REAL Talks - Episode 8: Systems are People: Promoting Equity, Sovereignty, and Autonomy in Food & Agriculture
Author: Kolia Souza and Maria Graziani
This episode examines the sufficiency of funding and technical support for programs centered on Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous producers, particularly as they scale their businesses.
July 15, 2024
“We don't think that systems are people, but, systems are people.” - Keesa V. Johnson, MDES, of Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems (CRFS)
In this episode of REAL Talks, Kolia Souza, Food Systems Equity & Advocacy Specialist of CRFS, and Maria Graziani, Food Systems Specialist and Food Impact Fellow with the Federation of American Scientists, host a conversation about how the changing landscape of language used to communicate about food equity, sovereignty, and autonomy is creating barriers to change for people of color.
In this episode, they were joined by:
- Rachel Lindvall, Retired Extension Specialist at South Dakota State University
- Keesa V. Johnson, M Des, Food Systems Strategy Design Specialist at MSU Center for Regional Food Systems
The relaunch of this podcast series will focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, across the food and agriculture system. Through this and future episodes, different aspects of this topic will be discussed with members of CRFS and the Racial Equity in the Food System (REFS) National Workgroup. REFS brings together Cooperative Extension professionals and community stakeholders to connect, learn, and collaborate to facilitate change within our institutions and society to build racial equity within the food system.
These episodes will explore the following questions:
- Is there adequate funding for programs that are centering Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous voices?
- Is the technical assistance that is being funded adequate for supporting these producers when they are scaling up their businesses?
Listen to their discussion on the podcast!
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Episode 8 Transcript
Kolia Souza (00:12): Welcome back to REAL Talks (Reaching For Equity in All Lives). I'm Kolia Souza, food system equity and advocacy specialist with Michigan State University's Center for Regional Food Systems, also known as CRFS. I'm joined again by this episode series cohost, Maria Graziani.
Maria Graziani (00:29): Hello, everyone. I am a food systems specialist and currently in the role of food impact fellow with the Federation of American Scientists. As a fellow with FAS, I work within the USDA to develop research focused on equity and accessibility in mid-tier agricultural markets.
Kolia Souza (00:48): This series of episodes is exploring two straightforward questions. Is there adequate funding for programs that are centering Black, Hispanic and Indigenous voices? And is the technical assistance that is being funded adequate for supporting these producers when they're scaling?
Maria Graziani (01:05): As a part of my residency with the Federation of American Scientists, I have been looking at the accessibility of funding for Black, Hispanic and Tribal producers when working to scale their farm operations. And also looking at the core competencies for technical assistance for BIPOC producers, along with other topics like the effectiveness of wholesale incentive programs and food hub leadership skill development.
Kolia Souza (01:31): Our first episode of this series really set some foundational context, in terms of USDA's complex history with the food and agriculture community, equity implications, and attempts at implementing some solutions and the public response.
Maria Graziani (01:46): Now in episode two, we are really digging into the changing landscape of shared language and why big divides in how we describe and communicate what is food equity, sovereignty and autonomy are creating barriers, and delaying change that uplifts and centers persons of color.
Kolia Souza (02:06): We continue in conversation with members of CRFS and Racial Equity in the Food System, a work group that brings together cooperative extension professionals and community stakeholders to connect, learn and collaborate to facilitate change within our institutions and society to build racial equity within the food system at the national level. Ultimately, we get at what I call the squishy part, or the territory where deeper exploration is needed to come to some sort of shared vision of a desired future state and what might be holding us back from that. I think there's some opportunity for dissection here.
Maria Graziani (02:45): Kolia, let's go to a clip of you and I kicking off this discussion.
Kolia Souza (02:57): There's something I want to pick up on that Rachel was emphasizing: language. Going back to policy, which is just one pathway through which we increase access, and more specifically I'll go back to the American Rescue Plan Act and the whole debacle that happened there. Just noting the very relevant policy language shift from socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers to economically distressed farmers. That shift away from what the core of that policy was supposed to do in the first place, it took it away from the focus on people of color as soon as we switched over to economically distressed farmers.
You have this case where a little bit of pressure came from the outside with white farmers suing the government and the banks, and then the scope changed. Which also, to something that Rachel said earlier, shifted the burden onto the farmer to provide proof. It really is like a redux, all of this, of Pigford v. Glickman. Same story, thousands of farmers didn't even hear about it in time to apply. I remember sitting in on a listening session around some of this about, actually this time last year, with USDA farmers and ranchers, and it was just like déjà vu, the same things happening over and over again.
Maria Graziani (04:23): Changing language is an important part of writing history, to make sure that we're using common language and language that's accepted by all, and particularly language that is requested and desired by communities that the Federal government is working with. I don't know the context of language changes, particularly around the 2501 program, but I think some clarity is that the larger bucket of economically disadvantaged includes women and LGBTQ+ community, that is the larger bucket. When the Federal government is speaking specifically of Black, Hispanic, Tribal producers, the term that also was a change is now historically underserved producers.
Not that I'm saying this is what people want to be referred to as, as a group, but this is what the Federal government has decided, in terms of these two terms that are used. Economically disadvantaged refers to some categories of producers who are not historically underserved, and women are not considered historically underserved by the Federal government.
Kolia Souza (05:39): Going back to language, what does it look like when we say food is a matter of national security? That's something that came out of the COVID-19 pandemic. What does it look like when we say food is a right? How does that change funding sources? Or what does it look like ... I've heard this as well, food is a public utility. When we start to reframe the conversation, it does open up new pathways for policy, resources, et cetera.
Maria Graziani (06:16): I think, Kolia, that this is exactly where our nation is at politically. We are debating what it means for food to be a right of being human and it's a public service to feed the people of our nation. To some degree, when we examine our current state of the public utility of food, we have child nutrition and feeding programs as the largest sector of Farm Bill funding. $600 billion out of the total $867 billion allocated in the 2018 Farm Bill went to SNAP, that's the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But we have to ask ourselves as researchers, educators and food system thinkers, what pathways of our food system are underrepresented and underfunded, that might look at the entire picture of hunger, land access, and food equity and sovereignty that feeding programs alone cannot improve.
Kolia Souza (07:14): Terminology and frameworks emerge from the language that we use. I think that's what we're seeing here. By frameworks, I mean the bringing together of terminologies that then serve as these kind of guidebooks for understanding an issue and what's to be done about it. The understanding of the language, our interpretation, is the place that transforms abstract concepts like food as a human right into concrete actions like policy solutions. Maybe it wasn't a Freudian slip that I said feud instead of food just a second ago.
As our conversation progresses with REFs and CRFS members, important nuances that affect our capacity for understanding emerge in discussion. Listen to Keesa talk about this.
Keesa Johnson (08:03): I look at ... I'm always thinking about the farmers and the food workers. What I see, as a designer, again I always go back to the policies and the process ... Food has always been, since I was young, that's what I learned at my grandmother's table, how food can change you. She did a whole bunch of things, but she always had the herb garden. People in the neighborhood have gardens. People in the rural space, in the urban space, people been growing for centuries, all the time. It wasn't based upon the capitalistic viability model that we see now. It was mainly based upon it was a sense of pride to be able to grow your own food. You had deep connections to where you lived and where you laid your head through the food. Some people had other jobs, but that was about viability, the sustenance of it and the pride of it, and then being able to share within a community. Then understanding that you can make money off of it, too. Okay, wow. That's great.
The viability is much different when you look at people of culture, it's a different model. But yet, what we all know is that we do live in a capitalistic system, so what do we do about it and these inter-webs? A lot of times, I feel like when we're just looking at any grant program or any program that's created to serve a set community, well, who's sitting at the table asking the questions? Because a lot of times, we just say that it's not a right question, but yes it is. It is a right question when you ask enough of them, when you're going through critical reflection you ask enough of them to be able to come together, and align and solve or resolve an issue. But it takes a lot of critical self-examination, it takes a lot of asking questions, equity questions.
A lot of times, when we get into these organizational structures, questions are shunned on. "What, what are you talking about? Who are you? Should you be asking that question?" The questions allow us to critically think and figure out a better way for people to live. It's really about that. Yeah, it's about the paperwork and the planning, it's about understanding the issue, and it's about like what Kolia is saying, is framing and reframing the issue. Who is defining the problem or the issue and why? That's where the language comes in, because it's other people's languages, not the people who know that they have a problem and they know how to solve it, too. They really do. Has the issue been framed around their wants and their needs, of the stakeholders who are in the margin? Or is it being framed by the people who are writing the grant to be able to make sure the people get paid? "Make sure this person gets paid and then we'll do something with the community."
All of that is why we're in the predicament, because we look at systems but we don't think that systems are people, but, systems are people.
Kolia Souza (11:38): Keesa gets into something critical to any transformational shift, but difficult to capture or reconcile in policy. That thing is culture. I acknowledge that often times, when we rely on policy as a mechanism to introduce change, but there's a whole system underlying policy implementation and maintenance. To Keesa's point, systems are people, people operate on values and values are based in our culture.
Maria Graziani (12:04): Are we saying grant funding opportunities are misaligned with the vast variety of community needs? Do you think it would be a difficult task for foundations and public food system funders to address multiple cultures within a funding mechanism? Or does it seem a smoother path to implement channels of funding directed towards each ethnic and cultural group?
As an example, right now we have the Black Farmer Fund at a national level, and there are also multiple regional funds across the US that have been set up. Another example is the Native American Agricultural Fund.
Kolia Souza (12:44): Really, I think it's a both/and. I think that there has to be structures in place to support and sustain any shift that's made from one operational paradigm to another, and just as responsive as we would be to cultural needs, we have to provide multiple financial models to match.
Maria Graziani (13:04): I think it's coming to pass to be understood that we need to be more knowledgeable, more collaborative and definitely more inclusive in the systems wide shifts, so as not to harm people. Rachel has some insightful thoughts on this topic.
Rachel Lindvall (13:26): I really think that one of the reasons that food is so interesting because it is at the center of everything, and that's one of the things that we have talked about when I taught food systems classes. Because in some instances, food is economic development but it can also be almost weaponized for, or against people. I think that we're starting to talk more about how it has been weaponized. In Native communities back in the 1800s, that was a way, if you cut off people's food systems and access, you're cutting off their culture. That's the story of the buffalo, that I think there's been a little bit more attention drawn to the history of that in recent times.
I think that access to healthy food is really important because as we look at what's going on in communities of poverty, they're being killed by cheap unhealthy foods. The idea that you could eat at a fast-food restaurant off of the dollar menu for cheaper than it is to actually do your own food, to prepare your own food is killing people. I know in a lot of Native American communities, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, the inflammatory diseases, they're decimating communities. All of that is food related by systems that we, as a country, as a society, are subsidizing.
I think as people start realizing that, we are going to see change. We've mentioned the good side of COVID. I think that people are more aware of that and not just wanting the cheap foods that we've remained, had access to, but starting to think about their food, and what it does for them and what it does to them.
Kolia Souza (16:03): Rachel brought out the big tractor on this one. Can I say that, an agriculture pun? I don't know if that works. But weaponization as a cultural practice, the implication of this and the impact on our food system, I almost don't know where to start. What do you think, Maria?
Maria Graziani (16:27): Rachel brings up an important topic. Food accessibility used to either lift up or tear down a people is not lost on human and American history. I just watched a documentary on World Central Kitchen, they were building their emergency food response projects. Early on, they realized that just feeding people was not enough. In each country they responded to disaster, they needed to make and serve foods that were familiar, even loved by the people suffering. As you said, Kolia, how much does policy reflect the human right to eat with the nuances in culture and community woven in?
Kolia Souza (17:14): There's another component to this, as I'm listening to you talk about emergency food response, Maria. An idea of coordinated efforts. In some way, you might argue that there's been this coordinated effort within agriculture and food systems, through the lens of globalization and the way mass markets are driven by that. You could even consider the industrialization of food to be a framework we've developed to provide for the masses, based on a shared understanding reached around a set of values. I'll leave it to the audience to ponder on what those things might be. But that industrialization framework has an unintended, or I don't know, maybe even intentional shift away from local and regional foods, which by virtue of a smaller scale, would be more culturally rooted. We also saw the detrimental consequence of the lack of diversified local and regional food systems during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the food supply chain broke down.
Maria Graziani (18:15): This essentially, in my work, is where I see mid-tier agriculture and agricultural markets. Mid-tier brings down the big buyers of food from food banks, utilizing government subsidies and grants to feed people, to institutional and school buyers and brings the community engaged and serving farmer up. Mid-tier agricultural production gives more to supporting a wider swath of farmers to make a living farming, and can still consider cultural and community food needs when servicing these larger buyers in a way that large scale corporate buyers and large-scale commodity producers cannot.
Kolia Souza (19:01): That's where we're going to build from in our next and final episode of this series.
We hope that you have enjoyed this episode. You can find all REAL Talks episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify. Please share this podcast and check out our other episodes. REAL Talks is a podcast created by the Michigan State University's Center for Regional Food Systems. The series is hosted by Kolia Souza and produced by Melissa Hill. The podcast is supported by funding from the WK Kellogg Foundation.
This episode is made possible in part through the Food Systems Impact Fellowship from the Federation of American Scientists. You can find out more about FAS at fas.org.
Reaching for Equity in All Lives (REAL) Talks
REAL Talks is a podcast created by the Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems. The series is hosted by Kolia Souza and Maria Graziani, and produced by Melissa Hill. The podcast is supported by funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. This episode is made possible in part through the Food Systems Impact Fellowship from the Federation of American Scientists. You can find out more about FAS at fas.org.
You can find all REAL Talks episodes on Spotify, YouTube Music, and Apple Podcasts Please share this podcast and check out our other episodes.
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