Since the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy's founding in 1986, we have fought alongside allies for food systems that work for people and the planet. Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota with offices in Washington, D.C. and Berlin, Germany, IATP brings together policy experts united by a shared passion for healthy, just and resilient food systems. We've always been ahead of the curve, connecting the dots between local, national and global policies and their impacts of people's lives and the environment.
Watch our new video (above and on YouTube) to learn more about how IATP is taking on the biggest crises of our time in 2023.
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Transcript:
Few things bring people together more simply — and more powerfully — than food.
The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy is a nonprofit hub for policy research and advocacy in Minneapolis, Minnesota with offices in Washington, D.C. and Berlin, Germany. IATP policy experts are united by a shared passion for healthy, just and resilient food systems. Since our founding in 1986, we have fought alongside allies for food systems that work for people and the planet.
Nick Levendofsky, IATP board member: Agriculture is everything. I mean we all eat.
Sagari R Ramdas, IATP board member: Never before have we had so many hungry people in the world as today, and the inequalities in terms of access to food are just getting worse and worse. We do know that the food systems are in complete crisis.
IATP has always been ahead of the curve — connecting the dots between policies and their impacts on peoples’ lives and the environment.
In the mid 1980s, IATP was among the first organizations to recognize how trade deals like NAFTA would strengthen the hand of global agribusiness while diminishing incomes for farmers, polluting rural communities and undermining local economies around the world. Today, IATP staff are working to rewrite the rules of trade, so they protect and promote the public interest – and the climate.
Sophia Murphy, Ph.D., IATP executive director: IATP is working at this interface of systems.
Marie Clarke, IATP board member: Climate change, food crises, energy crises, how are we going to power our world? How do we do that sustainably?
Pat Mooney, IATP board member: IATP recognizes the confluence of those issues, of food and agriculture around climate, and is pointing the way to how we address those questions, what policies we need to have in place. Who do we need to push to make the world a safer place?
IATP was an early leader in leveraging public money — channeled through schools, hospitals and child-care centers — to build new markets for small-scale and socially excluded farmers. These programs keep capital in local communities, pay farmers fairly and improve our children’s health. Today, IATP continues to lead a coalition of organizations committed to expanding and strengthening community food systems in our state.
Sagari R Ramdas: If you are talking about dismantling a system, you have to be locally involved in how that system would look. But at the same time, it is advocating it is researching at a global level.
Sophia Murphy, Ph.D.: We're building out and understanding as well as channels to direct resources to what we call agroecology, which is a different way of thinking about the food system where you look at the whole landscape and see what food it might generate. You talk to the people who nurture that landscape and ask them what they want to do, how they want to produce the food.
We were among the first to warn of the threat that large corporate-controlled factory farms pose to the health and economic viability of independent farmers, rural communities and the environment.
In 2018, we launched our seminal report estimating the greenhouse gas emissions of the biggest global meat and dairy companies. We continue to expose how industrial animal agriculture has come to rival the global energy giants for the harm they cause to the planet.
Pat Mooney: The climate issue can't be addressed without addressing the major concluding factor in the climate, and that is agriculture.
Sagari: Above all, what IATP does is very fearless kind of work, which then advances the thinking and advances then the ability to strategize, to move our understanding about how we're going to really fix the system.
Our world is facing a convergence of interrelated crises — rising hunger, rural poverty, accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss. Through our work, IATP seeks to understand root causes, strengthen relationships and shape policy to bring about positive, transformative change across systems as a whole.
Support IATP to bring about a harvest of healthy foods, produced and processed by workers earning a living wage, setting a table that has a seat for everyone.
