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Food and Farm Policy

The Slow Food USA Food and Farm Policy Community Action Team brings together diverse stakeholders from our network, and beyond, to advocate at every level of government for policies that will help forge the political, social, environmental, and economic links of a food chain that is good, clean, and fair for all.   

Slow Food USA believes in the power of a food chain that is good, clean, and fair for all. It starts with our personal decisions about what food is on our plates and continues by advocating for federal, state, and local public policies that affect every aspect of the food chain, from field and sea to fork.  

The magnitude of the failings in our food chain is such that we cannot truly achieve our goals going it alone. Our decades of engagement lead us to the imperative of adding our voice to those of other, like-minded, organizations in  advocating for public food and farm policy that aligns with our beliefs and complements the on-the-ground programs and campaigns of our network.  

Disrupting fast and furious food systems by demanding a better Farm Bill

by Lindsay Troyer, Food and Farm Policy Community Action Team member and Policy Coordinator, Slow Food USASlow Food USA nurtures food justice through being a weaver of communities, a disruptor of injustice, a builder of relationships and a storyteller of our diverse...

The Farm Bill: Heat Stress Protections

By Nisreen Abo-SidoThe Farm Bill is one of the USA’s most comprehensive legislations on food and agriculture yet it leaves out farm workers. Agriculture is among one of the most dangerous industries in the country, with farm workers being 35 times more likely to...

Flustered by the Farm Bill? Here are Five Things to Know About it

By Brett Rapkin-Citrenbaum, Slow Food USA Farm Bill Community OrganizerThe Farm Bill is not only the largest piece of legislation to dictate our food systems in the US, but it’s one of the most epic bills to pass through Congress. Every five years, our elected members...

The Policy of Child Nutrition

What’s the recipe for good, clean and fair food options in our nation’s schools? Learn from experts who are feeding students, researching policies, and implementing legislation to improve school nutrition programs.

Carbon Markets: Rewarding Small Farmers or Protecting Big Ag Polluters?

The Growing Climate Solutions Act of 2021 (GCSA), originally introduced in 2020 and revived by the 117th Congress, was passed by the Senate in June 2021. The bill aims to make it easier for “farmers, ranchers, and private forest landowners” to enter voluntary environmental credit markets, namely carbon markets.

Slow Food groups across the Americas send antiracist motion to International Congress

  The motion below was developed first by Slow Food Brasil, then expanded to include all Slow Food groups in the Americas. We will present this document to the International Congress in July, and again at Terra Madre in September. The purpose is to shift the...

5 things we learned about the AQUAA Act

By ERYN KELLY, SLOW FOOD USA POLICY COORDINATORWhat is Aquaculture?  Aquaculture is the cultivation and harvesting of aquatic plants and seafood. Done correctly, in balance with nature, it can be ecologically and economically successful in both freshwater ecosystems,...

White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health

  The content in this post was written in partnership and support from the following organizations: North American Marine Alliance, National Family Farm Coalition, Wallace Center, Rural Coalition, and Farm Action.   Intro to White House Listening Sessions...

20 food justice orgs tell White House: ensure upcoming food conference focuses on equity and justice

Slow Food USA and more than twenty like-minded, partnering organizations support the coming White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. This Conference is only the second of its kind in our nation's history.  The first Conference, in 1969, led to...

Tell the USDA: Support local farmers and ranchers

Slow Food USA’s work to advance good, clean and fair food for all means that we support localizing American foodways to ease the burden of food travel and production on the environment and our food producers and workers. Right now, if you buy packaged meat and poultry...

Slow Food Live Recap: Winning A Fair Farm Bill

By Michelle DiMuzio, Communications CoordinatorLast week, Slow Food USA hosted its last Slow Food Live of the year, Winning a Fair Farm Bill. The panel discussed the successes and failures of past legal action, legislation, executive action, and existing programs...

This policy page will help keep you informed about food and farm challenges, opportunities, and times to be heard by policymakers. Learn more about our volunteer Policy Team, federal food and farm policy structures through our Policy 101 guide, and the policy issues of like-minded organizations that we support.

POLICY PRIORITIES TO ADVANCE JOY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

The THREE SISTERS of FOOD and FARM POLICY

Like the symbiotic trio of corn, beans, and squash, the three sisters of our national food and farm policy legislation are below. Learn more about the trio and what Slow Food USA is calling upon our federal legislators to do to achieve better, cleaner, and fairer food and farm policy.  

About every five years, Congress, via a Child Nutrition Reauthorization (CNR), reauthorizes essential federal nutrition programs that help provide healthy food and nutrition to more than 35,000,000 children and infants each year, including

  • more than five billion school lunches for about 30,000,000 students at more than 100,000 schools (Twenty-two million qualify for free or reduced-price lunches that provide half of their nutrition needs.). 
  • the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and 
  • the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP). 

Each CNR updates the original enabling legislation, the Richard B. Russell School Lunch Act of 1946.  

The last CNR, the Healthy and Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA), became law in 2010. We are long overdue for a CNR that builds upon the nutrition successes of the HHFKA and restores subsequent school nutrition rollbacks made by the last Congress and Administration. 

Slow Food USA calls upon Congress and the Biden/Harris Administration to ensure that the next Child Nutrition Reauthorization

  • Extends school meal waivers to ensure all school children have food access during the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • Provides Universal Free Meals for all school children. 
  • At minimum, adheres to federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans to determine stronger nutritional standards for school meals that include reductions in salt and added sugar.
  • Limits unhealthy school snacks offered that undermine the consumption of healthy meals.
  • Rejects rollbacks and “flexibilities” to the Healthy and Hunger-Free Kids Act nutrition standards and ensure adequate public comment periods regarding future federal school meal regulation proposals. 
  • Eliminates marketing of Big Food brands as school meal competitive foods. 
  • Provides incentives and reduces barriers to procure local food by schools, institutions, and Tribal communities.
  • Funds school garden and nutrition education programs to offset inequities in the food system and increase healthy food consumption in schools. 
  • Ensures that schools participating in the National School Lunch Program guarantee enough time for lunch, so children have time to eat the healthy food provided in school.

While it seems far off, advocates and legislators are beginning to consider the next Farm Bill (2023). 

The Farm Bill addresses food and farm policy from production to access. It consists of Agricultural Titles and a Nutrition Title.

  • Agricultural Titles include programs that address commodities, conservation, trade, rural development, horticulture, organic farming, crop insurance, subsidies, research, beginning and disadvantaged farmer and rancher development, and food and farm issues affecting indigenous people.
  • The Nutrition Title accounts for 76% of farm bill spending and covers programs including SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps); TEFAP (The Emergency Food Assistance Program); the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR), and the Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP).

SFUSA calls on Congress and the Biden/Harris Administration to ensure that the next Farm Bill 

  • Effectively addresses food chain structural racism, inequity, exclusion, and injustice, with emphasis on engaging and supporting BIPOC producers.
  • Ensures national food and nutrition security. 
  • Helps local and regional, urban and rural, and Tribal farm and food economies thrive and ensures that the next generation of family-scale, urban and rural farmers and ranchers are successful. 
  • Re-localizes our food chain and ensures fair markets, programs, and access for family-scale farmers and ranchers, focusing on BIPOC producers.
  • Supports science and policies that serve small and mid-scale, family farmers and ranchers and ensures that they are central to climate-focused conservation and regenerative production. 
Food Chain Immigration 

While issues of food chain immigration historically are not addressed in the Farm Bill, the fact is that our food, from field and sea to fork, depends on the labor of immigrant farmworkers and food chain workers, many of them undocumented.  

 

Farmworkers and food chain workers, documented and undocumented, are and have been essential to our ability to feed ourselves.  However, it took the Covid-19 pandemic for the last Congress and Administration to acknowledge that essentiality, albeit doing too little to protect those who risked their health and that of their loved ones to put food on our tables. Now, we must ensure that the essentiality of these workers and our debt to them are not forgotten.   

 

Slow Food USA calls upon Congress and the Biden/Harris Administration to

 

  • Support the health, dignity, and fair treatment of our essential farmworkers and food chain workers, regardless of immigration status.
  • Provide undocumented immigrant farmworkers and food chain workers with a path to citizenship for themselves and their families. 

    The Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA) is the periodically renewed legislation that governs marine fisheries management in federal waters. First passed in 1976, the MSA fosters the long-term biological and economic sustainability of marine fisheries by addressing fish habitat decline, preventing overfishing, rebuilding overfished stocks, increasing long-term, seafood-based economic and social benefits, and ensuring a safe and productive supply of seafood.  

    Slow Food USA calls upon Congress and the Biden/Harris Administration to 

    • Rejuvenate federal leadership, policymaking, and funding to support just and meaningful ocean governance that acknowledges that our marine fisheries are a shared, national resource.
    • Engage meaningfully and equitably with community-based and Tribal fishing communities as a prerequisite to establishing policy goals – seeking the active involvement of the communities who firsthand know our federal fisheries. 
    • Reauthorize the MSA to include considerations of climate change, ecosystem-based fisheries management, and sustained participation in local/regional fisheries by community-based and Tribal fishers.

      Our Partners

      Like minded organizations with whom we share beliefs and partner in advocating for a food chain that is Good, Clean and Fair for All