Reprinted with permission From the September, 2009 issue of the Ester Republic.

Out of the blue. Thats what I thought when I heard the news that Obama’s justice department has launched a broadly-scaled antitrust investigation of ‘Big Ag’. How can they manage this new front in what is an ongoing ideological battle between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’, I wondered, embroiled as they are within healthcare reform and economic troubles? For the most part, Obama’s administration has been unwilling to take on additional big issues until it can put the healthcare and the economy to bed. Education, for instance, has stayed off the radar despite the looming renewal of “No Child Left Behind.” Obama is already being hammered by some for taking on too much too soon (though arguably this comes from those who would just as quickly criticize him for doing too little if circumstances were different). But to Obama’s credit, news of this new initiative slipped off of the news desks as quietly and as quickly as it slipped on, obscured, no doubt, by the healthcare firestorm and all but missed by the talking heads.

It is an important story that deserves more attention, however, especially regarding what this move could mean for the future of local food movements. All along I’ve had a feeling that a gradual process of secession from the ‘Big Ag’ system, in the way of grass-roots, local food movements, could only go so far, and that one way or another we would eventually need some help from the top. This antitrust move, though not at all what I had imagined, might just be more than I could have hoped for.

In particular, I see some real possibility here for the outcomes of an antitrust investigation to establish a legitimate degree of food sovereignty in America. Food sovereignty is the idea that it is an inalienable “right” to manage one’s food, agriculture, livestock and fisheries systems in the way one sees fit. This is in obvious contrast to our current system, where the shape of our food system and the cost and quality of our food is subject for the most part to international market forces. Antitrust law, also often called competition law, is admittedly about maintaining a degree of fairness within the broader context of this same market. However, I think it may nevertheless be the best chance we have, barring amendment of the constitution, for setting a legal precedence for the right to feed ourselves. That is, if certain, key happenings in the past 20 years of Big Ag are found as anti-competitive.

The Big Ag business model is replete with strategies designed to keep you and I from feeding ourselves. Some obvious things for the justice department to look at include the massive consolidation of the beef, pork, and dairy industries, and the patenting of so much of the world’s seed (though I fear making actual changes to patent law remains outside the domain of the justice department). But with any luck, they will also take a closer look at the impacts on competition of some of the more nuanced business strategies, such as the way these companies have come to control almost the entire distribution process of our food, right up to which foods appear in our school lunchrooms, or how and where things are placed on the shelf at Safeway. Changes to these would help level the playing field, and put the entire business model for community food systems on the table. But these are changes that we would be far less likely to achieve (at least in a timely manner) with our individual acts of secession alone.

It won’t be long, however, before the talking heads and the old-school food scholars of the world pick this story up and rail on the Obama administration as anti-democratic, with their rhetoric about socialism and the values of a “free” market. Don’t be fooled. Democracy and capitalism are not the same thing, nor are democracy and freedom, for that matter, though many of us have been confused about these since the cold war. This is why I call the battle over food an ideological one–those on the ideological right seem to be quite happy perpetuating this incorrect notion that a “free” (read: unregulated) market is part and parcel to democracy. What they forget is that our democracy is not built on the concepts of Adam Smith, arguable father to the free-market paradigm. Rather, its foundation is an idea of social contract born in the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Where a free market ideology believes in placing no limits on competition, these argued for the need to sacrifice certain ‘absolute’ freedoms (freedoms of the first order) in exchange for protection of other freedoms which we cannot ensure on our own (freedoms of the second order), in particular life, liberty, and property. We are not free to steal, to cheat, to kill; but protected from those who steal, cheat and kill we become free to own, barter, and prosper.

By law, American corporations enjoy the same freedoms, and bear the same responsibilities as an individual. Need it be asked whether these people, who perpetuate a fast food system that starves some, enslaves many, and poisons the rest, are living up to their end of the social contract?

I am optimistic, yet also cautious, about where this antitrust initiative will lead. Unlike a bill or an amendment to the constitution, we cannot vote on it, or even call our representatives to support it. Nevertheless, we must continue to do what we have been doing, choosing locally grown foods first, organic second, canning and freezing those foods for when they are not in season, and limiting our use of industrially-produced packaged foods as much as we can manage. At least now we can do these things with the knowledge that we’re not alone anymore.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 11:15 am by Philip Loring and is filed under Feature Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.