by: Angie Carter
I live in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP) on the shores of Lake Superior, and so I waited until mid-March of 2020 to start my tomato plants. As I tended to these plants, cities and states in the United States initiated voluntary and mandatory stay-at-home orders in response to COVID-19.
Soon after, the Women, Food and Agriculture Network actively engaged members in response to the pandemic. In addition to a gardener, I am also a rural sociologist and board member of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network (WFAN), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with a mission “to engage women in building an ecological and just food and agricultural system through individual and community power.” WFAN began as and remains the only national sustainable agricultural non-profit organization organized by and for those identifying as women and non-binary. Started in the mid-1990s in Iowa, the organization now has national reach and includes those working in sustainable agriculture, food systems, food justice, and community health & nutrition.
WFAN’s COVID-19 organizing in response to COVID-19 includes “community-centered tools which are significant in ensuring that community health is a critical priority, not just now, but always,” as described by staff member Amy Kousch in WFAN’s Profiles in Resilience. In mid-March, staff member Moselle Singh invited members to join a virtual discussion about localized mutual aid efforts and encouraging knowledge-sharing across the network. These “Growing Community Resilience” calls, initially held weekly, were facilitated by Kousch, Singh, and staff member Wren Almitra; staff also created a facebook group and online resource compilations to further facilitate and support members’ efforts. The profiles, virtual meetings, and social media platforms provided needed space to share strategies and resources as we worked through the beginnings of a global pandemic event many of us continue to experience in isolation. For example, board member Sarah Carroll shared her efforts to organize mutual aid by knocking on doors within her Minneapolis neighborhood: “It has been heartwarming and securing to know that we actually have many of the resources we need right here in our neighborhood.”
On a Growing Community Resilience call three months later, as a wave of protests originated in Minneapolis after George Floyd’s murder by police officer Derek Chauvin, WFAN members engaged in critical reflection and discussion about the intersections between food and racial justice. Soon after, WFAN shared a Statement in Solidarity with the Movements for Black Lives, acknowledging WFAN’s position as a majority-white agricultural organization in a food system rooted in Indigenous genocide, enslaved labor of African Americans, and the continuous exploitation of BIPOC. In the statement, WFAN committed to prioritizing anti-racism and challenging members through shared learning and hard conversations not only about the patriarchal control of resources and land in agriculture, but white settler control.
George Floyd’s murder and the continued failure, to date, to arrest the police who murdered Breonna Taylor are not accidental, but the outcome of hundreds of years of white supremacy created to power capitalist expansion; first, the plantations and, now, corporations. It is June 2020 as I write this; people have been in the streets now for three weeks without stop and a new wave of protest is beginning in Atlanta where police just killed Rayshard Brooks. The continued police brutality targeting Black lives and the health inequities exacerbated by COVID-19 are pre-existing conditions of our larger economic system. Similarly, the recklessness of Tyson, Smithfield, and other agrifood corporations in failing to protect their workers during this global pandemic are externalized costs in a system of food production and national food policy that prioritizes cheap food and commodifies the lives of agricultural and food laborers.
Monica White’s (2018) Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resilience and the Black Freedom Movement analyzes how Black agrarianism has and continues to create alternative systems and community transformation. White writes: “Community resilience is a way for a community to absorb a disturbance and reorganize itself while undergoing change. White resilience as a concept often does not take into account structural approaches and community engagement that includes indigenous knowledge and emotional experiences, and the kind of interracial and intraracial exchanges that we need to adapt” (145). WFAN staff had not read White’s work when they first began the “Growing Community Resilience” efforts, yet their organizing aligns with White’s definition of community resilience, its emphasis on structural change, critical reflection, and community engagement, as well as the valuation of the knowledges already held among the many diverse members of our communities.
White’s emphasis on interracial and intrarracial exchange, as well as WFAN board member Sarah Carroll’s point that the resources and knowledge we need to attend to these crises are “right here,” in our own communities, empowers us to begin the hard work of transformation now as we learn from and care for each other. In my own community this transformative work has been in collaboration with the Western UP Food Systems Council.
Food insecurity is high across our region. Knowing the already existing strain on our food access network, we began a new grassroots collective food redistribution program–Growing from the Heart–inviting people to plant and to share extra food. Informal food exchange in the UP, including gifting and bartering, are important, though often devalued, forms of food access. We chose to center these traditions. Our organizing intentionally worked to avoid the stigmatization of poverty, insisting upon fresh food as a right and emphasizing reciprocity and mutuality, as shared through the teachings of Keweenaw Bay Indian Community Natural Resource Department collaborators.
“The pandemic is a portal,” Arundhati Roy wrote presciently in her April 2020 essay of the same name; “it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.” Agricultural organizations, such as WFAN, and researchers, such as myself, are engaging in critical examination, reflection, and interracial and intraracial exchanges described by White as necessary in the formation of a prefigurative politics and transformation. This is the work both of response to COVID-19 and police brutality, and the dismantling of the machine powering both crises.
Roy, Arundhati. (2020). “The pandemic is a portal.” Financial Times. Retrieved June 11, 2020 from https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca
White, Monica. (2018). Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. The University of North Carolina Press.
Angie Carter is originally from Iowa, where she grew up on the ancestral and contemporary homelands of the Oceti Sakowin, Iowa, Sauk, and Fox peoples. She is a descendent of white settlers who benefitted from the “Black Hawk Purchase,” really a massacre, that opened lands for her ancestors to farm. She now lives on the Keweenaw Peninsula in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the ancestral and contemporary homelands of the Ojibwa, on lands ceded in the Treaty of 1842. She is a board member of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, MI. Her work focuses on agriculture, social justice, and social change.