SLEE Gratitude! CAGJ's 16th Annual SLEE party a beautiful success!

Watch the Keynote by Black Star Farmers!

Thank you to everyone who attended our 16th SLEE in celebration of food sovereignty and community.

There couldn’t have been a better setting than outdoors in the MLK F.A.M.E. Community Center Garden, where we enjoyed garden tours and a keynote from Black Star Farmers, music by Sin Fronteras, and delicious appetizers made with local ingredients. Check out awesome photos of SLEE by Alex Garland in our Facebook album!

Highlights

We were honored to hear from four members of Black Star Farmers. Please watch and share their fantastic keynote: “Reclaiming Food Sovereignty and Reconnecting to Indigenous Ways of Life.” (Thanks Ed Mays for filming!) Black Star Farmers are dedicated to creating radical, joyful, and supportive space for communities to reclaim their ancestral foodways. In their keynote, they highlighted the importance of collective organizing and power, and a shift away from individualism in order to address injustices.
Our supporters and members helped us reach 1000 signatures on our letter campaign to USAID! We also held a demonstration calling on the agency to immediately stop funding AGRA, and fund agroecology instead — as demanded by African farmer organizations. We have subsequently reached out to Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA-07, and Chair of the Progressive Caucus), in order to set up a meeting in early August to share details about the campaign.
We are so thrilled to announce that we raised over $23,000! Thank you for making CAGJ’s organizing and grassroots funding model possible. If you would like to help us reach our $25,000 goal, please donate today.

THURS August 25th, 4-6pm Pacific

Field trip to Gates Foundation Discovery Center + AGRA Watch flyering action!

4pm: Meet at Gates Foundation Discovery Center, 440 5th Avenue N. Seattle, WA 98109

4pm-5pm: Discovery Center tour

5pm-6pm: Flyering demonstration (end at Seattle Times office, 1000 Denny Way Seattle, WA 98109)

As part of our Rise Up! Summer School, we’ll be holding a field trip and demonstration in downtown Seattle. We’ll visit the Gates Foundation’s Discovery Center, starting at 4pm; at 5pm, we will then post flyers from the Discovery Center to the Seattle Times office, demonstrating the critical analysis of the Foundation’s agricultural development that the Times has persistently refused to cover.

Please register for the event here by August 21st. (We will then send you email updates and instructions on how to reserve your free online tickets closer to the date). For questions, please email Ashley ([email protected]).

Tierra y Libertad Farm Visit

Saturday, Sept 24, 2022, 11-2pm

At Cooperative Tierra y Libertad Farm: 1240 Central Rd Everson, WA 98247

Note the farm is 2 hrs from Seattle, we will depart at 9 am and be back in the city between 4 and 5 pm.

Register Here.

Join us for a taste of exploitation-free berries as we visit Cooperative Tierra y Libertad (Earth and Freedom Cooperative farm)! This farm co-op is a perfect example of the realities we can create when we dream together. Founded by four farmworkers from Familias Unidas por la Justicia, the cooperatively run farm is located about 2 hours north of Seattle. We will depart Seattle at 9am and be back by 4pm. We will hear about how the Cooperative was founded, how it is run, what they’re growing (chickens! eggs! berries!), meet their goats, cow and horse and lend a hand for a bit.

Need a ride or have a car and can provide carpooling? Fill out our Google Sheet so we can connect folks to make it out there! We are asking that folks be vaccinated and masked.

Watch our July webinar, We are the Salmon People: The Campaign to Block Corporate Salmon

Watch the recording here

As part of our 2022 Rise Up! Summer School program, we had the absolute pleasure of hosting Estefanía Narvaez and Carl Wassilie for our We are the Salmon People: The Campaign to Block Corporate Salmon webinar. Carl Wasilie and Estefania Narvaez are two organizers on the forefront of the campaign against genetically engineered salmon, which was initiated by CAGJ in solidarity with Northwest tribes and then evolved into the #BlockCorporateSalmon campaign, now spearheaded by Uprooted and Rising. The webinar provides crucial insight into the connection between Atlantic Salmon and Indigenous Food Sovereignty, campaign updates, and ways to get involved. It finished with an introduction to a visionary fiction workshop, for viewers to try their hand at dreaming up a world where justice and people power win.

TAKE ACTION

Please take action today to stand with African farmers!

Help us Reach 1500 signers!

Did you know that US tax dollars go toward supporting corporate-controlled, industrial agriculture in Africa? In response, African farmers and farmer networks, such as the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, have recently met with representatives in the US Congress to demand that the taxpayer-funded US Agency for International Development (USAID) stop funding industrial, corporate-led agriculture via the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and support agroecology instead. Help us support this work, by calling on USAID to end support to the failing “Green Revolution”: sign the letter to USAID today!

Stand with farmworkers!

Oppose the Farm Workforce Modernization Act

Sign the petition here

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act (FWMA) is an anti-labor bill that will set back farmworkers’ rights for generations. If passed, it would expand E-Verify and a flawed H-2A program while tying the possibility of immigration status to eight years of exploitation. Big corporations in the agriculture industry say they need this bill to deal with labor shortages and rising food costs, but the truth is, they’re the ones responsible for these so-called problems. There wouldn’t be a shortage if employers paid workers a living wage and offered safe working conditions. This bill will only boost profits for the agriculture industry and food corporations that are already gouging prices at the expense of workers and their communities. The FWMA is dangerously close to getting the votes it needs to pass in the Senate. Please urge your Senator to listen to farmworkers across the country and to oppose the FWMA.

CAGJ NEWS & ANALYSIS

As heat rises, who will protect farmworkers?

July 9, 2022 – Bridget Huber, Teresa Cotsirilos, & Nancy Averett, Grist

This year, in a move to avert heat-related deaths — and force employers to take responsibility for protecting workers during hot weather — Oregon adopted the most stringent heat protections for outdoor workers in the country. The rule kicks in when temperatures reach 80 degrees F and requires employers to provide cool water, rest breaks and shade, as well as to make plans for how to acclimatize workers to heat, prevent heat illness and seek help in case of an emergency. The new standard has been praised by advocates, but industry is already pushing back. In the rest of the country, as climate change drives increasingly brutal heat waves, farmworkers lack protection. There are currently no nationwide regulations that spell out what employers must do to protect workers from heat and, while efforts to draft a federal rule recently began, it will likely be years before the standards are in place. Read more...

Some factory workers at Amy’s Kitchen allege mistreatment as company closes plant in San Jose

July 19, 2022 – Amy Martyn, NBC

Amy’s Kitchen, the country’s top maker of vegetarian frozen and canned food, in recent months has grappled with angry comments from consumers and calls for boycotts that are at odds with its family-run, ethical reputation, with workers alleging unsafe conditions, injuries and attempts to stop unionization. On Monday, workers at its newest plant in San Jose, California, said they were abruptly told that the plant was closing because it was losing money due to inflation. Six workers at the San Jose factory, which had only been open since 2021, told NBC News they have experienced demeaning behavior by supervisors and unsafe conditions. In interviews in the weeks leading up to the plant’s sudden closure, and in additional interviews on Monday, four of those workers said there was an unofficial policy that they could not use the bathroom outside lunch and other designated break times. Employees at the company’s manufacturing headquarters not far away in Santa Rosa, California, have said they were subject to unsafe production quotas and repetitive motion injuries, according to previous reporting by NBC News. Read more...

The battle over regulation of new breeding techniques in South Africa

July 22, 2022 – Mariam Mayet, African Centre for Biosafety

In October 2021, the South African (SA) government determined that the regulatory and risk assessment framework that exists for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) will also apply to new breeding techniques (NBTs), which make up a host of new genetic engineering technologies. SA’s determination has been challenged by a consortium of industrial agricultural players through an appeal launched in November 2021. The ACB has extensively debunked the industry’s position, chiefly arguing that the new generation of GM techniques must be regulated since they do alter genetic material of plants, animals, and microbes, using synthetic guides with the express goal of changing the organism's DNA. NBTs will not provide sustainable solutions but rather function as mechanisms to secure and capture new markets for industrially produced seed. Read more…

True or False? Evaluating solutions for agriculture and climate change

July 27, 2022 – Sophia Murphy and Ben Lilliston, Institute for Trade and Agricultural Policy

For decades, mainstream climate debates, both nationally and internationally, largely ignored agriculture. Now, thankfully, the climate community has woken up to the importance of agriculture and food systems in tackling climate change. At the same time, this new awareness makes it imperative that climate experts who are new to the complexity of food and agriculture systems learn how those systems work and about the drivers that are stimulating food systems change. Too often, the proposals that have the support of private investors and global agribusiness firms fail to get to the root cause of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Worse, they can have unintended negative ecological or social consequences. As a result, the initiatives fail. We can and must do better, collectively. At stake is both our climate and the land, soil, water and biodiversity we need for future food security. Read more...

COMMUNITY CALENDAR

Recurring opportunities to support food justice organizing in Seattle:

Get to know Nurturing Roots and volunteer Sundays, 11 am - 3 pm. Drop in and out at anytime. All ages are welcome!

Get to know Beacon Food Forest by volunteering at 10am on the 3rd Saturday of every month! You can learn more about volunteering here.

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