The message was one of hope, the words of a newly elected President echoing the Populism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the promise of John F. Kennedy. It stopped there, the delivery of the promise fell short.

We have gotten a New Deal, albeit one that is more protective of those who caused the economic and agricultural crises than of those who suffer from them. We have also gotten a new version of “The Best and the Brightest” in the Obama Administration and their faulty counsel extends beyond war into food and trade policy.

The campaign promises were not worth the notepads they are written on. The promises were broken and business at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will carry on much as it did during the Bush Administration.

Instead of going outside the agribusiness and agrochemical industries, Obama has kept the revolving door spinning and appointed the very lobbyists and special interests he said would find no home in his administration.

Monsanto stalwarts Michael Taylor, special assistant to the FDA Commissioner for food safety and Roger Beachy, head of National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

Rajiv Shah, head of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) where his pro-biotech leanings will continue to be pushed on the developing world. Perhaps it is a good fit, as President Obama noted “The mission of USAID is to advance America’s interests by strengthening our relationships abroad”. However, advancing America’s interests and giving real aid to those in need are not the same thing. Advancing interests implies control and empire building.

Islam Siddiqui, Chief Agriculture Negotiator, office of U.S. Trade Representative, is a particularly troubling nomination. He is no friend of consumers, considering his most recent employment at CropLife America (CLA), the pesticide industries main trade association. As a registered lobbyist and vice president of regulatory affairs, Siddiqui was responsible for setting and selling CLA’s international and domestic agenda which, simply put, was to weaken regulations on pesticides and agricultural chemicals worldwide.

He is no friend of farmers either, and not just organic farmers, even though he has a long history of distaste for organic agriculture. He promotes agribusiness, chemical companies, processors and grain marketers who make their profits by buying low, processing and selling high. In his world, a farmers job is to maintain corporate profits.

As an unabashed ‘free trader” he is a strong supporter of the World Trade Organization and its ability to strong-arm countries into accepting unwanted U.S. imports. He openly derided the European Union’s rejection of hormone-treated beef, Japan’s desire to mandate labeling of Genetically Modified (GM) food and he pushed to permit pesticide testing on children. In his world consumers should be forced to accept whatever food products are thrown at them.

Forced trade, telling countries they must accept our products whether they want them or not is not trade, it is nothing short of blackmail.

His “public service” career has been dedicated to selling more pesticides and GM seed to farmers world-wide and easing restrictions on their use. The beneficiaries of these policies were not farmers or consumers but the agribusiness corporations that Siddiqui worked for. That is not public service, that is promoting private interest.

Siddiqui has not worked in the best interests of farmers or consumers, rather he has consistently promoted the interests of multi-national corporations, grain companies, meat processors and chemical companies over those of the farmer or consumer. If appointed, why should we believe that that the leopard will suddenly be changing its spots ?

President Obama noted as a candidate ” We’ll tell ConAgra that it’s [USDA] not the Department of Agribusiness. We’re going to put the peoples interests ahead of the special interests.” Just another empty promise.

A September 2009 Prairie Farmer article , “Here is what’s not sustainable,” leads me to believe that the author, a spokesperson for conventional agriculture, dislikes and even fears organic farming and its supporters.

The author admits to feeling self-satisfaction in knowing that organic farmers are suffering in a falling economy, I doubt many people share her sentiments. Farmers generally have the attitude that “we are all in this together”, no matter what farming practices we use.

Still, Michael Pollan has conventional agriculture circling its wagons, Michelle Obama has an organic garden, and organic farmers are accused of riding the backs of conventional farmers.

Most farmers I know, (not all but most), see organic farming as just another way to farm, curious, perhaps a bit backward, but to most conventional farmers organic farming doesn’t even register. With agribusiness however, it’s another story. They’re not content with just 96.5 percent of the food system, they want it all.

Those who have their priorities confused, need to figure out who their enemies really are.

Conventional farm milk prices have dropped by nearly 50 percent over the past year. Dean Foods controls 80 percent of the fluid milk market in some states and 40 percent of the market in the U.S.; their net profits more than doubled in the last year.

Conventional hog farmers have experienced losses for two straight years. Tyson, the second largest food company in the U.S., controls 40 percent of the U.S. meat market. They reported a profitable third quarter for every segment of their business, including pork.

When the farm price for beef cattle dropped 8 cents per pound, consumers were paying 17 cents more per pound at the supermarket. Average retail beef processing margins across all companies, increased 13 percent over 2008.

And guess what, none of that was caused by organic farmers.

Corporate agribusiness has a problem with organic farmers because they haven’t yet figured out a way to totally bleed them like they have conventional farmers. But as surely as corporate agriculture is working its way into the organic market, we suffer from their growing control.

While farm prices have trended downward for the past couple of years, food price decline has lagged far behind. As farm input costs have continued to climb, so have corporate profits.

Even in the toughest of economic times, the corporate buyers and sellers profit while farmers loose. A recent New York Times editorial points out the dangers of powerful corporations (specifically Monsanto); controlling seed supplies, their market control, and their anticompetitive behavior.

Agribusiness spends multi-millions on lobbyists. Their lobbying efforts are aimed at increasing their profits, not farmer income or benefits to the consumer. They lobby for more cheap raw imports, less labeling, less restrictions on pesticide use, and weaker environmental standards.

The Prairie Farmer tells us anyone who believes organic, sustainable, and locally grown is the only way to feed the world is wrong. Contrary to their opinion, there is plenty of evidence that organic production is a viable means of producing food and that organic farming may be the best way for the world to feed itself.

Since we are all in this together, perhaps we can dismiss the ill will of the Prairie Farmer editorial and agree that there is more than enough room for all responsible farmers to do their thing, conventional or organic?

Corporate agribusiness is riding roughshod over all farmers and it’s time farmers recognized their real enemy.

Advocates of large scale agriculture see Pollan as the enemy, they believe he stands against everything they see as the future of agriculture. Pollan however is not an absolutist, his basic premise is that people need to think more about their food; where it was grown, how it was grown, was the farmer paid fairly, is it good for you?

Pollan wants people to think about cooking, about food freshness and flavor, about the dinner table as more than a “filling station.”

Knowing your food is not a radical concept, and it should not be a frightening concept. Knowledge is power, the more we know, the better choices we can make.

Farmers should have nothing to hide, and those most upset with Pollan’s theories on eating, tout their large scale farming methods as being models of efficiency, environmental protection, animal welfare, and safe food.

Still, they fear his thoughts being mainstream. Granted, Pollan is not a farmer, and does not know all the intricacies of farming; he does not claim to. However, those who denounce him do not know the intricacies of the local, regional and organic farming he advocates.

So, why are they afraid of what he has to say? Pollan admits there is no one right way to farm, there is no one system that will work for all farmers. He maintains that all farmers need to make a living yet be mindful of how they farm, how they raise their animals and how they maintain the environment. If Pollan has an argument with agriculture, it is not with farmers, it is with agribusiness.

Author Wendell Berry notes that “Agribusiness is immensely more profitable than agriculture.” Any farmer knows that the corporate owners of seed, chemicals, fertilizer and the buyers of grain, livestock and milk always seem to make a profit; farmers do not.

Over the past 60 years farmers have seen competition in the market place steadily disappear as corporate mergers concentrated all aspects of agriculture into the hands of a few multinational corporations.

Their profit comes at the expense of the farmer, the farm worker, consumer safety, and the environment.

While farmers defend themselves against what they see as an attack by Pollan, they are really defending agribusiness. When they say they love their Roundup Ready corn, the hormones and the chemicals they are promoting the corporations that always make a profit whether the farmers win or lose.

When farmers disparage small-scale ecological agriculture because it “will never feed the world” they conveniently forget that conventional agriculture has not fed the world either, despite 60 years of promises to do so. They also ignore the findings of IAASTD that indicate the old paradigm of industrial agriculture is a thing of the past.

The industrial model sources food from the world, pits farmer against farmer in a race to the bottom. Globalized commodities converted into processed nutritionally empty foods, make corporations rich, Americans obese, and developing countries destitute.

Pollan just wants farmers and consumers to think. Agribusiness is rich and persuasive, they own both ends of the market place and they want to keep it that way. When people think about what they eat and what they grow, chances are, eventually, they will make the right choice.

When President Obama attends the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) meeting (or the more innocuous sounding, North American Leaders Summit) in Guadalajara he has the opportunity to keep some campaign promises.

The SPP has been referred to as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on steroids. For good reason.

As a candidate Obama was a strong opponent of NAFTA. During a primary debate in Cleveland Obama said : “I will make sure that we renegotiate… I think we should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage…”. He noted that NAFTA had outsourced millions of jobs, had weak provisions for protection of the environment and labor standards.

Now, it seems he has “softened quite a bit, to put it mildly”, according to former US Ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci.

Candidate Obama said, in an Obama Administration, meetings would be conducted with transparency and the active involvement of citizens, labor, the private sector and non-governmental organizations. So why hasn’t he scrapped SPP?

At least NAFTA was debated in Congress, SPP is a strictly closed door meeting between the Administrations of the US, Canada, Mexico and the North American Competitiveness Council.

No citizen input, no governmental oversight, just the “Three Amigos” and big business interests.

Unless he has completely softened on the tough talk of his candidacy he must end SPP. SPP, it seems, could just be a clever way to follow through on the provisions of NAFTA that were launched in 1994.

“Harmonization”, a key component of SPP, will lower the standards that protect the environment, the safety of our food and our health.

Other than increasing the profits of corporations, the hopped up, secretly negotiated SPP offers no benefit to the average American. Either in security or prosperity. We have seen the emergence of the Swine flu, numerous food safety violations and the never ending loss of jobs.

Mexico has seen its economy collapse, a cycle of increasing violence, militarization and drug trafficking. Small farmers have been pushed off their land and into abject poverty. Now big business and the Three Amigos offer them more of the same only faster? So who is benefiting? Canada?

Hardly, Canadians have never liked NAFTA, and the best SPP can offer them is increased mining of the Alberta Tar Sands to fuel the US appetite for oil and more armed Transportation and Security Administration officers on Canadian soil.

President Obama has given enough ground on his campaign promises; on ending torture, on single payer health care, on ending the war. It’s time to bring trade into the light of day, like he promised.

A partnership should be built on more than bureaucrats and fat cat businessmen, it needs citizen involvement and approval.

Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur of Ohio perhaps stated it best, “We need to change the nature of our trade agreements. I hope this new president will lead us in that direction– toward more democracy and less exploitation. We’ll see.”

Yes, we’ll see.

It’s a nice theory: surplus equals low prices. Easy to explain and easily accepted by farmers. Farmers want an explanation, they listen to the dairy ”experts.” They drink the Kool-Aid.

Milk prices, like the rest of the world economy, crashed because of a globalized, unregulated free market system, not because of surplus product. According to New York dairy farmer/market analyst John Bunting “dairy markets are run by an oligarchy — a few elite players — with little or no government oversight”. The parallels between the current dairy price crash and the Wall Street financial crash are pointedly exact.

Both crashes were engineered by the same sort of folks, those who promised us they had the Midas Touch but were, instead, bulls in the china shop.

Just as Wall Street investment bankers took advantage of the removal of regulatory safeguards put in place by the government after the 1930′s depression, so did the “elite players” of the dairy industry take advantage when the US Congress scraped parity dairy pricing in 1981.

Until 1981 as Bunting shows, farm and consumer milk prices were perfectly correlated. Since 1981 (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) inflation adjusted farm prices have steadily fallen while consumer prices have steadily risen.

Increased 2009 first quarter earnings of Kraft Foods (up 29%) and Dean Foods (up 39%) came, according to The Milkweed, “from dairy farmers’ grief”.

If US dairy farmers are overproducing, why are imports of dairy product constantly rising? The National Milk Producers Federation notes “In the past 10 years alone, the value of dairy imports sold in the U.S. has expanded from $800 million, to nearly $3 billion”.

• Why have cheese imports increased in the first quarter of 2009 over 2008? Or as Bunting notes, how can free falling milk prices be justified by the following data?

• Nearly as much nonfat dry milk was exported in December 2008 as was exported in December 2007.
• December 2008 imports of milk protein concentrates were massive.
• Imports of casein, another dairy derived protein, also increased in December 2008.
• “Butter and other milkfats” imports increased nearly 60% in December 2008 compared with December 2007.
• Cheese imports for December 2008 increased 15% over December 2007.
• Commercial disappearance of dairy products increased in December 2008 and for the 2008 year increased 2.6% according to USDA data.

Just as US corporations shipped jobs to low wage workers overseas, Kraft and Dean Foods welcome the products of lower wage overseas farmers. Just as low priced foreign textiles, electronics and auto parts put US workers out of their jobs, so are foreign farm imports putting US farmers out of business.

Clearly, supply and demand does not control farm prices, nor do low priced imports mean lower consumer prices. Just as in the financial sector or the manufacturing sector, prosperity is intentionally funneled to the top at the misery and expense of the workers and taxpayers.

Government regulation on behalf of the worker and consumer appears to be non-existent. Yet we continue to listen to the economists, the corporate oligarchs and Congress who keep telling us prosperity is just around the corner, globalization and the free market will deliver us all.

More kool-aid anyone?

Farmers claim to be stewards of the environment, some would say it’s best friend; others, its worst enemy. The truth is we can be both.

Humans have never left a small footprint, we have always tried to shape the environment to suit our needs. Initially farming had one purpose, food; farming provided a more stable diet than the hunter-gatherer existence.

As we became more “civilized” our effect on the land became more pronounced and more devastating. We thought the oceans were too vast, the soil too deep and the forests so thick that we could never harm them and, of course, we were wrong.

We used to grow food and fiber, now we raise commodity crops and commodity livestock. Farmers, for the most part, no longer sell to the consumer, they sell to processors who slice, dice, mince, preserve, pasteurize, color, flavor, package and deliver what they call food.

Agricultural production is neither controlled by nor is it supportive of farmers or consumers. Farmers have no control over prices so they do what they must to survive. Consumers buy what the global market provides, is there a choice?

We produce more than enough to feed the world. Yet, not everyone shares the bounty. Not everyone has the money or the access. Equally as sad, by the time the processors are done with their slicing, dicing, coloring and flavoring much of the “food” they deliver assaults, rather than supports our health.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) claims agriculture is one of the biggest threats to the environment. The National Cattleman’s Beef Association (NCBA) says agriculture does not harm the environment.

The University of Minnesota cites a seven fold increase in use of nitrogen fertilizer, a three fold increase in phosphorous fertilizer and a near doubling of irrigated cropland between 1961 and 1996. Since the introduction of Genetically Modified crops in 1996, fertilizer and pesticide use have steadily increased.

WWF notes global agriculture uses 70% of the worlds water and threatens the oceans with agrochemicals and the atmosphere with greenhouse gases from livestock production.

The US Geological Survey points to fertilizer, manure and agricultural runoff from the Mississippi basin as being responsible for the Gulf “Dead Zone”.

The United Nations estimates that farm animals world-wide generate 18% of the worlds greenhouse gas emissions. Couple that with emissions from transportation, refrigeration, clearing land for crops and pastures and livestock do not appear as environmentally benign as NCBA would have us believe.

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s) have a negative affect on our health as well. The 2004 outbreaks of avian flu in Laos and Nigeria occurred on CAFO’s and the current swine flu epidemic has Mexican lawmakers pointing the finger at CAFO’s while Mexican health officials back them up.

CAFO’s, crop production, water, processing and transportation comprise an industrial agricultural system that is no friend of the environment. The argument supporting the system,”we need to feed the world”, is a lie. As the system industrialized, world hunger increased.

In the end the question is, who will decide if agriculture will protect or destroy the environment?

We can continue to allow multinational agribusiness corporations and industrial agriculture to control our food system. We can continue to accept CAFO’s, mono-culture cropping and the inherent environmental damage they cause. Or we can think about the environment and humanity when we make our food choices. We can, as Michael Pollan says, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”.

We need to think before we eat.

The same can be said of U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s newfound commitment to “get Americans to eat more healthful foods while also boosting crop production to feed a growing world population.” As he notes, “These two goals have often been at odds.”

Since the end of World War II, every USDA Secretary has embraced boosting crop production to feed a growing world population. Unfortunately, in every administration, that has meant the production of more corn and soybeans. Instead of solving the world’s food crisis, the USDA’s policies have only made it worse.

Fully one half of the corn and soy grown in the U.S. are fed directly to livestock. By 2012, one third of the corn crop will go into ethanol. Ten percent, give or take, will be exported and likely fed to livestock. The rest will be converted into processed foods, corn chips, other snack items and the ubiquitous high fructose corn sweetener.

The result is an international food system completely out of balance. South and Central American farmers are pushed to export fruits and vegetables to the developed world rather than feed their own people. The amount of oil used in farming grain and transporting imported produce continues to increase. And the grain-producing farmland that fattens our livestock, powers our cars and sweetens the forty gallons of soda per capita we drink each year is unavailable for the healthy food we should be growing.

Clearly, this is not the answer. If we want to solve our food problems, we need to bring new ideas to the table.

Most importantly, and I say this as a livestock producer, we must move to a diet less centered on animal products. Reducing our dependence on grain-fed livestock will free up vast acreage for staple food crops, rangeland and forests.

We also need to explore new ways of local food production, such as hoop houses, grass-based livestock, and seasonal eating. We need to produce good food locally and push for economic reforms that enable everyone to afford that good local food. And we need to reorient our national priorities to food production for domestic consumption.

Internationally, governments need to promote people over markets, replacing the blind devotion to free markets that has only produced more poverty, more hunger, and an ever-increasing gap between rich and poor. And we must reject the idea that farm workers in any nation should be forced to labor for less than a fair living wage.

With these fundamental reforms, we can, as the new administration says, begin to make a “very significant push” to increase the consumption of affordable, quality food in America.

Progressives assumed change would extend to President-elect Barack Obama’s Cabinet, but we never expected the change to be a reflection of the Clinton administration or, worse yet, the Bush administration. We thought change would mean, well, something different. New people, ideas, economic reforms, energy policies, a withdrawal from Iraq, and a new face to the world.

The political junkies say Obama has loaded his cabinet with centrists. Progressives can only wonder why the world suddenly turned upside down. OK, it’s his cabinet he can pick whom he wishes, but his picks seem a bit out of place. Like Michael Pollan eating a Luther Burger.

History tells us that unlikely people have sometimes done great things. Lincoln put his major rivals in his cabinet, which worked out well. Still, if Obama wants “a vigorous debate inside the White House” a few progressive voices would help mellow out the DLC chorus.

Then there was Obama’s nomination of former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack for secretary of agriculture. With a world food crisis, food safety problems, and a growing demand for local and organic food, the time was right for a real change in national food policy on so many levels. Obama could have picked someone who was knowledgeable about organic farming and local and regional food systems; someone who felt more at ease mending fences or thinning carrots than sitting in a corporate board room — someone who knew the difference between growing food and growing commodity crops.

I don’t doubt Tom Vilsack is a nice guy who did a lot for Iowa agriculture. But I know he did a lot for agribusiness, the chemical companies, biotechnology, and large-scale farming. Apparently his vision of better agriculture is bigger more intensive agriculture.

Is that Obama’s vision of agriculture as well? Could be, it seems he’s been pal’n around with big agriculture biotech zealots. Sharon Long, former Monsanto board member, and Michael Taylor, former Monsanto vice president, are both on his advisory team. Obama endorsed genetically modified crops, stating they were safe and had “provided enormous benefits to farmers,” so choosing the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s “Governor of the Year” to head USDA shouldn’t have been surprising, but come on!

Obama once said, “the good food movement, the organic food movement is a wonderful opportunity for farmers to diversify. When they can diversify and get other crops going, we can in fact produce a healthier food. And more profits can go into the hands of family farmers as opposed to the big food processors and mega businesses. Then I think we are doing well for everybody.” Michelle was quoted in the New Yorker as saying “in my household, over the last year we have just shifted to organic …”

GM farming and organic farming are not compatible. GM pollen drifts for miles and contaminates both organic and non-GM conventional crops. As GM proponents spread their technologies worldwide they push out small organic farmers and local food production. President-elect Obama isn’t a farmer, he has no practical experience with GM crops, so we need to tell him; there is a lot we need to tell him.

For one, it is difficult to have it both ways, disingenuous to want organic for your family while supporting the “mega businesses” that push GM on the world. If Obama’s heart is really with small farms, local production, and organic food, why choose a secretary of agriculture so closely allied with agribusiness?

The progressive community feels like we have been left “sucking hind teat” again. But progressives have always kept the vision alive, in spite of efforts to kill or cripple every progressive initiative. From single-payer health care to fair trade to local food our issues still resonate. We held against Ann Veneman, Dennis Avery, and "ketchup as a vegetable." We can’t let up; even a timidly progressive agenda would be a step forward.

Obama is certainly no fool, could his cabinet picks unify Congress and actually effect progressive change by stealth? I certainly hope so. As Obama so eloquently phrased it, “hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope.” Paul Wellstone once told me, in Washington, "ya gotta play the game." Well, the games have begun. I’m waiting to see which side Obama plays for.

Yet, according to FAO statistics, world food supplies have kept pace with population growth. There is enough food to adequately feed everyone. Clearly, root causes of the food crisis lie in politics, problems with food distribution, poverty, and a failure of the industrial food system to deliver its promises.

Dr. Bob Watson, chief scientist for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the U.K., places the blame for the food price spikes on several factors: grain being shifted to animal feed, drought, increased use of grains for biofuels and speculation in food crops. While proponents assert that industrial agriculture is the only hope to end the food crisis, it appears that industrial agriculture is causing the food crisis.

A study by the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development found, that as industrial farming practices are adopted in countries like India, small farmers and landless peasants are forced off the land. Hundreds of vegetables and weeds that were part of the traditional diet are wiped out by mono-cultures and herbicides used on the Genetically Modified crops. Thus, as Margaret Visser tells us, more rice and wheat produced in India really means less food and less nutrition.

In 1995 Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro addressed the Society of Environmental Journalists stating, “The commercial industrial technologies (the Green Revolution) that are used in agriculture today to feed the world … are not inherently sustainable.” Even Shapiro, was admitting the Green Revolution would fail. As George Kent notes in The Political Economy of Hunger, “the benefits of Green Revolution yields went into the mouths of rich world denizens, in the form of meat and processed foods.”

IAASTD concluded that small-scale farmers in diverse ecosystems should be the focus of efforts to get better quality food in the right places. Farmers need better access to knowledge, technology and credit, but was biotechnology ‘the technology’? Watson told the U.K. Daily Mail, “Are transgenics the simple answer to hunger and poverty? I would argue, no.”

Study after study indicates small-scale, integrated organic/low input sustainable production can produce more food, of higher nutritional value locally, where it is needed.

A 15-year study at the Rodale Institute showed similar yields for conventionally raised vs. organic corn and soy, with soil fertility being consistently higher in the organic systems.

The Broadbalk study in the U.K., ongoing for over 150 years, shows higher yields in integrated organic systems over conventional systems with soil fertility remarkably in the organic system.

In This Organic Life, Joan Dye Gussow notes that prior to World War II, even with its harsh climate, Montana produced 70 percent of its own food, including fruit, sustainably, organically on small farms.

The advantage of integrated organic and sustainable systems is even more apparent in the Global South where most farms are an acre or less. While “yield” per acre can be higher on large conventional farms, “total output” per acre, the sum of everything the farmer produces, is according to Peter Rosset in The Ecologist, far higher on small farms. More food, more nutrition, more animal feed.

Gardeners are familiar with the Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash — three food crops that thrive together. This system of intercropping, has long been practiced by small scale indigenous farmers. Integrating livestock, manure, and crop rotation makes the system even more productive in terms of food per acre.

According to Rosset, economists at the World Bank realize that redistribution of land to small farmers would promote greater food production, yet due to corporate and political pressure, the industrial farming model is promoted as the standard that will “feed the world.” Helena Norberg-Hodge notes that the industrial food system became dominated by the “need for corporate profits, not the need to feed the global population.”

Industrial farming has been an abysmal failure at feeding the world. The best hope, according to the IAASTD report, long-term research and countless generations of indigenous farmers, lies with “small scale farmers in diverse eco-systems.”

As for the U.S., we need sensible food policy: less grain for animals, more home and community gardens, farmer-owned grain reserves, energy policy that does not use food for fuel, and an end to food price speculation. That is a “change we can believe in.”

I was there. He took his own life just a few yards from where I stood among the other protesters near the barricades. I stepped aside as they carried him past me on a stretcher, but I had no idea what had happened until I heard later that night that he had died in protest.

Many people have and will continue to discredit his act, write him off as a crazy or some sort of fool. While I didn’t know him personally, I have spent time with peasant farmers like Lee Kyung Hae and the one thing I have learned from them; farming is about much more than making money, it is life. They are ready to do anything, to protect their farms, their families, and their way of life.

One might ask, what is so special about food? Why is it different than other commodities? The cheapest food is the best food, right? Rosset makes it clear that food is “not a typical commodity because it affects so many people and the environment in such intimate ways … Food is both personal, as it affects our bodies, and political as it affects the world.” Food does have political power, and as we have seen in the current world food crisis, it has real economic power as well.

Unlike most commodities, we need food every day. Some may want a flat-screen TV, but they do not need one. They can live without a fancy TV, but they can’t live without food.

We were shocked by the death of a Wal-Mart worker trampled by crazed Christmas shoppers, but if food supplies become short, everyone will become crazed. Eating is part of that basic survival instinct, we will do what we must to survive. A new TV or a car, we might want them, but few would kill for them. Food is different.

Most farmers I know, myself included, have a strong attachment to our farms, the land, our heritage, but it is a life or death attachment for very few of us. These peasant farmers are different, they have the passion, they will die for what they believe.

Those who would write Lee Kyung Hae off do not understand the commitment, the connection, the interdependence these farmers have with each other and their communities. Back in the ’60s during Vietnam, we occasionally heard about a U.S. soldier who threw himself on a live hand grenade to save the lives of his comrades, his brothers; it’s like that.

Peasant farmers have told me stories of those who stood in front of bulldozers in their attempt to stop Plan Puebla-Panama, the giant transportation project linking Central and South America to the North, another part of the corporate effort to extract the wealth of the South.

These peasant farmers are willing to sacrifice their lives for what they feel is the greater good. Perhaps there is no thought given to a spontaneous act of sacrifice, perhaps there is, I don’t know. I do know that in order for a human to overcome the strongest instinct we have, self preservation, there needs to be an extremely urgent life altering issue at stake.

Food, one’s farm, one’s heritage, one’s family: these are the issues Lee Kyung Hae gave his life for. He, like all the peasant farmers in Cancun, was determined that the WTO, would not sell out Korea’s farms, it’s families and their right to produce food to a parasitic group of multinational corporations intent only on making a profit. They knew if the trade provisions of the WTO were enacted they would loose their right to feed themselves and their families, their right to grow the food their ancestors had grown; the food that maintained their heritage as well as their lives.

Lee Kyung Hae’s sacrifice was a very visible and selfless act, yet every day peasant farmers around the world give up something — their land, their rights their ability to feed themselves, their food sovereignty.

How could we have let our world slip so far? Why must people die for their right to feed themselves? At what point did the profits of multinational corporations become more important than the lives of farmers? We must get agriculture out of the WTO.

Food is different. We need to understand that people are willing to die for their right to farm, to grow what they want, and to feed their families and communities. While few are inclined to make the ultimate sacrifice, we need to think about how important food really is. It is life and death. Good food, local food, food that supports the farmer, nourishes the eater and supports the community, that is what Lee Kyung Hae died for.