[Community Voices]

PCC’s mission is to ensure that good food nourishes the communities it serves, while cultivating vibrant, local, organic food systems. We’re proud to partner with organizations throughout the region and share their stories. One is the Community Alliance for Global Justice (CAGJ), grassroots, mostly-volunteer organization working toward a just local and global economy. Its three main programs focus on food justice, trade justice, and on challenging the “corporate-driven, industrial model of agriculture into Africa.” Sound Consumer contributor Tara Austen Weaver recently spoke with Heather Day, the organization’s director. A condensed, edited version of their conversation follows:

Q: How did CAGJ get started?

A: There was a founding visionary and director named Jeremy Simer. After the WTO (World Trade Organization) protests in 1999, he saw the need for a new organization in Seattle. It was about carrying forward the global justice movement that had gathered and had a very significant victory in those protests. We started meeting weekly for about a year—there was a lot of deliberation with other organizations and coalitions to make sure we weren’t duplicating work. Our first big campaign was against the Free Trade Area of the Americas—FTAA—that would have expanded NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) to all of Latin America. It’s always about education, consciousness raising, seeing ourselves as part of global movements.

Q: You are active in a number of different areas. Can you tell us about that?

A: The early years (after the official 2001 founding) were really focused on trade agreements. Trade work is grassroots, but it’s also “grass tops”—we need to get leaders of organizations to speak out on behalf of their constituencies. It’s really more appropriate for a coalition, so we’re part of a lot of alliances to do that work.

We were finally able to get funding from the national body that coordinates trade work to start the Washington Fair Trade Coalition (more than 60 labor, faith, environmental, farmer and social justice groups statewide committed to fair and sustainable global trade.) We started to link the interest and activism around local food economies with global justice issues. We’re looking at how trade agreements undermine food sovereignty and the impacts on agriculture and food specifically. We do that work with National Family Farm Coalition and Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. We’re very much looking for direction from local and national organizations who are part of La Via Campesina (an international movement devoted to food sovereignty); we’re part of all those networks and try to promote their concerns.

The food justice project is transitioning right now, but the idea was to have a space where people can meet regularly and come up with different projects. We published three editions of Our Food Our Right—the last is a book that is available digitally online as well as in print (featuring art, stories and recipes around food justice). We launched the local food justice work with a teach-in, but more recently we’ve been doing teach-outs, where we take people to visit different farms and community kitchens in the area. We were asked to do workshops on food justice, so we came up with a series of workshops. We call it our leadership development and political education school—a three-month program to learn about food sovereignty and connect with our partners who are on the front lines of doing this work.

Our third area is a David-and-Goliath campaign (focused) on the Gates Foundation—they are funding a chemically based industrial farming model in Africa. Local “peasant” (small-scale rural farmer) organizations and food organizations are up in arms about this. (Editor’s note: See here for a 2022 report.) We are a member of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa and we are following their lead to raise the voices of those who are most impacted by these decisions.

Q: Can you tell us more about the Gates-backed initiatives in Africa? On a farming level, what does that look like?

A: It looks like increased use of chemicals, reliance on imported fertilizers, buying seeds that are often more expensive than farmers can afford. They have been successful in changing the legal structure in many countries to make it possible to introduce biotechnology and pushing hybrid seeds; increasingly in many countries seed saving is being criminalized. It’s making farmers become dependent on external companies and not be self-sufficient and use materials that are readily available to them. There’s (already) amazing work being done in Africa teaching agroecology and different models of sustainable agriculture to help farmers to improve their yields.

The majority of farming in Africa is still small scale, but there are a lot of land grabs happening and it’s eroding (farmers’) ability to be resilient to climate change and be able to feed their communities, things that are essential right now.

Q: How are you seeing climate change impact your work?

A: For the food sovereignty movement in general, it’s been very concerning how little attention is paid to agriculture as it’s one of the biggest contributors to global warming. Sustainable agriculture and agroecologists just aren’t at the table. Sustainable agriculture doesn’t rely on fossil fuels, so it’s a way of weaning ourselves from the central cause of global warming. From fertilizers to transportation—the way the industrial agriculture model works contributes to global warming on a massive scale and we need to be moving away from that, not increasing it.

Q: What does a good version of the future look like, if you could imagine it? What is the potential?

A: I envision communities that have strong relationships between the different parts of the food system and are invested in ensuring that people in all parts of the system are treated well. We’re already doing this to a certain extent and it’s just a matter of expanding it— local farmers, local fishermen, restaurants, grocery stores. People getting reconnected to the land is essential—and there are many groups doing that. Indigenous groups are really leading the food sovereignty movement, and the Black food sovereignty movement is getting stronger as well.

The work is being done, the hard part is building that up so it’s strong enough to replace the industrial food system, which is likely to start collapsing more and more. We need long term thinking—we need a 50-year Farm Bill, as Wendell Berry has suggested. (Editor’s note: Poet and farmer Berry, among others, say the federal Farm Bill, a 5-year bill overseeing and setting the agenda for the nation’s agricultural and food issues, needs a far longer time frame to support sustainable agriculture.) We need a transition from industrial agriculture to these internetworked regional economies that is just. We still need global trade within that, but it needs to be done fairly. It’s a huge undertaking, but it’s doable. We just need the political will.

Q: How can people get involved if they want to help?

A: One of the things we talk about is that it’s not enough to vote with your fork, but that’s a good place to start. Shopping at co-ops, shopping at the farmers markets, supporting CSAs—it all makes a difference. Then, trying to connect with organizations who are working at a policy level and with global movements is essential. Becoming a member of CAGJ [there are no dues, just participation] is one way to learn where those opportunities are for intervention, but there are lots of organizations doing great policy work. The Fair Trade Movement is also important—looking for opportunities to counter the negative impacts of our corporations on the global south. We want to make an impact at both a local and global level.