The multi-million dollar initiative known as AGree released their mission and strategies for transforming food and agriculture policy by 2030 last week. Despite a litany of plans and players involved, it’s still hard to know what to make of AGree.
AGree is the brainchild of nine foundations (with the Gates Foundation far and away the largest) that already fund a variety of initiatives of food and agriculture in the U.S. and around the world. They announced a year ago that they would combine forces and launch “an initiative designed to inform and address food and agriculture policy issues through the direct engagement of diverse groups” to “drive transformational change.”
AGree is led by four co-chairs including former USDA Secretary Dan Glickman, and a diverse Advisory Committee that includes farmers of all sizes and types as well corporate giants like Cargill and DuPont. AGree has identified four interrelated challenges: meeting future demand for food; conserving and enhancing water, soil and habitat; improving nutrition and public health; and strengthening farms, workers and communities. And last week, AGree announced their five strategic priorities to take on these challenges:
- Redirect and modernize research, education, and extension institutions in the United States and developing countries;
- Ensure vulnerable populations’ access to nutritious food;
- Align agricultural and food production in the United States with improved environmental outcomes;
- Create a stable, legal food and agriculture workforce in the United States; and
- Attract young people to food and agriculture.
The strategies are all laudable, as far as they go. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who would “disAGree” with them. And perhaps that’s the problem. The dysfunctions of our current agriculture and food system are not the result of misunderstandings and unintended consequences that we can clear up with stakeholder consensus and research. We have this system because it works well for the most powerful players: agribusiness, banks, the insurance industry and food companies. It was designed this way. Truly transforming it to work for all of us requires acknowledging and challenging this status quo.
Yet, nowhere does AGree mention the increasingly concentrated economic and political power of Big Ag, Big Food and Big Money. This omission takes off the table a number of critically related issues, such as the financialization of agriculture and food, the erosion of democratic control of the food and agriculture system (known as food sovereignty) at all levels, and the damaging effects of market deregulation on farmers, health and food systems worldwide. The exploitation of workers throughout the food chain is mentioned, but it’s buried under the heading, “Creating a Stable, Legal Work Force.” What perspective does that sound like to you?
Despite the presence of some excellent individual advisory council members, it’s hard to see how AGree’s corporate-friendly, inside-the-Beltway approach can yield big, bold thinking, and move beyond the “politics of the possible” in which food and agriculture policy has remained trapped for decades.
Do we need policy research? Absolutely. The transition from an unhealthy and unjust system to one that is democratically controlled and benefits all people calls for major investments to think through the nature and sequencing of policy interventions needed. But that research agenda is fundamentally different than one aimed at curing all of the symptoms AGree has identified without addressing the fundamental underlying causes.
Likewise, dialogue about our common challenges in food and agriculture is important. Unfortunately, by seeking consensus among stakeholders with very different views and interests—instead of supporting a genuinely transformative movement for change—you often end up with the lowest common denominator. In other words, something that’s hard to disagree with.
