G20 Trade Ministerial Highlights Farmer-Labor Solidarity
Wisconsin Farmers Union joined a coalition of labor unions, family farm advocates, and community organizations for two events surrounding the G20 Trade Ministerial in Milwaukee to call for fair trade policies that put working people and communities ahead of corporate profits.
On September 29, WFU Milwaukee-Waukesha Chapter President, Sam Odin, and farmer and dairy policy advocate, Dr. Sarah Lloyd joined an expert panel at The Stakes of Trade Summit in Milwaukee, moderated by The Nation’s John Nichols.
On September 30, WFU joined partners, Milwaukee Area Labor Federation, AFT Local 212, Citizen Action of Wisconsin, Citizens Trade Campaign, Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Union, Our Revolution Wisconsin, Peace Action of Wisconsin, Public Citizen, Sierra Club, UAW Wisconsin State CAP Council, and UFCW 1473 at the Fair Trade for Working Families Demonstration and Rally, bringing farmers and workers together to challenge corporate-driven trade policies that offshore jobs, suppress wages, and undermine family farms.
These events highlighted the importance of farmer-labor solidarity. Farmers and workers share an interest in an economy that supports fair prices, good jobs, strong rural communities, and local businesses rather than concentrating wealth and power among large corporations. By building these partnerships, WFU helped elevate the voices of Wisconsin’s family farmers and working families in the global trade policy conversation.
Here is Sam Odin’s Welcome Speech From September 29th:
Thank you. I began my journey as a farmer and food systems researcher and organizer about 15 years back. In academia, I dug into topics of ethics, hunger, poverty, climate change, and alternative cultural and political economic models. However, my impatience perhaps got the best of me, reading and ethnographic participant observation got redundant, and I had no inclination to add my small ideas to the mountains of literature already available, more coherently argued, and more engagingly penned than I could ever possibly contribute.
No, it was time for me to make a different move. One more grounded, focused on my specific community and its needs. I figured everybody's got to eat and how we produce and consume our food has the potential to either continue doing a lot of hurt or perhaps it can really change the world for the better.
Next year, our farm, Village Farmstead, enters its 10th season. When we started, we were revolutionaries. Today, before you, stands a tired, more or less disillusioned small business owner. My partners and I thought that by demonstrating alternative farming and food distribution practices, no-till agriculture, organic, community-supported agriculture, and the such, and the like, we thought that we might save the world. Turns out we had really started something like a high-end restaurant meets Old World Wisconsin elite members-only club. It is important that we as local advocates, small business owners, conscious consumers, academics, activists, and U.S. citizens don't mistake our place in the world and the importance of our context and its dialectic, interconnected, dynamic relationships to everything else.
Farming, turns out, isn't so bad, but making a living doing it is damn near impossible. We aim to provide ourselves and our workers a living wage. We don't let anyone work more than eight hours a day or more than 40 hours a week, all while stewarding and respecting and protecting the land we work on as if it were one of us. But because we exist in a corporate capitalist world driven by profit, consolidated power, and the superficiality of consumer choice, my vegetables, on the same shelves and are beholden to the same producer-consumer expectations of cheapness, convenience, and alienation as other products grown, harvested, and distributed at the often fatal cost to the respective labor and land in their wake and the consumers in their sights. I am thus driven to subsequently cheapen, shortcut, and exploit my own self, my own land, and my labor. It is that relationship that is so important.
My struggle is not one solved by improving my seeds, my irrigation, my tools, my marketing, or how quickly I can weed a bed of carrots. As long as we refuse to acknowledge and confront the hidden costs behind our fast, cheap... food system, we all will continue to be at its mercy. There is no hiding or escaping into alternative economic models, business practices, or enlightened life ways. It's no surprise the uptick of libertarian apocalyptic preppers and maha enthusiasts in the organic farming and foodie communities. We need to look beyond ourselves and our falsely localized and individualized insecurities, our farms, to understand the internationally connected causes of and solutions to our problems.
Global capital will not stop taking advantage of cheap labor and cheap resources, and as long as corporate exploitation is allowed to persist unchecked It will continue undercutting all of us, driving down our standards of living, our basic dignity, and our humanity towards one another and ultimately robbing us of our futures. In the spirit of the international and tonight's talk and tomorrow's rally, it is therefore our responsibility to stand in solidarity with the most vulnerable people and places already deeply affected by these forces. We can't give another inch.
Whether you are eating one of my organic tomatoes or a tomato on a Big Mac, no person and no place should be exploited, hurt, or neglected in getting us that tomato. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice. Only together can we fight for a food and farm system that takes care of everyone in every place from field to fork to toilet. Thanks.
Comments