AJP began our strategic assessment process in the fall of 2024, when a shortfall in funding converged with other challenges and forced us to reflect on the past and future of our work. We learned so much as we considered our successes and challenges, and many partners and allies expressed a great deal of interest in finding new ways to continue work that we started. Unfortunately, our year-long process has not secured the material resources we need to continue, and we have reluctantly decided to close AJP. This organization has been a container and a venue for a wide variety of coalition work, some of which is certain to continue after we dissolve AJP as a legal entity. If there is a silver lining to this transition, we hope that this closure allows our coalition to grow in new directions that are focused, relevant, and responsive to this moment.

Indeed, much has changed since AJP’s founders came together around efforts to make the National Organic Program accountable to farmworkers and small-scale farmers. An authoritarian front has taken advantage of the cracks in the old neoliberal order and is consolidating their control of the US government. Further industrialization, consolidation, and financialization of our food system have reaped huge profits for investors at the expense of regular people and our planetary home. Industrial agriculture forms a part of the anti-immigrant alliance intent on keeping workers from the Global South disposable, deportable, and exploitable. At our best, our movements have developed the building blocks for a program of economic democracy, reparations, and agroecology, but we have yet to assemble forces strong enough to implement those visions. We have big gaps in our movement ecosystem that have made it hard for us to bring new people in and maximize their contributions. And yet the convergence of many struggles in this moment means that we have great opportunities to link disparate groups together in new ways and lay the foundations for long-term people power.

In this report, we have tried to flesh out AJP’s vision for US agriculture, making the case that farming needs not just reform but reconstruction: deep, transformative change that finally uproots the longstanding injustices folded into our food system through colonization, plantation slavery, white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. As a strategy, our certification was always an odd fit for these larger aims. AJP’s founders were rightly skeptical about whether a food label could try to reconfigure entrenched power structures and still succeed in the marketplace of certifications. But as AJP co-founder Richard Mandelbaum suggested, “There are reasons to do things even if they’re going to fail.”¹ Based on our outreach and assessment process, we believe that AJP has made small but important contributions to winning the transformation we seek:

First, through many discussions, convenings, and debates, we facilitated a grassroots vision for justice in agriculture that is far-reaching and intersectional—and also still deeply grounded in people’s everyday experiences. We insisted on justice and solidarity, disrupting common food movement tendencies to neglect thorny questions of labor, class, and power. In addition to ecological stewardship, we insisted on a rigorous attention to human rights and dignity, including health and well-being, economic democracy, and workplace democracy. We insisted on reciprocity and accountability and committed to leveling hierarchies of power. Yet given the breadth of our vision and the ambiguities of our strategy, we struggled to communicate our vision clearly.

Second, we pursued a strategy to push the limits of what was deemed possible or desirable in farming. Our programs proved that a more just agriculture is within reach and helped demonstrate what stands in our way of implementing those changes. We developed standards and practices that challenged the oppressive workings of the status quo yet could still be implemented in actually existing farm and food businesses (resembling so-called ‘non-reformist reforms’). We made pathways for farmers and others to show solidarity with workers. We learned from leading farmers and food businesses who sought to bring justice to their own practices, and we shared their experiments and resources far and wide. Yet our strategy was far from perfect. Our emphasis on certification brought with it a range of difficulties: we were often overwhelmed by the demands of administering a complex and highly formalized certification program; our skillsets and inclinations were poorly matched to our market-based strategy; we anticipated revenue from client fees which never materialized, leaving us perpetually strapped; and we struggled to develop meaningful on-ramps for widespread participation, limiting our reach.

Third, we developed governance and coalition processes to support participation and build power for frontline communities, including through our insistence on both farmworkers’ and farmers’ rights to organize. We flanked our allies and lent the voice of coalition to their causes. We disrupted business as usual and called people to throw their lot in with a growing movement for justice. We strived to instill accountability and solidarity into all of our advocacy, education, and certification programs. These commitments led to uncommon collaborations and encounters with many indirect benefits, bridging major divisions between farmworkers, farmers, and communities.

Yet we also suffered from key gaps in our coalition, as we failed to build close relationships with Black and Indigenous farmers early on, leading to us playing ‘catch up’ later. Despite on-going strong expressions of support from our partners, only rarely was our work deeply integrated with that of the members of our coalition. Our participatory process often required more capacity and support than we or our partners were able to muster.

Finally, we worked to build institutions that could fill key gaps in the solidarity economy ecosystem. Through both AJP and DFTA, we sought to complement our movements’ defensive fights by encouraging efforts to build people- and planet-centered enterprises, all the while asserting the need for leadership by frontline workers and farmers in those efforts. Unfortunately, we failed to secure stable, movement-aligned resources to sustain these institutions. Our plans for DFTA assumed that dues from corporate members would fund the organization’s work, but those members lacked long-term commitment to the organization and its goals. We also expected that AJP’s certification would generate revenue to fund our programs, but certification never came close to breaking even.

Among all of our challenges, it is a shortfall in funding that has most directly forced the closure of AJP as an organization. Our coalition partners wanted us to find a way to continue our work, and we remain committed to the cause of building solidarity across US agriculture. Our financial circumstances simply mean that AJP cannot pivot and address our challenges within our existing organizational container. As Tomás Madrigal suggested, our Food Justice Certified label was a tool in the toolbox: it has been useful for accomplishing some things, and now we need something else to get us the next part of the way. We need a new vehicle.

For AJP as for our movements more widely, we face big questions about how to face this moment. How can we advance our cause in deeper ways and in radically altered circumstances? What can we rally a coalition around? What is the call to solidarity today?

Defending our people, winning a livable future#

Faced with a hostile and authoritarian government today, we follow many other movement strategists in calling for a pro-democracy united front. We believe there is a critical opportunity to defend and expand our democratic institutions, to value workers and communities over billionaires, to fight hate and xenophobia and build peace. The tactical toolkit for such broad coalitions is diverse but centered on social strikes and mass non-cooperation, and farm people can play important roles in this work.² Such united front formations have proven crucial in defeating and rolling back authoritarian regimes around the world. These alliances are also necessary because our movements cannot win on our own. For that reason, we must be realistic about what we can expect from such a ‘big tent’: if we settle our quarrels, we can win important but limited victories together over the near term.

Despite their limitations, united fronts also offer an important opportunity for our social movements, which have been weakened by decades of repression and cooptation. As AJP can attest, working together across differences can build powerful bonds of solidarity and remake how we think of ourselves. Those of us who believe in liberation are called to demonstrate our vision and leadership in united fronts, because our movements offer the only realistic alternative to the death cult of authoritarianism.³ Earning leadership will mean addressing some of our movements’ weaknesses and disunity, but if we can do so, we might win over the allies we need to achieve our more ambitious goals—a truly people-centered immigration policy, justice and freedom for all people, and de-commodification of food and land.⁴

This work is our generational task. AJP has been one small and imperfect coalition effort, but we believe our experience can help clarify some of the work that lies ahead to build principled coalitions. Out of the various things AJP tried or struggled with, a few reflections stand out as relevant for the work ahead.

Our movements need a lot more people in order to have the power to win our goals, so we need many more on-ramps that welcome in regular people and develop their skills and leadership. 

We need to strengthen our skills of analysis and principled debate, in order to bring clarity and flexibility to a range of important questions—from vision and values to strategy, to coalition membership, to power and landscape analysis. 

We need to be skillful in our organizing, valuing organizing as a practice and growing our ability to hash out and implement grassroots movement strategy. That includes developing rigorous practices for testing and adjusting our strategies according to experience.

We need an ecosystem approach that values many different strategies but also attends to our movements’ gaps and weaknesses. At this moment, this means we need a deep organizing orientation as well as politicized movement institutions that can coordinate and strengthen that organizing.

We need on-going grassroots processes of envisioning the world we want, and we need to better integrate our movements’ defensive fights with our work to build the institutions of a people-centered democratic economy.

Most of all, we need to overcome our deep fragmentation, cultivating a bigger ‘we’ that is united by bonds of solidarity, rigorously responsive to each other’s different needs and conditions, and ready to fight our shared enemies. To do that, our movements need to offer a compelling alternative to the individualism of the American Dream, instead weaving stories about our collective flourishing and shared humanity. That task is particularly difficult in the context of farming. US agriculture is a capitalist-colonial swamp, deeply sedimented with successive layers of violence, exploitation, and dispossession, spread unevenly across many years, many communities, and a vast area. We are all in this muck together; and it is rich, fertile, and festering. Its rich soil could feed and nourish us, but its stagnant injustices spread a sickness at the heart of our society. To harness its fertility and cure what ails us, we need to work toward a right relationship with each other. That right relationship must entail reparations. It must take seriously the burden of our histories and the unevenness of our present conditions. We need a compelling story of our pasts and our futures together.

Such a story is the missing link that can tie farm people to our movements more widely. Agriculture is and must always be central to a vision of justice in the US. Agriculture was the site of this country’s founding violence—land theft, genocide, and slavery—and agriculture in the US has resisted the most important reforms won by people’s movements over the centuries. As with slavery and racial codes in the past, today’s labor and immigration laws still deprive large numbers of people of basic rights and render them exploitable and disposable. As in the plantation economy, today’s commodity and property markets squeeze every drop of value out of farmers, workers, animals, and the land, creating super-profits for capitalists while leaving devastation behind. These are the central injustices of agriculture, but they undermine the rights and well-being of our whole society. Our wider justice-loving movements cannot achieve their larger goals—of racial justice, climate justice, gender justice, peace and demilitarization—without addressing the status of excluded workers and the commodification of food and land that renders the planet and all life on it subject to ruthless profit maximization. These engines of injustice are deeply embedded in US law and political economy, and significant progress will require a reconstruction that remakes our society in fundamental ways. That is why social movements need farm people and farm people need social movements.

It is a bold aspiration to muster the broad coalition we need to defend the rights and the political system that we already have. It’s an even bolder aspiration to muster that coalition towards a larger goal of transformation, but history gives us reason for hope and courage. As W.E.B. Du Bois noted of the First Reconstruction (1866-1873), for “seven mystic years…a majority of thinking Americans in the North” believed in racial equality, joined in common cause with African Americans, and acted “with a clear-cut decisiveness and thorough logic” that was “utterly incomprehensible” to later generations who lacked such commitments.⁵ Twentieth-century movements likewise won radical changes in the 1930s and 1960s, all in the face of fierce opposition. We may feel discouraged by the strength of our opponents today, but, as Howard Zinn reminds us, seemingly invincible power has, “again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience…. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.”⁶ This is why we need bold visions for justice: to inspire and align our movements, allowing us not just to defend our ancestors’ wins but also to carry their work forward.

We all have so much to gain if we work together towards common goals. For our part, we hope that AJP’s work and legacy will help draw farmworkers, farmers, food and delivery workers, and all our people into a broad, fighting movement that is hungry for justice. We deserve much better than the food system we have, and it’s ours to win. Let’s figure out what comes next.

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