Organic Empowerment 2010: Taking Action Locally

Ten Strategic Local Campaigns

#1: Locally Grown Organic Food

Making affordable, locally and regionally-grown organic food available to all, rich, middle-income and poor, must become a top priority for city and county governments across the nation. Making the transition to organic food and farming stimulates the local economy, improves public health, sequesters enormous amounts of climate destabilizing greenhouse gases, and protects the environment. As global warming intensifies, scientists warn that a continuation of current "business as usual" practices will lead to a catastrophic 8.6 degree Fahrenheit temperature rise by 2100. Our only hope is to make energy-efficient and climate-stabilizing organic food and farming the norm rather than just the green alternative. Here are several programs that support locally grown organic food:

• Free city land for urban farms
• Ownership opportunities for beginning farmers
• Delivery cooperatives and Local Food Hubs
• Laws that allow backyard poultry, beekeeping, and raw milk
• Slow Money investments to fund Slow Food
• School and community gardens
• Local organic food in schools, hospitals, and food banks
• Mandatory composting
• Free compost
• A local Food Policy Council
• A local organic food purchasing policy
• Four-seasons farmers' markets
• Local food processing plants
• Local abattoires that can go farm to farm to process animals
• Community Supported Agriculture

Resources and inspiration:

• Organic Consumers Association's Breaking the Chains Page
• The New Wave of Urban Farming
• Means and Ways to Build a Sustainable Food System
• Wendell Berry: Large-Scale Farms Killing Land, Towns
• The Localization of Agriculture
• The Power of Growing Your Own Food (Video)

#2: Local Currencies and Community Banks

Unregulated Wall Street gambling crashed the economy, prompting Bush and Obama to hand over $14 trillion to our so-called "Too Big to Fail" banksters! Meanwhile, almost nothing has been done to stop the avalanche of foreclosures and job losses. The US economic system seems diabolically designed to suck money out of local economies and ordinary working people. We can reverse this trend by pulling our money out of Wall Street and the big banks, and instead investing in local currencies, credit unions, and community banks. Here's how:

• Local governments can open publicly-owned banks to create credit for the local economy.
• Neighborhood corporations can engage in housing and land development, and own stores, businesses and factories to benefit the neighborhood.
• "Enterprising cities" can manage municipally owned cable television, Internet services, land, hotels and utilities to provide services, create jobs and make money to pay for health care and nutrition, education and jobs.

Resources and inspiration:

• Organic Consumers Association's Breaking the Chains Page
• The Economic Revolution Is Already Happening - It's Just Not on Wall St.
• Publicly-Owned Banks Can Help States and Residents
• Move Your Money

#3: Health Care Access, Including Natural and Integrative Medicine

The health care debate has occurred mainly at the federal level, and, with 6,000 corporate lobbyists and nearly a billion dollars being spent by the insurance industry to influence the outcome, public support for universal, single-payer health care is likely to lose out to a plan that would force each of us to buy expensive, inadequate health insurance. OCA is calling on the public to boycott the "profit-at any-cost" medical insurance industry and support local alternatives like state-level single payer health care coverage, local universal health care, and health care providers who have opted out of the insurance industry. States and localities need to be pressed to protect the right to practice - and access - midwifery, naturopathy, and alternative integrative medicine.

Learn more and take action at OCA's Health Resource and Action Center

Next Week:

#4: Organic, Fair Trade & Union Made Procurement

#5: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Compost

#6: Reduce Energy Use & Build a Renewable Energy Infrastructure

#7: Tell the Toxic Industrial Food Producers to Take a Hike

#8: Implement the Precautionary Principle

#9: Eliminate Corporate Personhood to Protect Democracy

#10: Make Peace At Home

Read more: Organic Empowerment 2010: Ten Strategic Local Campaigns

Read more from Ronnie Cummins in Organic Bytes, the free weekly e-newsletter of the Organic Consumers Association.

 

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Comments

[RecessionPROOF-Business]

10:55 AM on 01/12/2010

Organic food demand has increased far more quickly than the supply, hence, we have to pay twice the price for organic foods in most local grocery stores and even farms. I use to belong to a local organic farm cooperative, but it just got out of hand, too expensive for the average family, so what is the anwer?

Certainly this article hits on many of the issues we all face, but the only solution I found for low cost organic foods is through online gardens and wholesale discount direct grocery stores and farm markets. If this trend continues as it has, now people will be able to again afford organic products. With more certified organic farmers joining cooperative, I see this as the only strategy to keep organic food prices low, direct from farmer to nationwide customers, this is the future as I see it.

[Photofarm]

07:22 PM on 01/10/2010

How to reduce food output, increase food prices, and make people starve. Totally clueless about the realities of agriculture is all organic farming city slickers get hood winked.

[Alexis BadenMayer]

11:21 PM on 01/10/2010

Actually, there's plenty of evidence that organic can feed the world better than the expensive, resource-intensive forms of agriculture driven by synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, chemical pesticides, genetic engineering and wasteful irrigation. Industrial agriculture doesn't feed the world now: It's brought us a world where a billion people are unhealthily overweight while another billion starve.

Organic Can Feed the World:

http://www.celsias.com/article/organic-agriculture-can-feed-world/
http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/files/GreenRevUP.pdf
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_18780.cfm
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=9864870CA5185124D96593630C2DBF47.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=1195100
http://www.theecologist.org/trial_investigations/268287/10_reasons_why_organic_can_feed_the_world.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/organic-farming-could-feed-africa-968641.html
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-10-07-pollan-shoots-down-organic-myths-at-grist-event/

[Photofarm]

11:33 PM on 01/10/2010

All lies, I farm, I have a few fields of neighbors that grow some organic crops. Yields of corn and soybeans are much less than conventional farming methods. Weeds are a huge problem, and you can't get organic sources of Nitrogen to raise 200 bushel per acre corn.