Agricultural issues at a crossroads with social justice

Teach-in to address agricultural issues such as supporting small, local farms

By: Chris Hokanson

Posted: 2/28/08

When students sit down to lunch, they probably don't consider where their food came from. The fruit probably came from Georgia or Florida, the vegetables from California and the fish from China. The fact that those foods came from so far away has major implications on the environment and on the livelihood of local farmers, said Elliott Hall, project coordinator for the Association for Social Entrepreneurship.

ASE is having the second of this semester's group of "teach-ins," events which allow students and community members to discuss social issues with experts. Thursday's teach-in will present issues in agriculture - eating locally and organically, rising food costs and the impact of climate change.

Bruce McCarl, a professor of agricultural economics at Texas A&M, said he wants to stress the importance of social justice in relation to climate change. McCarl, a leading expert in the field of climate change mitigation and climate change policy, is a member of the International Panel on Climate Change, a group that won a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. McCarl is one of the panelists for Thursday's agriculture teach-in.

"I want to stress how some of our actions impose costs on people in different countries and different income strata," McCarl said. "For example, much of our corn ethanol boom is done in the name of greenhouse gas mitigation. It's causing great incentives overseas to cut down rainforests. And yet we want to say to these folks, 'You can't do that. We're interested in the carbon that forest is storing, so you can't use your land in that way.' "

McCarl will be joined on the panel by James Richardson, a regents professor of agricultural economics and the director of A&M's Agriculture and Food Policy Center, and Brad Stufflebeam, owner of Home Sweet Farm in Brenham, Texas and the president of Texas Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.

Hall, who helped found ASE in August, said social entrepreneurship is nothing new, and that the concepts it teaches apply to agriculture, now more than ever. Social entrepreneurship, the idea that people in the business world can give back to the community and the environment, grows in popularity and has at its root ideas of social justice. It entails using entrepreneurial concepts, which are fundamental to business, in order to move for social change.

Hall said social entrepreneurship in agriculture means eating organically to help the environment, eating locally to reduce greenhouse gas emissions caused by transportation and supporting small farmers who get pushed around by large agriculture companies.

"You see a lot of bullying in agriculture," Hall said. "Look at Monsanto: They buy up seeds, they patent them and then they own them. They then go out and prosecute farmers that have those seeds on their farm, even if it's unintentional. These are the kind of pressures that big agriculture businesses use today."

Hall used the example of Enron and WorldCom to say that large agriculture companies, with their fleets of lawyers and accountants, manipulate markets and get out of tight spots of the law so they can push out the small farmers.

Today's agriculture teach-in, then, allows students and faculty to discuss these and other issues. Unlike traditional panel discussion, said senior anthropology major and Chapter Coordinator of ASE, Annie Behrman, the teach-in substitutes the question and answer session with small-group discussions, so attendees can interact more closely with the experts and with each other.

The first teach-in ASE had, about the Fair Trade movement, exceeded attendance expectations, Hall said, and the group hopes the agriculture teach-in will garner similar interest.

The Association for Social Entrepreneurship agriculture teach-in will be from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday in Koldus 110.