Three Food Policies Essential to Solving the Climate Crisis:
1. Truth in Labeling --Tell Consumers How Food Choices Impact Climate Change
Local, organic & fair trade food and products are the climate-friendly, humane and healthy choice, but consumers should have the same right to know when their purchases have a negative impact on health, justice or sustainability. Food labels should reveal the presence of genetically engineered ingredients and pesticide residues, the use of antibiotics and artificial hormones, the product's carbon footprint and its country of origin.
2. Green Budget Priorities--Subsidize Solutions Not Pollution!
Voters want clean energy, green jobs, and a food system that's local, organic and fair trade, but it's not going to happen as long as our tax dollars are spent on industrial food and farming, fossil fuels, and war.
U.S. taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuels and industrial food and farming amount to $60 billion a year, while resource wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost us $200 billion annually. This wasted money is enough to fast-track the conversion of the U.S. and global economy to organic agriculture and clean energy and save the world from climate catastrophe.
3. Regulations That Promote Health and Sustainability--Protect Consumers and the Environment from Hazardous Agricultural Practices
Consumers often complain that local, organic and fair trade products are too expensive. Of course, you can economize on your organic food or green product purchases if you can buy directly from the farmer or producer or buy in bulk quantities with others in your community, but there's no denying that Food Inc.'s "business as usual" practices - polluting the earth, destabilizing the climate, using toxic chemicals, cutting corners on ingredients and nutrition, and exploiting workers from the farm to the checkout counter - generate products with lower sticker prices. However if you add in the hidden health and environmental costs and collateral damage of GMOs, pesticides, antibiotics, heavily processed and packaged foods, and the climate and environmental "footprint" of chemical and energy-intensive food and farming, our cheap food system is in fact dangerously expensive.
To level the playing field for healthy, organic climate-friendly foods and products, we need to make the polluters and junk food purveyors pay for the damage they are causing to public health and the environment. We need to demand sensible and equitable regulations from our elected public officials that protect consumers and the environment, and we need these policies now, not in ten years. We can start by phasing out the inhumane confinement of animals in factory farms and eliminating billion dollar subsidies for genetically engineered crops and biofuels. We can phase out toxic pesticides, methane generating chemical fertilizers, artificial hormones, the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics, sewage sludge "fertilizer," and animal feed made from slaughterhouse waste.
