Monopoly profits are bad for your diet. Let us count the ways!
Corporate and monopoly domination by a few HUGE conglomerates lobby for subsidies and tax breaks to add to their profits—all while squeezing farmers made into low-paid employees and customers facing rising prices.
We'll share resources for learning and host a great conversation among women who know what we're up against, and what works better. You can help!
Click here to access the resources for further learning for this conversation.
Meet the Speakers
Leading the conversation is Jules Salinas, Ex. Director of W-FAN (Women's Food and Agriculture Network), an organization that connects women land-owners, farmers, and producers to change the way we do food business, honoring the Earth, our farmers and workers, and communities. Small and local is suffering, largely un-subsidized by government policy.
US farming must be made sustainable and survivable in the face of an undeniable climate crisis. What practices enable farmers to regenerate soil health and provide healthy food at an affordable price? What the heck is going on with the 5-year, $1.5 Trillion dollar US Agriculture Bill? Will we adopt the Wall Street version concerned only with profit, or the Main Street version that envisions farmers and foresters as stewards of healthy land and water and food?
Also joining us is Niaz Dorry with the National Family Farm Coalition and North America Marine Alliance. Niaz recently won a James Beard award for her work advocating for policies that can transform food systems away from big-business control to locally-led operations steeped in values like fair prices, racial justice, and the right to live in vibrant and healthy communities. At her award ceremony in Chicago on June 9, Dorry said: “Nothing I do is as an individual, so the honor goes to our collective movement of fishing and farming families, who are rooted in food sovereignty and community stewardship of waters and lands.,,, Join our struggles against the corporate capture of our food systems and the expansion of factory farms on land and at sea.”
We'll also hear from Janice St. Onge, of the Flexible Capital Fund, a CDFI (Community Development Finance Institute). Janice has long been associated with the Vermont Farm to Plate program, and Northern New England Women's Investor Network. The Flexible Capital Fund's mission is to invest in growing and strengthening local Vermont food systems and other natural resource sectors. She's a founding member of Slow Money Vermont and serves on the Vermont Small Business Development Center Advisory Board.
What is a Zoom of Our Own?
This event was recorded live. As some feminist epistemologists (Gilligan, Belenky et al.) have taught us, seeing and seeking connections seems to be women’s ways of knowing and reasoning. Our economics is lived in tangible and complex communities. Our goal is to model how women can talk together and learn together about traditionally male territory still new to most women.
Our Zoom of Own Series brings women (and men!) together to construct a fuller knowledge and set of values now omitted from the mainstream “free market.” Together, we're flipping the script on a racist, sexist economy.