Solidarity Beyond Crisis
When the pandemic first hit in the U.S., lines at food pantries and banks spiked, the unemployment rate exponentially increased, and COVID-19 began to hit communities of color the hardest. The state of emergency elicited a varied emergency response in our food system. Gaps in the corporate-controlled food supply chain resulted in large scale farmers dumping milk and letting produce rot in the fields.
The federal government developed much of the COVID-19 related policy to allocate funds to corporate-controlled and large-scale agriculture into the emergency sector of the food system. In response to the crisis, the USDA allocated about $3 billion in the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP) to fund the procurement of meat, dairy and produce to be distributed in free food boxes by charity-based groups such as food pantries, volunteer driven mutual aid efforts, and other pop-up sites in neighborhoods across the country. In addition, food banks received an estimated $600 million in other federal government funds for food purchases in food banks and $850 million alone for administrative costs.
Billions of dollars are not going to farmers who need it the most like farmers of color, young farmers, and other small- and mid-scale producers, who need help pay farm workers fairly and pivot their supply to food insecure populations. Many small- and mid-scale farmers already donate a good portion of their yield to communities in need and have donated even more this season. But it cannot be lost that we need viable and active regional farmers in our economy to keep providing their healthy food while making a sustainable livelihood. While large-scale suppliers can leverage the tax breaks that come from food donations, small- and mid-scale farmers cannot.
The majority of food in the U.S. is grown, harvested, and processed in challenging work environments such as large scale commodity farms or meatpacking facilities. Labor advocates and workers continue to fight to make sure they are safe and workers get paid fairly during these challenging times. What is not sold to institutions, wholesale, consumers — is surplus. This capitalist system of extraction and exploitation of natural and human resources generates purposeful surplus in the form of excess crops and products which is then dumped directly into large scale charitable emergency food security models such as food banks and pantries.
