar as I am able to be active in action related to climate change, and it has given me pause to realize how cancer and our runaway reliance on fossil fuels are so similar to each other. Cancer is, by definition, cells that multiply against the best interests of their host. They threaten to take over and destroy if not stopped. In spite of other ways we can provide energy to our world, carbon emissions continue to rise, even with the knowledge that their continued proliferation will result in temperatures that will no longer be conducive to many forms of life, including human life. Capitalism and corporate control of our government almost make it impossible to stop the continuation of our mining, transporting and burning every last bit of carbon in the earth, without consideration for what happens next. Globalization and the fossil fuel industry’s heavy influence have put most decisions out of the control of the people most affected by them.
When I received my diagnosis, I was shocked. But thank God, surgery and treatment were offered to me. I am hopeful that they will result in an extended stay on this earth, and so I have endured and will endure whatever it takes for this possibility. If this cancer had asked if it could spread through my abdomen, you can bet I would have said an emphatic “No.” Yet here we are in Iowa with the possibility of the Bakken pipeline cutting diagonally through our precious state, looking somewhat like the weird scar on my abdomen, and we have to go through a long process of protest with no guarantee that it will not be built. It would mean 570,000 barrels of flammable crude oil running through Iowa every day, compromising our soil and our streams.
I wish someone had told me that if you have breast cancer, you have greater odds of getting ovarian cancer. I wish I had been told by my breast oncologist and my primary care physician to watch for certain signs. I wasn’t. I can claim ignorance and bad luck, as one of them put it. But none of us can claim we didn’t know what we were doing to our atmosphere and what would happen if we continued to do it.
Joanna Macy refers to Robert Jay Lifton, the psychiatrist who pioneered the study of the psychological effects of nuclear bombs. The refusal to acknowledge or respond to actual or impending disaster is “part of the disease of our time. … It divorces our mental calculations from our intuitive, emotional, and biological imbeddedness in the matrix of life. That split allows us passively to acquiesce in the preparations for our own demise.”
The words “climate change” have been disallowed in several states, giving it the status of “the C-word,” like cancer used to be when polite people didn’t talk about it or admit to having it. George Marshall, in “Don’t Even Think About It,” refers to Seth Godin, a communications expert who wonders whether calling it “Atmosphere Cancer … might produce more alarm.”
My alarm resulted in action. Hopefully when you read this, I will be halfway through six chemotherapy treatments. The chemo drugs I receive are paclitaxel and carboplatin. They are referred to by those in the trade as “carbotax.” That is pretty ironic considering I have been working for the past four years for Congress to pass a fee and dividend on carbon, often referred to as a “carbontax.” “Make my body a prayerstick for the world,” to quote Meinard Craighead.
The Rev. Dr. Barbara Schlachter is a co-founder of 100 Grannies for a Livable Future and a member of the Iowa City Climate Advocates, who are working with Citizens Climate Lobby to pass a fee and dividend on carbon.
Lester Brown has spent his career making shrewd projections about the food, water, and energy people need to survive, and pushing governments to respond. None of this math brings tears to his eyes except the time in 1965 he made some calculations and risked his career advising the president of the United States to save India from starving.
Brown’s eyes misted over as the 81-year-old resource economist recalled the reaction of a U.S. agriculture attache in New Delhi to his discovery that famine was imminent in India that autumn. Few saw it coming, he warned the attache, and the U.S. would have to take extraordinary measures, transporting millions of tons of grain, to prevent mass suffering and death.
“If you’re right, it’s the biggest shipment ever,” the man told Brown, then 31, in New Delhi. “But if you’re wrong, you’re going to be a statistical clerk the rest of your life.”
Brown, a soft-spoken walking encyclopedia of global natural resources in sports jacket, slacks, and New Balance 785’s, isn’t prone to displays of emotion. Perhaps, responding to an interview question about his most meaningful accomplishment, he was moved by the audacity of the young man who told Lyndon Johnson to send a nation’s worth of food halfway around the world — or just by the impossibly swift passage of half a century.
His newest book, The Great Transition, is a counterpunch to the typical environmental gloom and doom, telling of how market forces, often despite policy, are championing renewable energy over the dirtiest fossil fuels.
But the near-disaster in India, 50 years ago this fall, shows how a crumbling pyramid of natural resources can suddenly become an avalanche. Here is Brown’s account of what happened when science and policy met in a crisis, and actually talked to each other.
Clues to a nightmare
Brown, who grew up on a tomato farm in southern New Jersey, would go on to serve as a foreign policy aid to the secretary of agriculture, Orville Freeman. His breakthrough as a prognosticator came in 1963, when, as a staffer in the department, he wrote a report combining population and food production projections that U.S. News & World Report featured in a cover story. “The conclusion: in most of the world, creeping hunger looms,” the magazine wrote.
When the department received a request from the U.S. Agency for International Development in New Delhi, someone needed to fly over to evaluate a draft of India’s five-year economic plan for agriculture. The country’s grain production had been failing, with the U.S. sending some of its surplus east to help.
Brown describes that 1965 trip to India as if he had walked into a nation-size jigsaw puzzle and started collecting pieces.
He’d begin his days reading newspapers from around the country, each of which seemed to carry isolated accounts of local droughts. That was one puzzle piece. The head of Esso (now ExxonMobil) in India, whom he met at a diplomatic reception, glowed about business: Indian farmers had doubled their diesel purchases over the previous year to power irrigation pumps running full throttle to water dying crops. One more piece of the puzzle. An embassy official Brown knew showed up at work unexpectedly one day when he had said he’d be in the north duck-hunting. The man had canceled his annual trip because the lake had run dry. Another piece.
The anecdotal evidence piled up and pointed to one conclusion. The country’s farmers would fall dramatically short of the grain needed by Indians, then numbering 480 million. Famine was imminent.
From whatever data he could assemble, Brown projected a deficit of at least 10 million tons of grain below the Indian government’s official demand estimate of 95 million tons. Previously India had never imported more than 4 million tons a year. If Brown’s calculations were correct, feeding the nation would require a huge mobilization.
Working against him, and the clock, was a villain common enough in action movies: bureaucracy. With critical days ticking by, diplomats would not dispatch the message to Washington until they received official permission to do so from their embassy superiors. At last they got it, and Brown’s estimate found receptive ears back in Washington. President Lyndon Johnson would say that India’s food problem “ought to be attacked as if we were at war,” according to India and the United States: Estranged Democracies, 1941-1991, by Dennis Kux, who is now a senior policy scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington.
Johnson had an “intense, obsessive personal involvement” with India’s over-reliance on food aid, particularly from the U.S. “The India food question went right to where he lived,” Walt Rostow, a National Security Council member, told Kux. “It was part of Johnson’s fundamental concern for human beings and his hatred of poverty.”
Yet, fighting an actual war in Vietnam, Johnson was probably also conscious that if bread prices started rising because of Indian food aid, it wouldn’t help boost his popularity.
If mobilization was to happen, it needed to happen fast. It was October, the monsoon was nowhere to be seen, and inventories of grain were running low.
The president charged Freeman, and Freeman charged Brown, with drawing up a bilateral agreement that would cover both his short- and long-term concerns. Johnson wanted a policy to solve two problems: avoid the coming disaster, but also set India on a path to independent and stable agriculture. If necessary, he wanted to use the former as a tool to extract the latter.
The stakes, in politics and people’s lives, were high. Johnson didn’t want to be seen as pressuring India to change its agriculture policies by withholding food aid, even though that’s what he was doing. He instructed Freeman to negotiate in secret.
“If anybody finds out about this, your ass will be hanging from a yardarm,” Johnson told Freeman, according to Kux’s book.
India in 1965 was not yet 20 years old. In the 1950s and 1960s, the government prioritized industrialization over agricultural development. It capped food prices so that people in the cities needn’t fear emptying their pockets to eat. But the same price cap kept farmers from earning enough to modernize their equipment and practices.
They needed the reverse, a price floor. They also needed the state to deregulate fertilizer production. Government-backed plants took a decade to build. Private companies could do it in a tenth of that time, Brown said.
Brown wrote those points into a three-page draft policy for the president, which Johnson immediately adopted and which would eventually be called the Treaty of Rome.
A 10,000-mile bucket brigade
The USDA tapped logistics specialists who had served in the Army Quartermaster Corps in World War II. They leased an Esso supertanker longer than a football field, the Manhattan, and anchored it in the Bay of Bengal to act as a floating harbor, because India’s ports were insufficient to handle so vast a scale of imports.
Trains delivered U.S. Midwestern wheat to ships awaiting them in Galveston, Texas, and New Orleans. About two ships a day left for India, more than 600 in all, according to Brown’s 2013 memoir, Breaking New Ground. They docked to the Manhattan and emptied their grain into it. Thirty-foot boats called dhows then filled up with grain and carried it up the Ganges. About one-fifth of the U.S. wheat harvest in 1965 was shipped to South Asia. India produced only 77 million tons of grain, 18 million tons below the official demand projections.
“It was the largest movement of grain between two countries in history,” Brown said. “We managed to get the grain in there and avoid the famine, but time became everything in that effort.”
Diplomacy didn’t stop when the first ships left. The new agreement, and Johnson himself, made clear that emergency food aid would be contingent on the Indian agricultural reforms price floors, instead of ceilings, and deregulation of fertilizer plants. To ensure the changes went through, the president personally managed the release of grain ships to India.
The reforms took hold, and the “green revolution” in Indian food production was under way. “India doubled its wheat harvest in seven years,” Brown said.
Brown left government in the late 1960s to begin a career in research and advocacy. He founded the Worldwatch Institute in 1974. A recipient of the MacArthur “genius grant” in 1987 for his research on “global economics and the natural systems that support it,” Brown launched his current research group, the Earth Policy Institute.
A cliche is born
The word “sustainability” has gained wide currency among governments, civil society groups, and, intriguingly, large companies over the past decade or so. Lester Brown has done as much as anybody else to put it there. The notion comes out of concerns in the 1960s and 1970s about the earth’s “carrying capacity” for humans. The first reference to environmental and societal sustainability in the New York Times, for example, is a May 1978 article about a Worldwatch study by Brown. “As human needs outstrip the carrying capacity of biological systems and as oil reserves shrink, the emphasis in economic thinking must shift from growth to sustainability,” he said at the time.
But Brown’s successes as a resource economist stand out against a harsher truth. If environmentalists had a perfect prediction record, the earth would already have been destroyed several times over. Brown himself has taken his share of direct hits to the jaw. “Never right but never in doubt,” Reason wrote in 2009.
In the half-century since Brown began his career, scientists and economists have continuously monitored both the global economy and the natural systems it runs on, with increasing, and eternally insufficient, precision. Resource problems are rolling problems. They are often difficult to see, difficult to project, and difficult to respond to.
If there’s one thing that’s focusing minds at this point, it’s this. Three billion more people are coming by the 2050’s, and a couple billion will be middle-class consumers before then. Everybody is going to want everything — food, water, fuel — so it’s best to make sure now that there’ll be enough.
Just as India was wholly unprepared for the failed monsoon of 1965, it and other nations today may be leaving themselves wide open to drought and famine.
India in particular is draining its aquifers and rivers. More than half of the nation today faces “high to extremely high water stress,” according to the World Resources Institute, which has worked with companies and other groups to develop a water-stress mapping tool for India.
Posted inEducation|Taggedbooks, Lester Brown|Comments Off on Lester Brown (author of The Great Transition)
The over 5 million chickens and turkeys are not dying a painless death. They will suffer and feel terror while they die. They will fight for their lives because, like us, they want to live.
Unfortunately they have been suffering since the day they were hatched. With chicks destined to be “laying hens,” instead of seeing their mothers, they are moved down a conveyor belt and roughly thrown about while being “sexed.”
The male chicks are thrown in grinders to die or in garbage bags to suffocate. They can’t lay eggs, so they are of no economic value to the industry. The female chicks are “debeaked” which means they have a significant part of their beaks cut off ( sort of like cutting off part of the lips of human babies).
When they are old enough, they are crammed into wire cages and live in a huge building with no windows. Their lives are nonstop misery.
Cramming tens and hundreds of thousands of birds in a closed building and having them live in and breathe their own waste is a recipe for disaster. There will be more. And because these operations are so large, they will want the government ( taxpayers) to bail them out when this happens. They will say they are too big to fail.
The current system is a problem environmentally, economically and morally. Please do not support factory farms. Don’t buy their products.
Why should we accommodate corporation convenience in transporting harmful products under, over, around or through the ground on which we live, breathe and have our being?
Let corporations work harder to develop safe, non-damaging energy sources, and stop gouging Mother Earth! Let us retain our local and national control over quality and safety standards, sales and taxes as the cost of civilization and employment.
Have we as a nation and community no enlightened self-interest in the health and well-being for our citizens? Global interchange and interaction must not be controlled by global corporate interests. We need not sacrifice air and water quality our grandchildren will need for the profit levels of corporations.
No Bakken pipeline, no Fast-Trak for undesirable trade agreements. Please! Itʼs all connected to money and power, not the actual welfare of the people.
George Schultz, who was secretary of state from 1982 to 1989, had a piece in The Washington Post a few weeks ago titled “A Reagan approach to climate change.” What I remember about President Ronald Reagan is that when he moved into the White House, he removed the solar panels from the roof that President Jimmy Carter had installed there. Was he denying climate change, or did he simply not want to support alternative energy sources for political reasons?
Whichever, it turns out he has left a legacy on climate change action that will stand for all time. When scientists warned that the ozone layer was shrinking and that a catastrophe was in the making, Reagan decided not to argue with the doubters but provide action that would benefit them as well. U.S. industry and DuPont went into high gear and found a set of replacement chemicals that were implicated in the problem. “Action is better than aspiration,” Schultz wrote. And this action worked right then and there. It became the basis for the Montreal Protocol, regarded as the world’s most successful environmental treaty.
While Schultz uses the words “insurance policy” to describe Reagan’s action, he could have invoked something called “the precautionary principle.” This means that if there is a good chance that a course of action or inaction would result in less-than-desirable consequences, the best decision is always one that works to conserve our environment from possible disaster. This reminds me of the recent cartoon that has someone asking under a “Climate Summit” banner, “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?” Meanwhile in the background there is a list of what has been gained: energy independence, preserve rainforests, sustainability, green jobs, livable cities, renewable, clean water and air, healthy children, etc.
Schultz proposes two policies. The first is “significant and sustained support for energy research and development.” This would enhance our ability to produce electricity from the wind and the sun at the same cost as from other sources and help us find ways to store energy from intermittent sources.
The second is to “level the playing field for competing sources of energy so that costs imposed on the community are borne by the sources of energy that create them, most particularly carbon dioxide.” He recommends a revenue-neutral carbon tax, returning all funds generated to the taxpayers. It is therefore not really a new tax. Schultz didn’t say this, but it seems to me it represents a solution that Republicans and Democrats can agree on. Here’s an opportunity for Congress to take some leadership on this issue instead of waiting for the president to take all the action.
Schultz ends with a phrase he used earlier in his article: “mugged by reality.” That strikes me as pretty graphic. Who wants to be mugged? He says: “Before you get mugged by reality, take out an insurance policy. It’s the Reagan way.” Sens. Charles Grassley and Joni Ernst, Reps. Steve King, Rod Blum, David Young and Dave Loebsack, how about it?
Barbara Schlachter is a member of the 100Grannies for a Livable Future and the Iowa City Climate Advocates, affiliated with Citizens Climate Lobby.
Bruce Rastetter is claiming he will elevate the concerns of farmers, who “feed and fuel the world,” through his 2015 Iowa Ag Summit to be held in Des Moines on March 7 by bringing the subject to the national spotlight.
That’s why he is bringing in 2016 presidential hopefuls like Jeb Bush and Rick Perry. Unfortunately, what’s missing is Rastetter’s role in displacing family farmers and robbing wealth from rural economies through his profit-driven industrial ag agenda.
“Feeding the world” was never about food security. It is about justifying industrial agriculture practices that jeopardize Iowa’s rich soil and undermine the stability of small towns across Iowa. Rastetter’s ag summit isn’t about farming issues — it’s about influencing politics to secure the profitability of his economic ventures in industrial ag and biofuels.
If Rastetter was truly concerned about food security, he would be investing in local control of agricultural production, using methods that sustain the soil and recognizing the dignity of the work done by small family farmers across Iowa.
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