What is a Food Issue? Why Do We Need a Politics of Food Praxis?
At the policy level, because we would never eschew that, there is a nascent opposition to the “Farm Bill” — a massive annual government giveaway to agri-business. The left is not alone in its oppositon to this. Libertarians oppose it, too. Does it matter why? The grotesque dysfunctions and injustices of the Farm Bill are visible to people across the political spectrum: more importantly perhaps, so is the unsatisfactory quality of the food and pseudo-food produced by the agribusiness cartels coddled by the Farm Bill. This is a food issue. Free-trade agreements are ultimately designed to convert foreign economies into dollar-generating export platforms; and agriculturally this means monocropping at the expense of peasants, the urban poor, and the globe’s disappearing forests. This is a food issue. US agricultural “dumping” is facilitated by massive government subsidies to agribusiness, which also facilitate the competitive destruction of local small producers. This same dumping introduc
