This Valentine’s Day Season, join us as we urge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to have a heart and support a Fair and Healthy Food and Farm Bill. We need a Farm Bill that stops subsidizing corporate agribusiness at the expense of public health and instead invests our tax dollars into creating a sustainable, healthy, community-driven and just food system!

Speakers Include: Bryant Terry, eco-chef, author, and Food and Society Policy Fellow; the California Food and Justice Coalition; Shyaam Shabaka, Founder and Director of the Eco-Village Farm Learning Center; Local Farmers; Community Anti-Hunger Advocates; Peggy De Silva from Veritable Vegetable, the oldest organic produce distributor in the U.S.; and San Francisco’s Alemany Farm.

We live in an era of global food insecurity and chronic hunger, where 800 million a day go hungry, small farmers worldwide are struggling to survive in a consolidated agricultural industry, soil erosion, water and air pollution and pesticides threaten our health and our farmland, and poor communities in the United States have little access to affordable, accessible, healthy food. The U.S. Farm Bill shapes our broken food system.

We know it’s time to take action for change. The passage of the 2007 Farm Bill through Congress has been marked by unprecedented and previously unseen public demand for reform, which has compelled California’s urban legislators to begin to vote in our favor. In the final stages of this campaign we must keep the pressure on.

SO MUCH IS STILL AT STAKE! Our Representatives are cobbling together a Farm Bill from the different House and Senate versions, and deciding how much money to allocate to each program. Neither of these bills include significant reform of commodity programs, but Speaker Pelosi has the opportunity to use her power to negotiate for meaningful reforms that will begin to transform the food system – like limiting subsidy payments to people who are actually farming (right now wealthy urbanites in New York City can get subsidy payments), and closing loop-holes that allow mega-farms to receive mega-payments. We also need to ensure that vital food and farm justice programs like the Community Food Projects Grants Program, which gives grants to small food justice organizations like the Ecology Center, and the Minority Farm Outreach Program, which helps minority farmers fairly access Federal Government support programs, receive the full funding they deserve. Go to http://www.cafoodjustice.org for more information on how this Farm Bill affects you.

This event is also an opportunity to listen to, connect with, learn from, and get involved in important local programs and campaigns to improve the bay area’s food system. We encourage you to bring a hearty lunch that reflects the kinds of foods you think our Farm Bill should support. After the speak out we’ll walk to Pelosi’s office to deliver our message.

Get involved in creating this event: jessicabell [at] cafoodjustice.org, 510 704 0245, http://www.cafoodjustice.org.

Banner and sign making party, Sat. Feb. 9th, 12pm – 4pm, 3208 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley. We’ll be making a big banner as well as signs with love hearts on them.