for a little while and we still work on trade justice specifically right now we have to do everything in our power to stop the trans pacific partnership from being passed by congress over the next few months we also organize for food justice refuge justice project through political education and by working in solidarity with frontline communities for example were part of the seattle boycott committee standing in solidarity organizing weekly picket families united for justice which is that independent and really historic farm worker union that formed two years ago near mount vernon and that's getting a lot of support from the amazing organization community to community based in bellingham anniversary of food first who's really an essential part of the movements for food justice and food sovereignty there are peoples think tank that provides really invaluable analysis and leadership and we urge you to become a member of that also membership organization and just to give an example when we learned that the gates foundation was promoting a new green revolution in africa we went to food first and of course they are they already were writing about it and we learned about you know the early days where you sort of figured out was happening from specific things one is the gates divest campaign that's demanding that the gates foundation divest from their one point four billion dollars investment in major fossil fuel companies and the guardian newspaper is also doing this organizing but they have a five year time line best as a local branch or they started independently actually and their demand is that they do best by november thirtieth which is the start of the climate talks and we totally salute their organizing they're doing great work they've got the former mayor on their side they're doing creative protests frequently outside the foundation which we've done over the years as well but we're really excited to have a great partner and pressuring the gates foundation and we also really appreciate that they might have gotten our great new fire tonight that they welcome to our addition to their message that it's not enough to divest from fossil fuel vestments and those big companies if the gates foundation wants to make a difference because they are promoting agribusiness and agribusiness as one of the greatest contributors to global warming and climate change so please don't let the gates foundation of the hook that we have a fear that they'll be the good guy they do best and they certainly should not be allowed to be seen as a good guy or any greenwashing to come out of that if they were to take that action the second thing is a statewide organizing being led by communities of color for climate justice and under the umbrella of a new coalition the alliance for jobs and clean energy this is an amazing development in our state really really important and i'm so excited that we're able to ground the big analysis that erick will give tonight in specific local organizing being led especially were really excited to see the leadership of both got green and community to community for the alliance for food sovereignty in africa last week they released a statement calling a group college the future of farming in africa so part of the purpose of this event tonight was just to to be highlighting that work that's being done and i just want to read a short part of their statement and they say in many ways our go apology is the antithesis of current conventional corporate driven monoculture based agricultural systems where conventional agriculture seeks to simplify egger apology embraces complexity where conventional agriculture aims to eliminate biodiversity college it depends on diversity and builds upon it where conventional agriculture turns farmers into unskilled laborers agro college e is knowledge intensive building on traditional agricultural practices with modern research and technology strengthening the sovereignty of small scale family farmers where conventional agriculture is based on one size fits all fixes like g m o's chemical fertilizers and pesticides agro college it provides local solutions to local problems the strongest resistance agro quality comes from the vested interests of agribusiness fertiliser agro chemical and biotech companies that are quote claim they're feeding the world as a narrative to increase their profits from input sales as africa wan down the industrial agriculture route just because there is money on the table this is the crucial question for policymakers across the continent so eric holder the man is the perfect person to help us make all these connections he's an panel that we organize a town hall during the africa u s food sovereignty strategy summit here also another really memorable event that brendan born was also a big part of was on the tenth anniversary to the day of the protests or any of you at that school hall got three hundred people that night it was an amazing event as well back in puerto rican heritage eric grew up milking cows and pitching hay in point reyes california where he learned that putting food on the table is hard work after studying rural education and biology at the university of oregon and my alma mater evergreen state college ex pat the next twenty five years working in mexico and central america with farmers his first book  i love coming to seattle i lived in the pacific northwest for a number of years i mean before i went to school in evergreen i lived in the san juan islands for a while and i got here the ne and i didn't know wh because food first is really about this this connection between intellectual work and activism and so it's no mistake there we're here at the university of washington with a partnership with   and we have been around for forty years thanks to the people we don't get money from foundations we got a little bit of grant money from time to time but we've stayed active for forty years researching the injustices that cause hunger and what to do about it amplifying the voices of the social movements and trying to inform the general public  thanks to individual contributions people who give us anywhere from five to i'm not kidding five dollars a year and then call on the phone i want to talk for half an hour about food first  to you know maybe five thousand dollars a year or more and we have around five to seven thousand supporters at any one time and that's how we stay independent that's how we get to set our own research agend and our research agenda we make sure that it's accountable to the people which for whom we can we believe so tonight i want to talk about climate food and race challenges for the food movement some of you who've heard me speak before will recognize a number of the themes but i really want to address see look at how our food system and our food movement and the inequities and injustices of those also link with climate and the injustices that are taking place today around climate when i start with a story so once upon a time in a land not too far away an enormous hurricane slammed into the isness and it was called the hurricane of the poor because the ten thousand people who were killed were primarily poor people there primarily peasants slum dwellers the three million who were displaced were playing primarily peasants and slum dwellers this hurricane was not the most powerful hurricane in the history of the region but it was the most destructive hurricane in the history of the region and damages were calculated above thirteen percent of the beatles gross national product and the reason that it was so destructive was that the reason was had been made highly vulnerable over the last hundred years through deforestation the expansion of industrial agriculture soils were exposed peasant farmers who had been farming on the bottom then had been pushed off to make way for industrial agriculture and gone up into the hillsides and the mountains living very precarious lee of course when the hurricane hit they were washed down hill except the farmers from this movement  because the farmers in the compass you know compass you know movement had spent about thirty years forging their own agriculture farmer to farmers doing their own experimentation weaning themselves from chemicals and hybrids and from green revolution techniques implementing very labor intensive but extremely effective terracing and soil building practices and when the hurricane hit and pretty much destroyed agriculture throughout ok its central america these farmers their farms were not destr the neighbors farms were destroyed but these farmers made it through their farms were resilient actually their friends are resistant to the impact of the hurricane and when everybody sort of dug themselves out and looked around they realised the farmers still had a lot of food and they were selling this food they're actually making some money because i would also need food and they said you know we want to rebuild our region but we shouldn't rebuild it using conventional agricultural techniques because they're too final look what's happened they've been destroyed we should use our agricole logical techniques are sustainable farming techniques and we should rebuild sustainably but they knew no one would believe them so they carried out a massive study in three different countries in central america where they measured the impact of the hurricane on their farms and then on their neighbors farms so it was a comparative study between a logical farms and conventional farms under the exact same conditions across the entire instance and conditions of low medium and high impact from the hurricane two thousand farmers participated most of whom were illiterate took about three four months to pull this off there were about one hundred teams that work together these are all the spots where they made observations and there were about forty non governmental organizations and farmers organizations that participated in this tremendous research popular research had fewer losses actually made some profits managed to conserve more soil and water every single one of the indicators the agricultural ecological farms from these farmers one reviewed journals they called the ministry of agriculture and the ministries of for cooperation together in great conferences in each of the capital cities they presented their work everybody applauded and they made their case it was a scientific case they said look let's rebuild central american agriculture let's rebuild the sustainably we know how to do it we've proven it you haven't believed us for thirty years but here's the proof we are more sustainable and we can teach everybody else and it'll be cheap and everybody applauded and said ok look we're going off to spain we'll be back in a few months with a plan for central american reconstruction and when they came back farmers looked through the plan and they couldn't find the compass inner compass in the movement and they couldn't find any reference to sustainable agriculture or agro quality in fact they couldn't find any reference to agriculture at all the plan for the reconstruction of central america after hurricane mitch was to abandon these farmers to abandon the peasantry they figured the richer farmers would would be able to refinance their own reconstruction but they were going to help the part of the poor farmers refinance anything rebuild anything they decide with a poor farmers had to do was they had to move to the pacific plain where there were going to set up a whole chain of sweat shops and infrastructure so the central america could enter the global economy by selling manufactured goods and cheap clothing and in one fell swoop do away with the peasantry and enter into the modern world i don't know what delivering it to get it at the world bank thought up this scheme or maybe it was injured american development bank but who ever thought the central america could compete with china and textiles so the plan was a horrible flop complete failure known invested farmers were abandoned they started going hungry then the free trade agreements hit the price of their goods fell through the floor because of all of the corn which was being imported without any duties from overseas they went bankrupt and we get what we were at that time and talk about nine hundred ninety eight nine ninety nine two thousand what i consider to be the first climate refugees because people start to leave and mass the farmers from compa wanted to tell this story because i think it's emblematic of our climate dilemma our food dilemma and our agricultural dilemma and i think it's emblematic because what we found in this story is a globally under served community of people of color who develop a visionary strategy for climate resist resilient food production which is tremendously effective and yet there are structural decisions and this is very important structural decisions which are me by the institutions that control the global economy that dismiss this contribution to the public good in the name of economic development and they take advantage of the disaster to dispossessed people of their livelihoods who then become the first climate victims in the communities shift from a constructive socio environmental proposals to survival strategies so they should have had a climate action plan and they should have had a food action plan luckily for you you do seattle has a climate action plan and food action plan i found them online take a look they're not so bad unfortunately don't relate to each other at all but that's ok because from what i hear no one's paying attention to them but they're there and you could use them i think they're very important because as you can see what failed the compass you know compass you know was precisely this in gauge moment in the public sphere to determine the future to determine policy to determine reconstruction to determine how people are going to face th e hazards of climate and the imperative of producing food and luckily in seattle and in the united states and in california where i live from we have a very vibrant food movement and we're really proud about it in california and we're so short of insufferable in that way around that we're like vermont you know we we think we're really something with our food but then so does portland and i think you guys kind of do too but and you should i mean there's all kinds of things happening which are extremely important you know farmers markets and school gardens and farm to school programs again it farming urban farms locally grown stuff you know it's it's bursting out all over this is really important because we have such a terrible food system want to replace it with something but if we're concerned about people as we are about our food we can't ignore the fact that we have a racialized food system and you can start by realizing that one in seven people in this country is food insecurity california where the most productive agricultural state in the union has around it has over from eleven to thirteen percent of food insecure people so you actually and who are these food insecure people overwhelmingly people who are food insecure in our country are people of color african american or latino islander these are the people who are food insecure twice as much as our angle populations and not only the food insecure they suffer the highest rates of diet related disease now you probably  may not know that most of the people at the highest levels of food insecurity and i related disease are in the food sector those people who pick the crops process the food cooked the food might even serve the food but mostly they're in the back of the house are people of color and have the highest rates of food insecurity and we did studies in new york and in san francisco and we find that restaurant workers have the highest rates of food insecurity in the bay area and that this is correlated with how fancy the restaurant is fancier the restaurant the higher the food insecurity think about the next time you order a r now this parallels the global situation because globally one in seven people are our food is secure and yet we talk about the poor is being produced in poor countries is being where we have food insecurity and yet here in the richest country in the world we reflect the levels of food insecurity worldwide and of course bill gates is convinced that he's going to be the one who finally brings the green revolution to africa and he's going to save africa from hunger if bill gates was really concerned about hunger he would be working in asia and the pacific because that's where most of the hungry people are so why is he working in africa where the simple answer is i think the generous and certainly this because asia and the pacific already had a green revolution it clearly didn't  hunger so we can't talk about that we'll talk about africa not having had a green revolution and that's what's going to end hunger the fact is we've been producing one and a half times in a food for every man woman and child on the planet for decades is green line which you see there is food production per capita that's twelve percent per person per year keeps going up and up and up and you can take this back several decades that means each one it doesn't matter how many people are born each year and everybody who's born gets twelve percent more and we'll get twelve percent more theoretically but because of that little those blue diamonds which are absolute poverty you get the orange dots which is undernourishment because the problem is not that we don't have enough food the problem is not scarcity the problem is people are too poor to buy the food and who is too poor to buy food farmers farmers are too poor to buy the food the hungriest people in the world are farmers seventy percent of world's hungry are farmers and seventy percent of those are women and those women happen to produce half of the world's food so the people who feed half the planet are going hungry and these people happen to be people of color to begin to see how our racialized food system is structured in on a global level at the time of the famous two thousand and eight food crisis where prices skyrocketed and a billion people in hungary we had actually there was record hunger we've never had a billion people to hunger before we also had record harvests we've never produced so much food as in two thousand and eight and there were record profits for archer daniels midland monsanto cargill syngenta general foods wal mart's safeway tesco you name is the monopolies who dominate our food since our global food system so they were making record profits at the time we had record hunger around the world can drop but basically this is a straight line going this is a curved line going down which means what the price of food is going down all the time because we're producing too much of it so counter  not scarcity that produces hunger it's overproduction that produces hunger how is this how can this be because it's industrial agriculture this producing this food ostensibly cheaply because they don't pay any of the extra analyses and they don't pay the labor for it it's worth and so food is still very cheaply and that puts false farmers out of business or makes them extremely poor and these are the people who go hungry in industrial production of food is what causes hunger you can see these are the two spikes one in two thousand and eight and then in two thousand and eleven you can see that the red lines these are the incidence of food riots the second set of of red lines there that's the arab spring so you gotta watch out for these food riots they can topple governments and you can also see that when food gets above the food price index gets about twenty eighty or so  you pass a threshold and you enter into a state of sort of food rebellion and you can begin to expect a lot of unrest unless you quickly solve the problem a lot of talk about why this happens these spikes i'm not going to get into the details of it except there was as the price of food began to bump up a bit because of agro agro fuels ma grain scarce on the market because of the low low value of the dollar because so much food was being channeled into feedlots and what not because the price of oil went up and so since our food travels something like two thousand five hundred miles from pr r consumer price of food begins to go up but then when wall street gets a gander of this they begin to bet on the price of food and they pump the price of food up and speculation basically sense the price of food higher than anything we've ever seen in the history of capitalism but the real reason why this is even able to happen is because we have a food regime with a very concentrated food system which is structurally vulnerable to environmental and economic shock because we only see it because it's dominated by just five crops in just a handful of varieties is dependent on fossil fuels and very high external inputs and it's controlled by the grain traders the seed in genetic engineering companies and most of all the most powerful concerns in the food system are the retailers the supermarkets they control it at both ends this didn't happen overnight we're probably in our third regime stage of food regimes the first food regime was the colonial food regime which is accomplished basically through genocide dispossession slavery and ind coerced labor in which the global south produces cheap food and draw materials for the industrialization of the global north this switches around after world war two where we have a lot of nitrates and poisons left over and a tremendous machine capacity machinery capacity and so we plow them into agriculture in the united states because our mainland was not touched by that work and we had all kinds of money left over from the war it was treated at least tons of money to invest in agriculture we begin to overproduce in this country and we sending the surplus to europe because they're rebuilding they need food pretty soon we start seeing the machines over there we start seeing the seeds over there they start over producing and then the big inversion takes place and the north begins to send food to the global south all this time is from the south sending the food to the north now the  do that they have to destroy it was there otherwise there's no room for it this is what capitalism calls creative destruction the food regime we're in now is the neoliberal or corporate food regime basically came about through the structural adjustment periods of the nineteen eighty's and ninety's the jean revolution the g m o's through the ninety's and the free trade agreements up to the present day nafta craft and how it got to tip and the european free trade agreement and the move by wall street and bond street to invest less in the real economy and things that actually produce things and infests in the finance economy the finance sector and the finest sector uncanny ability to squeeze the wealth i had of existing sectors and products and amass it elsewhere we also see a lot of land grabs because they don't know what to do all this money sort of buying up all this land because you want to keep it in the bank because you can lose it's going to lose value and we're in a recession so what kind of what do you invest in no one's buying anything so invest and when you're not making any more of it this is paralleled by massive immigration migration from the global south into europe into the united states from dispossessed agrarian communities and the explosion of the prison industrial complex and the new jim crow laws and we begin to see that the brunt of this process the construction of food regimes falls heavily and most violently on people of color from the global south and here in communities in the north so the results have been devastating that south used to produce a surplus of a billion dollars of food every year now they import eleven billion dollars to agriculture uses up eighty percent of the world's fresh water and produces depending on how you calculate it twenty to forty percent of the world's greenhouse gases we've lost seventy five percent of our crop diversity and of course massive immigration an explosion of diet related diseases that you know in the u s costs one hundred fifty billion dollars a year and this is paid by the public there's an extra nowi from our food system which the private concerns don't pay but we all pay and certainly the families who are subject to every day disease like diabetes pay the hardest the worst we also see the disability ation of the climate the frequency of severe weather events and the increased vulnerability to environmental and economic shock communities around the world but i think one of the most tragic losses strategically is the loss of the public sphere because over the last thirty years what we've seen is the privatization of everything right down to our relationships so those social institutions which used to protect us from the volatility of the market which used to protect us from have all been destroyed and this is why you see the rise of violence in so many poor communities because these institutions are under such strain from globalization this which is what this process is is commonly referred to so it's not shouldn't be we should be surprised to see an explosion of police violence and murders of young black men and women by police departments around the country given that all of these institutions including arc are local government institutions have been defunded and hollowed out and disintegrated and this is precisely at a time when we need our public sphere more than ever before to deal with the problems of our food system and of climate so i like to say that i think that the corporate food regime has overlaps and has an analogy with the corporate climate regime particular because of its dependence on petroleum but not just that and i think that if we look at industrial agriculture as a major contributor to greenhouse gases deforestation and species extinction and global warming and of course the hazards of the corporate climate regime under well known to all of us i'm sure as the temperature goes up one degree two degree his three degrees we begin to unleash a serious hazards  across across the globe and they don't fall evenly of course they follow any of them but what's important to understand about climate hazards is that they can become climate disasters and they become disasters if the population which is subjected to the hazard like a hurricane or i could drought or a flood or a heat wave is vulnerable if that if the population subjected to the hazard is not vulnerable then you don't have a disaster you just have a lot of rain or just gets really hot when nobody dies nobody has to integrate because your resilience well that resilience isn't just biological that resilience is social their resilience depends on the level of poverty or hunger or the level of market power or how much land you have access to or what quality of land you have access to which means you adjust by reducing to severe climate events by would reducing vulnerability to the impact the other is mitigation which is you reduce your greenhouse gas emissions and you try and capture some carbon so things like it works but  nobody wants to talk about in paris or kyoto from killer to paris where no one wants to talk about copenhagen you know that is remediation which is you address the causes of greenhouse gas emissions and you can rest the cause of social environmental vulnerability why are people vulnerable how can we change that continually in meeting greenhouse gases through this agricultural model why don't we change the model why haven't we been able to change this model why is the model itself so resilient but in fact when in fact society is not ok so people don't sit around with their arms crossed they stand up and fight and we have a very vibrant climate justice movement and i think the climate justice movement at least the united states has grown from the environmental justice movement which grew from the civil rights movement very much addressing environmental justice concerns poor communities continuing to be overly polluted and contaminated and now because climate is a global issue the climate justice movement is also global it's not just about local what's happening in our backyard what's happening in our region but in fact how do we actually mitigate climate change and so you have some very radical proposals from the climate justice movement to cut greenhouse gases fifty percent by twenty twenty nine hundred percent by twenty fifty reparations pay for the climate data people who are suffering from climate change and course massive investments in renewa human rights into the agreements around climate change so not just about ensuring human rights what human rights were the right to food the right to live in one place the right not to migrate series of rights and of course the other side of it is very practical it's about building local living economies then extending extreme energy bringing in green jobs zero waste looking at public transportation clean community energy regional food and water systems you can see where a lot of these things really overlap with the local food movement these are types of things we need for a healthy local food mov controlling the system itself controlling the wealth in that system so the food dollar stays in the community say is closer to the farm isn't gobbled up by the monopolies and it's about agriculture  about cooling the planet by capturing carbon through farming not emitting greenhouse gas emissions capturing and establishing a sanctuary free g m o a sanctuary g m o free agro biodiversity because when most crashing there are already started to crash where we're going to get the new genetic material not from the seed banks and here we have the food justice movement which is really a movement of movements with the food sovereignty movement is very international in scope very structural in its focus the food justice movement is based on the civil rights movement equity based on economic justice environmental justice has many different routes so if you don't remember anything else what i said tonight because i've covered a stage capitalism we know some things about it always goes through two periods you go through a period of liberalization and a period of reform we're in a period of liberalization right now they liberalize the market everything is privatized and you get tremendous concentrations of wealth last time this happened was in the one nine hundred the roaring twenty's but it is liberalization was able to continue indefinitely it would destroy the social and the material basis of capitalism itself so usually get reforms come in and you get a reformist period like the new deal backs these only come in if you have a strong social movement which assures them in roosevelt would not have been able to bring in a new deal had it not been for the fact that everybody was taking to the streets west powerful labor unions were powerful political parties it looked like capitalism was going to fall and the us look like the government could fall and then it came to the negotiating table and introduced reforms where we are today and i think this is historically really very promising because i know i've probably depressed you but if we look historically at the capitalism and we look at the corporate food and climate regime we see that it's made up of neo liberal and reformist trends but the neo liberals are really the ones who are powerful performance are pretty weak but are counter movement are the food and climate movements the food justice movement which is very progressive otherwise these great things that are progressive doing don't stand a snowball's chance in hell so the challenge is can we build strong alliances between the progressives in the radicals powerful enough to usher in reforms to create the political will within the regime to usher in reforms to scare them enough that they bring in reforms because they don't do it until they're scared pardon me for saying regime  this is an historical project and unfortunately we don't have a lot of experience doing this and there are a lot of obstacles to this is very hard to do otherwise we would have already done it we need to build a transformational movement i would say it is in construction but we are identifying some very important obstacles one is we have all these diverse movements how we can bring them together how are we going to converge in all of our diversity we don't have a plan for doing that political parties don't seem to work anymore the unions don't work the same way they worked before things are very different today than they were back in the thirty's we've got to somehow bring these different groups together we need to reply to size a lot of these social movements because many of them become  politicize why because the all politics stopped working capitalism moved on so people gave up can't give up we need to build the strategic alliances and we overcome the historic divides the things that keep us apart and i want to say i think that racism is one of the main things keeping us apart and of course sexism and of course classism but i think that we've just got racism so imbedded within the structures of our food movement and within the structures which produce climate change that if we don't address racism we're not going to be able to build a powerful movement we're not going to be able to bring about the changes that we need why is it so hard well for one thing internalize oppression is devastating and for another thing white privilege is to and we need to figure out ways to address both of these things because if there's anybody who can lead these alliances it's those people who have no other options if those people who are most negatively impacted by the food and climate regimes is the people of color of this world and so that's the leadership that we have to develop and to do that those of us who are white need to address our white privilege and as a man of mixed heritage i can say those of us who are people of color need to address our internalized oppression and this isn't easy to do because  extremely painful and traumatic i mean genocide that was pretty traumatic dispossession that's pretty traumatic indentured slavery but indentured service that's pretty traumatic luckily we do know how to deal with trauma and i would refer this to many of the indigenous communities in this country who have been dealing with trauma for quite some time in the trauma of genocide and dispossession for quite some time and know a lot about it now they're not the only ones but we have to find a way to bring this into the food movement because not only do we have to dismantle racism the food system we have to dismantle racism in the food movement itself which means better to mass dismantle racism in our organizations and within ourselves so this is a massive and unavoidable project the tools are there to do it we need the will and i would say we need a vision i think we can do this if we envision a world and if we envision a f system in which our food workers are food secure and which farm workers get living wages and have decent working conditions for dignified li and when women are recognised as producing half of the world's food and food system in which black lives matter  difficulty based to the difficulties about diet you know and i relate to season how to improve diet by taking hold of production but what we found is that it's really point to build alliances with food workers between between communities organizations which are based in community and organizations which are labor based within the food system so building alliances with restaurant restaurant opportunity center i mean let's face it i don't see how we're going to change the transponder food system if we don't do something about wal mart and i don't think you can do anything about wal mart unless you work with the workers because wal mart is the largest employer in the world and many of those workers are very poor and are forced to eat lousy food and suffer from dive related disease and as well as you know wage that everything else so it seems to me that's a very because your compass enos said well we can't have women produce half our food we can't have food sovereignty unless there is an end to all violence against women so an end to all violence against women is  platform for food sovereignty and they came to this and dialogue to the world much of women who said you know we can't have justice for women unless we have food sovereignty because women produce most of the world's food so you can see it was a very deep structural it was those who could afford to fly to washington on their own down time for the first meeting and that was good because it got things going but it was bad because it determine the demographic of the group imagine it was a fairly privileged group and almost all white and radical right and this is the food sovereignty prime is supposed to be radical and then we decided you know what we have to do two prizes we have to do a national prize and we have to do an international prize and the national prize almost everybody goes to s the chains so when a wal mart comes in usually wherever they go in has to cough up at least a couple million dollars particular because the wages are so low that most wal mart workers have to get food stamps have to get bt rely on public assistance in one way or another so the public pays and this is been calculated in different studies how much a really cost society to put in a wal mart in your neighborhood because a lot of money and we're also tends to happen is very often they're given incentives tax incentives and paid money to come in and what not so first about we we need to stop doing that and second don't let them in i mean just don't let them in people's community market is a model which is fairly small compared to a lot more like a large grocery store but the grocery store also has a whole range of community services and is a center point for community discussion for child care for youth activities and you know it's a very vibrant part of the community the difficulty now is that you need the public to step in and you need the government and the private sector and they all have to be there then the question is you know who has the power in that and we think that the public should have the power in that  i think that we can go a long way to changing that the supermarket model and there are many allies there including farmers who are getting gouged by the supermarkets particularly wal mart and the workers if for example we would stop subsidizing the production of soy so again you would kick the legs out from under the industry overnight if we started charging  large soybean plantations for the amount of nitrates they produce for the amount of methane they produce for the amount of night greenhouse gas they produce they would become uncompetitive and for the contamination they do in terms of the miller dishman contamination or not they wouldn't be competitive so basically have to internalize extra now it is make them pay and then they hear that these are people who want to talk about is the free market