Article # 1

Quaker Testimonies, Ecosystem Health, and Food

by Molly Anderson

One of the most noteworthy characteristics of the Religious Society of Friends is the courage and consistency with which Friends have sought how to act with integrity in various aspects of their lives, even when this action placed them at odds with contemporary social mores or law. Inspired by their reading and interpretation of the words of Jesus, George Fox, and later Friends, Quakers refused to bear arms or defer to secular authorities, and adopted habits of dress, speech, and daily business that set them apart from their society. What we recognize as testimonies at the core of Quaker faith and practice crystallized from individual and corporate leadings toward greater integrity with New Testament teachings.

The etymological origin of “integrity” is Latin integritas, meaning “wholeness” or “completeness”. The testimonies thus can be seen as guideposts toward a more seamless unity within our own lives, and between our lives and the Spirit working in the world. Testimonies important to Quakers through the centuries---peace and non-violence, equality, simplicity, honesty—arose from the particular circumstances and contradictions of the social setting of early Friends. The peace testimony was (and is) a response to an aggressive national power that conscripted young men into serving its aims of dominating other countries. The equality testimony arose in a hierarchical society that did not recognize human rights of women and people of color. The honesty testimony arose during a period of rapidly increasing population density, where business transactions were carried out more and more frequently between strangers, not necessarily bound by obligations of fairness that would be part of kinship or sustained social interaction. The simplicity testimony arose in the context of early capitalism, in a colonial nation using its military strength to seize other nations’ resources. Expensive clothing, sprawling estates, and ornate material goods were outward manifestations of financial success, clearly distinguishing the person who could appropriate the products of other people’s labor from those who struggled to gain basic necessities for themselves and their families.

These testimonies continue to evolve. The recognition of ‘that of God’ in each person and their commitment to non-violence which led early Quakers to support the abolition of slavery and women’s right to vote now leads Friends to fight more subtle forms of racism and discrimination. Peace-making has become even harder in a world of continuous war, in a country with a ‘defense’ budget larger than the combined military expenditures of US allies, Russia, China, Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Simplicity has become more complex in a society that virtually requires the acquisition and use of sophisticated technology—automobiles, computers, cell phones, fax machines, to earn income. Securing life’s necessities, such as food, water, shelter and healthcare, requires that we participate in an economic system propped up by overconsumption of material goods. The negative effects of overconsumption are obvious in the disproportionate use of resources by the United States and the vast amount of waste generated. With less than five percent of the world’s population, the United States uses more than a quarter of its non-renewable resources: 26 percent of the oil, 25 percent of the coal, and 27 percent of the natural gas. The lack of proportion inherent in overconsumption is apparent at the most personal level too, in the growing worldwide incidence of obesity and related diseases.

What does the search for greater integrity and wholeness in our lives require of us in contemporary society? We are becoming more aware of the devastating impacts of human actions on the biosphere, that interdependent web of living creatures and natural systems that sustains a healthy, livable world. We have clear evidence, for instance, that human actions are warming the earth, causing massive species extinctions, and disrupting global cycles of nitrogen through plants, animals, water and soil. Humans have appropriated more and more of the natural world for our own use, transforming it so that other creatures cannot survive. We have slaughtered other species, encroached on their habitat, and contaminated the air, water and soil that they need. The result is a clashing disharmony between humans and the natural world to which we belong and which feeds and nurtures us.

Humans seem bent on destroying the health of the entire planet, even though that will destroy our species as well. This gaping lack of integrity between human actions and planetary health points to a testimony that weaves together many of the earlier Quaker testimonies. How can we possibly live with integrity on a planet we have sickened almost to death? If ‘that of God’ exists in all of God’s creation, then protection of ecosystem health and integrity moves from being ‘merely’ a matter of human survival to a core moral obligation of our time.

The choices we make about food are among the most significant ways that we affect planetary health, in addition to more obvious consequences on individual health. This is true in part because food production, processing and distribution use so much of the available land and water on the planet. About 26 percent of the total land area is given over to croplands and managed pastures. The amounts of freshwater used in agriculture vary from region to region, but worldwide 71 percent of available freshwater is devoted to food production. The planetary impacts of food supply are exacerbated by the particular choices societies have made about the interconnected technologies and processes by which food travels from seed to plate, and by rapid population growth, which ratchets up the pressure to exploit ecosystems.

Our current food system has a devastating toll on land, water, air, oceans and other species. (Given the globalization of both food supply and its environmental impacts, we can legitimately call it a single global food system.)

Soil erosion continues to remove precious fertile topsoil that took millennia to form. In northwestern China, overgrazing by sheep and goats has created a Dust Bowl much more severe than the US Dust Bowl that forced about 2.5 million people off their land in the 1930s. Although China is the most urgent looming crisis, soil loss continues in the US as well: 1.9 billion tons of topsoil were lost to wind and water erosion in 1997.

At least 75 percent of the world’s commercially valuable fish species are fully exploited or overexploited.  Ten percent of fish stocks have become significantly depleted to the extent that they are far less productive than previously.

Agricultural pollution—mainly nutrients and sediment—is the leading cause of water quality damage in US lakes, streams and rivers. Rivers and underground aquifers in some of the most heavily used agricultural regions are drying up because more water is being removed than returned. The Colorado River seldom reaches the Pacific Ocean now, and recently the Rio Grande has been drying up. The Ogallala aquifer under the Great Plains is overpumped: the US Department of Agriculture reports that the underground water table has dropped more than 100 feet under parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Texas.

The food system uses fossil fuels at every step, producing gases that contribute to global warming. Methane, one of the worst greenhouse gases, is a by-product of rice and livestock production.

Conversion of forested land and grassland to cropland and managed pastures has been the biggest contribution to the wave of species extinctions the earth is now experiencing. Agriculture has displaced one-third of temperate and tropical forests and one-quarter of natural grasslands.

The damage caused by the food system extends to humans too. Farmers and farm workers have higher rates of diseases such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, associated with exposure to pesticides. Meatpacking is the most dangerous occupation, and agriculture generally is more dangerous than any other group of occupations except mining. Farm workers frequently have substandard housing and poor working conditions, and they do not enjoy the same legal rights as workers in other occupations. For example, farm work does not have a legal minimum wage nor a requirement that overtime hours receive overtime pay, and farm workers and low-wage workers in the food industry frequently are prohibited from forming unions. No wonder that more than half of all farm workers live below the poverty threshold for a family of four.

The global food system is not even feeding the entire lived in food-insecure households. Of these, 6.1 million adults and 3 million cpopulation adequately. In 2001, 33.6 million people in the US—including 12.7 million children—hildren lived in households where someone experienced hunger during the year because of food insecurity. People in poor countries are faring much worse: more than 840 million people in the world are malnourished. More than 153 million of these are under the age of 5; 6 million children die of hunger each year. Yet more than enough food is produced each year to feed everyone an adequate diet. Most countries have the potential to feed their own populations, although water shortages due to overpumping and droughts due to global warming are pushing many countries closer to being net importers of food.

Contrary to the widely held belief that US farmers feed the world, our country imports food from many countries that cannot feed their own people enough. Unfair agriculture and trade policies are partly to blame for the gross inequities in the food system. Wealthy industrialized countries, especially the US, European Union and Japan, demand that poor countries remove barriers to importing manufactured goods, while refusing to allow reciprocal free access of agricultural products from other countries to US markets. When the availability of Vietnamese catfish in U.S. markets began to drive down prices, U.S. catfish producers campaigned to have only the North American species of catfish be recognized as “real” catfish. There are at least 2500 species of catfish, and the Vietnamese were exporting two of these other species. In November of 2001, the Senate approved a last-minute amendment by southern senators to the agricultural appropriations bill, prohibiting the FDA from allowing imported fish to be labeled “catfish” unless it comes from the North American catfish family.

Agricultural subsidies in the U.S. consistently favor the largest farms and international corporations that trade grain, feed and meat. By paying farmers to overproduce crops such as corn, soybeans, and cotton, the US government encourages world market prices to fall below the real costs of production. Only the largest farmers receive enough from subsidies to survive these rock-bottom prices. Surplus crops are ‘dumped’ in developing countries at prices below the cost of local production and erode demand for locally produced food. So US policies not only support the concentration of land and food power in this country, they are pushing small farmers out of business around the world.

How can we as Friends live within the constraints that nature imposes, and learn to share the planet with its other inhabitants, while providing food for all?  The problems in our food system are deep-rooted and far-reaching, and fixing them will require a fundamental reorientation in the purposes and values that this system expresses. The concepts of food rights and food sovereignty are good starting places for thinking about systemic changes. The right to food is supported by several international agreements, including the 1948 United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and its 1966 extension in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Rights to food and water are considered as basic in some places as civil and political rights—in fact, civil and political rights can only be exercised if people have enough food, water, and other necessities of subsistence.

‘Food sovereignty’ includes not just access to food but control over a country’s food system. That is, a food-sovereign nation could refuse to comply with international trade policies that harm food security, and the people living in that country would be able to make democratic decisions about the ways their food was produced, labeled and marketed. The Final Declaration of the World Forum on Food Sovereignty (held in Havana, Cuba, in 2001) defines food sovereignty as: the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture; to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self-reliant; [and] to restrict the dumping of products in their markets....Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather, it promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy and ecologically sustainable production.

In the U.S., food is not perceived and treated as a right but as a commodity for sale to those who have sufficient money. The food programs sponsored by the US Department of Agriculture, such as food stamps and the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program, are based in a charity framework rather than on human rights. That is, these programs dole out food, or coupons that can be exchanged for food, to people who have proven they are poor yet ‘deserving’ under state or federal standards. Compare this to the framework we use for civil and political rights: imagine if a person were told she can vote only if she can pay for the privilege, or prove that she is too poor to pay. Imagine a person who is being mugged and beaten knowing that he will receive police protection only if he can pay for it. Imagine if the right to free speech applied only to people who can buy up TV stations or newspaper companies, and control what employees say and write.

Civil and political rights are not always enacted fairly, and the U.S. court system continues to define what each right entails. However, public opinion in this country supports them in concept and we react with outrage when these rights are violated. Examining food as a basic right, similar to the civil and political rights recognized in the US, could help us to see a path toward a food system with greater integrity that will protect and actually enhance ecosystem health. •

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