The theme of this August issue brings a smile of gratitude, because of the long history between the Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network (PAN) and Food First, and the way this moment reclaims the soil and closes the loop on our shared history. From Food First’s publication of Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World, which helped galvanize the global network that became the Pesticide Action Network, to the writing in this newsletter, Food First expands our horizons and reclaims our relationship to the land and to the food that sustains us.

Food First asks us: why should we export the fruits of our land and deny a community its history of sustenance? Why extract, when nothing comes back to regenerate the soil or feed the people who live there? We are forced to fill the loss with pesticides and fertilizers made from oil drilled far away, manufactured and shipped port to port at great economic and carbon cost, to restore our land just enough to grow another crop that will again be extracted and sent away. To eat, we must depend on food imported from a nameless place, preserved and processed to survive the journey to our plates.

Today our farmland is given over to large-scale, high-acreage monoculture, with a trail of pesticides in its collective wake. In 1996, Monsanto gave us genetically engineered corn and soy, modified to withstand proprietary pesticides. Now we spray herbicides aerially and indiscriminately across thousands of acres, at any time of year, leaving everything to die except the one crop bred to survive a patented formula. In thirty short years, we have let pesticide companies take control of 60% of the seed market. They choose what to sell us, and the highest volume of seed they produce will meet the highest global demand: genetically modified (GM) corn for ethanol and GM soy for animal feed. More land consolidation. Today, there are only two million farms left in the US.

Most large farmers feel trapped. They hold vast acreage and substantial debt, with pesticide-resistant superweeds threatening their margins. They need industry to supply more powerful poisons, or to fine-tune the seed for stronger formulas: the pesticide treadmill, so to speak. Almost overnight, 85% of our cropland has been given over to crops that never feed a person, such as ethanol and animal feed, and year over year we import more and more of our food. Meanwhile we have lost our memory. We no longer know the story of how we got here.

This is what a linear system looks like: take from the soil, poison its carbon-sequestering microbes, ship its produce away, buy back the fertility in a bag, and repeat until the land gives out. A circular one runs on a different logic. Fertility is regenerated rather than purchased and poisoned. The residue of one season becomes the ground of the next. Nothing is waste, because nothing leaves the loop — and the community that grows the food is also the community that eats it.

Food First, PAN, and so many farmers and farmworkers across this country believe in the better story. We believe in regional food systems that give communities control over their food and their food security, and in farming systems that protect the people who work in them. We believe in processing facilities, seed banks and grain banks, and food grown for our own health, sustenance, traditions, and communities. We remember a time before pesticides and nitrates poured into our rivers, our groundwater, our air, and our food. It will take a whole generation of those who remember, together with the new voices of today, to reclaim our soil, close the circle, and reinvent real community by rebuilding a healthy relationship to our land and our food. Thank you, Food First, for our shared journey, and for everything you have taught, and continue to teach, PAN and the world.

In Solidarity, 

Allison Davis
Executive Director, Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network (PAN)