This chapter briefly describes the historical context of the 1990s in order to better explain where the Agricultural Justice Project came from and why we approached the problems of agriculture in the way we did. The injustices in US agriculture have much deeper roots than the 1990s, beginning with the colonial genocide of Native Americans and plantation slavery and continuing through Jim Crow, New Deal exclusions and dispossession of Black farmers, farmworker struggles, and the industrialization of agriculture (see Race, labor, & land). The specific challenge of the 1990s, for AJP and others in our movements, was how to advance our struggles for justice at a moment when movements were poorly positioned to win major concessions from the state.

Why, heading into the 1990s, were movements in agriculture so weak?

Agriculture has been a site of particularly severe repression and defeats for popular movements. From colonial times to the present, farm laborers have endured forced labor and brutal vigilante and state violence, and this repressive violence was over time increasingly outsourced to federal immigration agencies. During pitched labor battles, similar violence was even visited upon farmers who were sympathetic to workers.¹ As for farmer movements, the McCarthy era of the 1950s decimated the lingering socialist and left-populist² farmer organizations—often a self-inflicted wound as organizations purged their own leading organizers—undermining one of the country’s most committed populist constituencies.³ Meanwhile an increasingly industrial agricultural system dropped the floor out of farm incomes and drained the countryside of most of its inhabitants, hollowing out rural communities and fostering larger and more industrialized farms operated by fewer people.⁴ In the South, white landowners used federal farm subsidies, mechanization, and later chemical weeding to displace Black sharecroppers and farm laborers who were increasingly vocal about their civil rights and human dignity; these tactics, plus price-gouging, land theft, discriminatory lending, and racial terror, drove many Black agrarians off the land.⁵

By forcing most farm people off the land—or, in the case of migrant workers, forcing them into precarious living conditions and constant movement—corporate agriculture shaped a terrain that made organizing much harder. This was the movement landscape that farm people inherited as we approached the end of the twentieth century.

Neoliberal capitalism vs. working people#

The 1990s were the heyday of neoliberal capitalism, the anti-democratic, anti-worker political movement launched as an attack on the egalitarian and democratic reforms that started in the New Deal era of the 1930s and continued through the 1960s.⁶ The hallmarks of neoliberalism were huge handouts to major corporations and their owners, paired with austerity for regular people. Neoliberalism aimed to gut all regulations that protected the public or aimed at greater social equality, since regulations were supposedly shackles on the creative dynamism of capital. Unions especially were in the crosshairs, and both Reagan and Thatcher declared war on organized labor. This nasty, unbridled greed seemed to be on a winning streak as socialist governments around the world gave way to capitalism.

The ‘80s and ‘90s were also a high tide of individualism and a low ebb for solidarity. Media forgot about ‘the public’ and spoke instead of ‘consumers’ and ‘taxpayers.’ The political class had a holiday dumping on idealists everywhere, which was easier after a few decades of intense state repression that left social movements in a weak position. Bill Clinton and the ‘New Democrats’ abandoned the working class and enacted a host of ruthless ‘reforms’: NAFTA, undermining US manufacturing and eviscerating rural livelihoods in Mexico; the 1994 Crime Bill, doubling down on mass incarceration; the 1996 ‘welfare reform,’ ending basic supports for the poorest people; and multiple bills criminalizing immigrants and fast-tracking deportations without due process. These policies were justified by the scapegoating of people of color in order to undermine solidarity among working-class people.

For left-leaning movements, setbacks like these followed long-term trends towards top-heavy, bureaucratic strategies.⁷ Anti-radical repression led to purges of the most visionary and committed organizers and boosted the fortunes of reformists (famously including Saul Alinsky, “considered the dean…of modern community organizing”).⁸ As a consequence, first unions and then social movements backed away from organizing regular people into a mass membership base, relying instead on advocacy, service provision, and short-term mobilizing campaigns. The retreat from deep organizing led to an increasing distance between regular people and the campaigns done in their names, including through the professionalization of social change work.⁹ The Left movement ecosystem grew weaker and less ambitious, increasingly forced to take up creative strategies that addressed their goals but failed to build the people power that would make bigger wins possible. As a result, social movements struggled to make gains against the alliance of neoliberal capital with an evangelical Christian-led conservative movement.

Farmworkers and farmers experienced serious setbacks of their own. After some successes in the 1970s, the United Farm Workers under Cesar Chavez faced a long string of defeats and unrelenting attacks by growers in California and beyond; the UFW’s own struggles with internal democracy only made things worse.¹⁰ Family farmers faced widespread foreclosures starting in the late 1970s after a boom decade led many of them to take on new mortgages, only to be followed by the crushing interest rate hikes of the ‘Volcker shock.’ New Deal-era pricing protections offered little respite, as they had been steadily eroded by agribusiness lobbying since the 1950s.¹¹ Despite widely-publicized protests (including the famous ‘tractorcades’), farmers did not get relief, and farmer suicide rates spiked along with foreclosures.

NAFTA made things worse, as produce farmers faced serious price competition from Mexican imports, including from big US growers that expanded into northern Mexico. The Mexican government privatized the communal lands (ejidos) where Indigenous farmers made their livelihoods, forcing many of them to migrate for work on farms in the US and Baja California and in the many new factories (maquiladoras) springing up along the border.¹² Reagan’s 1986 immigration reform bill offered amnesty for some undocumented immigrants; and while that bill may have improved the lives of some immigrant farmworkers newly eligible for citizenship, it also imposed new and ongoing threats to undocumented workers.¹³ The law effectively granted employers impunity for hiring workers without papers and shifted the responsibility to workers themselves, creating the conditions where employers could weaponize workers’ immigration status. If employers were caught hiring undocumented workers, they could claim ignorance and rarely faced fines; but those same employers could always call the feds to get rid of workers demanding better conditions. These new threats manifested more clearly after new immigrants arrived from Mexico in larger numbers following the passage of NAFTA. 

Yet these decades were not free from positive developments. A number of new farmworker organizations came together, including El Comité de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agrícolas (CATA or The Farmworker Support Committee; 1979), the Farmworker Association of Florida (1983), and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (1993). The Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) union made advances with its campaign targeting Campbell’s Soup (1978-1985), and the UFW won important new contracts for workers, as at the Chateau Ste. Michelle winery in Washington (1987-1995).

Organic farming advanced significantly over this period.¹⁴ The movement’s early years drew on various roots, especially the Back to the Land movement and the New Left. Many of these new farmers followed Booker T. Whatley’s injunction to “shun the middleman,” connecting with urban allies to found natural food cooperatives, farmers markets, and eventually CSAs (seasonal subscriptions for fresh produce), in the process greatly expanding the reach and demand for food produced without chemicals. This period witnessed the birth of a number of regional and national advocacy organizations to share knowledge, promote organic farming as a set of values and way of life, and advance the movement.

This period also saw significant new expressions of solidarity across borders and across social divisions. The UFW’s historic win—the Delano Grape Boycott (1970)—was waged with significant help and solidarity from faith and labor groups. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition “successfully brought together great diversity and had within its leadership the political, demographic, and gender spectrum that one would expect from a movement that called itself the ‘Rainbow.’”¹⁵ Solidarity with the fight against apartheid in South Africa—advanced by a grassroots ecosystem of Black-led organizations—helped defeat the white supremacist regime. The Central American solidarity campaigns to resist US-sponsored paramilitary violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua led to new cross-border connections that would later supply much of the energy and infrastructure for the Fair Trade movement. Peasant farmers from around the world came together in 1993 to found La Via Campesina and defend small-scale and subsistence agriculture from capitalist onslaught. The Zapatistas released their first declaration from the Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect, and quickly won an international following. The devastation wrought by free-trade globalization eventually inspired the historic show of transnational solidarity and resistance that shut down the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle in 1999, a stunning success for the nascent alter-globalization movement that birthed a generation of organizers across many causes.

Against Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal mantra, ‘There is no alternative,’ these movements for justice fiercely believed that ‘Another world is possible.’ Their examples nurtured hope that activists could recruit widespread commitment to justice in agriculture, in the US and beyond.

Organics on the make#

The organic movement was rapidly growing and commercializing during the 1980s, though it was largely overshadowed by the expansion of industrial agriculture. Free trade agreements, genetically modified seeds, aggressive legal tactics, and corporate mergers helped remake the global food system into a capitalist colossus.

There was significant disagreement within the organic movement about how best to advance further: given the US government’s firm commitment to industrial-chemical agriculture and to the agribusiness cartels that profit from it, it seemed unlikely that the movement would be able to win policy outlawing or strictly regulating herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers. Even GMOs, which were hardly popular with the public, got an enthusiastic green light from the federal government. Despite significant dissent from others in the movement, some advocates sought instead to enshrine regulation of organic food in federal law—a task they achieved with the Organic Foods Production Act, part of the 1990 Farm Bill. This limited success ended up channeling much of the movement’s efforts into battles to shape the nascent National Organic Program, even as the federal program paved the way for rapid growth in the organic foods industry.¹⁶

The federal policy-making process proved to be unfriendly terrain for sustainable agriculture advocates’ social concerns: as far as the USDA was concerned, egalitarian social, economic, and labor policy was effectively off the table. The dominant neoliberal policy framework favored passing off responsibility for social outcomes to private, voluntary efforts. Whereas signature legislation of the New Deal/Great Society era of the 1930s to 1960s created new legal rights for regular people and new legal obligations for corporations, neoliberal policy often tried to create markets with incentives for businesses that voluntarily implement ‘best practices.’ In this way, neoliberal policy largely shrugged off public responsibilities to the private sector, allowing many harms to continue unabated. Certification—organic and otherwise—fits right in with this logic: certified products (in organic’s case, ecologically produced goods) compete in a market alongside cheaper uncertified products (food whose production poisons people and environments).¹⁷ Running aground on these constraints, movement activists fought over whether ‘organic’ as a label could be separated from questions of fairness. California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) had already left social commitments out of their organic standards in favor of strictly ecological requirements, and this model suited the USDA just fine, given their institutional bias towards agribusiness and the most commercialized growers, as well as their bias against farmworkers and small-scale farmers. The CCOF standards became the model that the national program was built on, and organic certification as a strategy posed little threat to the profits of agribusiness.

This process of institutionalizing organic regulation in the federal government drew out many contradictions and disagreements among sustainable agriculture advocates and increasingly split the organic food industry off from the organic food movement. The industry mainly wanted to sell more product, while the movement aimed to radically change the way we grow food; many advocates hoped that a market premium for organics would help growers and make other good things possible. AJP’s founders met each other through this contentious process and found common cause advocating for fairness, beyond the limited federal focus on using more environmentally-friendly inputs. The Fair Trade movement was simultaneously gaining steam but primarily focused on the international trade of a few commodity crops, such as coffee and chocolate. Other allies in the farmworker movement gravitated towards different ethical labeling strategies around this time, as well: the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program label grew out of their campaigns targeting big restaurant and grocery chains, and the UFW and Oxfam America spearheaded the development of the Equitable Food Initiative (EFI). Of these organizations, only AJP asserted that fairness demanded organic production methods as a necessary step towards ensuring the health and safety of everyone working on farms.

Multiple paths to food justice#

The founders of the Agricultural Justice Project hoped to advance food and farm movements by bridging one of the biggest divides in US agriculture—that between farmworkers and farm operators—and they did so in concert with fellow travelers from the Fair Trade movement. As our early statements make clear, AJP understood justice in far-reaching terms. All the same, our certification-based strategy focused our efforts on justice in the context of commercial farms: i.e., justice in the workplace and justice in business relations. These issues have been routinely sidelined in the organic movement, and AJP took up the slogan of ‘food justice’ to try to change that.

Importantly, other movement groups in the 1990s took up the slogan ‘food justice’ in other contexts. Drawing on the welfare rights movement as well as community traditions of self-provision and mutual aid, Community Food Projects fought against injustices in food access, especially in poor and working-class neighborhoods of color.¹⁸ Against conditions of food apartheid, community groups claimed the right to grow healthy food for themselves and their communities, sometimes making explicit demands of local governments for land and infrastructure support. Many mutual aid efforts were led by farmworkers, as well, who themselves often face food insecurity despite growing food for a living. In the context of Community Food Projects, food justice came to mean not just ‘food security’ or freedom from hunger; some Black activists especially pointed the finger at the conditions that created hunger and malnutrition: racial capitalism and the systemic exploitation and abandonment of communities of color, processes intensified by the Clinton administration’s mass incarceration of people of color and gutting of welfare.

These multiple perspectives on food justice have enriched our movements and led to fruitful dialogue and sharing of knowledge.¹⁹ We at AJP have learned much from the Black farmers who have pushed the conversation on racial justice in US agriculture, including allies who challenged us to better integrate Black visions of justice into our framework. As we discuss in later chapters, these conversations have helped us to better see the gaps in our work, including the limitations of certification as a strategy, and also to see how much we all have to gain by better building alignment and understanding across our different positions.

* * * * *

This history of the recent past sets the stage for the story of AJP, as well as that of our sister organization, the Domestic Fair Trade Association. Before we turn to these stories in Chapter 3, though, we first look further back in history to describe what it will take to actually win justice in agriculture.