The launch of our Behind The Brands campaign and Oxfam’s first campaign action call to Mars, Mondelez International, and Nestle to tackle gender inequality in their cocoa supply chains garnered an immediate response from Mars through a blog post where they describe work they are doing with women in their Sustainable Cocoa Initiative:

“…the Sustainable Cocoa Initiative is designed to work with these communities to help ease social hurdles like poverty, lack of education, and lack of opportunity by addressing the core challenges that farmers face. We recognize the important role women will play in addressing these problems and in moving their communities forward.”

Nestle for its part welcomed their position at the top of the index even as they all but ignored our substantive critique of their policies on women.  Mondelez responded in media reports expressing disappointment that we did not focus solely on areas where everyone already agrees.  None of the companies committed to change any policies to address their current failures.

Olga Rosine Adou is the president of COOPASA, a cocoa cooperative in Agboville, Ivory Coast. She says international companies that buy cocoa from the women she represents could do more to improve their livelihoods. Photo: Peter DiCampo / Oxfam America

The truth is we recognize that all three of these companies have projects that seek to help farmers.  Most of these efforts are done to increase the yields of cocoa farmers, which can lead to better livelihoods.  We also recognize that these projects in some instances have reached out to women to work with them in bettering their communities.  Nevertheless, the projects the companies tout in their public relations are piecemeal at best.

While projects such as these can be a good tool for testing practices and understanding their impacts, they do not represent a holistic approach to supply chain management.  Clear policies that come from the top of a company, and that are communicated to all employees, buyers, and their suppliers throughout the supply chain, can result in more positive impacts for all agricultural producers and workers.  Oxfam is looking for the three companies to improve their policies across their cocoa supply chains so that all women working within them can benefit from increased training programs, cooperative membership, access to agricultural inputs, and living wages.

Together Mars, Mondelez, and Nestle control more than 40% of the global chocolate market, purchase nearly one third of the world’s harvested cocoa and net more than $45 billion a year in confectionary sales.  They have the power to influence suppliers, governments, and certification bodies and they can influence policy shifts and practices in the sector.

While women increasingly occupy positions of power in food and beverage company headquarters and are frequently the targets of marketing campaigns, women working in food companies’ supply chains in developing countries continue to be denied similar advances in wealth, status, or opportunity. For example:

• The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that women small-scale farmers in Africa own just 1 percent of agricultural land, receive only 7 percent of extension services, and benefit from less than 10 percent of agricultural credit is offered to women.
• As much of 60 percent of the global agricultural workforce is made up of women who produce everything from corn to tomatoes, vanilla to tea.

Overcoming gender discrimination could be the most important thing that can be done to cultivate equitable and sustainable growth.  As The Economist reported back in 2006, the increase in employment of women in developed countries during the past decade has added more to global growth than has the economic emergence of China.

While speaking to women cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast last month, I heard time and again that being a cocoa farmer for women was simply harder than it was for men because they lacked some of the support that men were getting.  Olga Rosine Adou is a rare entity in the Ivory Coast as a woman who is President of a cocoa cooperative in Agboville.  Olga told us that were many things she could use from the international chocolate companies that buy cocoa in the Ivory Coast to make the jobs of the women farmers she represents more efficient and remunerative.

“[T]here are many things we want. For example, we want to be trained, and taught about what steps to take to do it well. We also need tools and equipment, (machetes, motos, buckets, etc.) to get the work done. If we had those things, it’d be easier. We also need pesticides and fertilizers to treat our farms.”

Oxfam’s Behind the Brands campaign sets out three clear steps for companies like Mars, Mondelez and Nestle to address women’s unfair treatment comprehensively. The three companies have made significant commitments to source certified cocoa and have worked on projects through a number of stakeholder initiatives demonstrating the companies’ willingness to engage and the possibility of dealing collectively with complex issues. But, it’s now time to address women’s rights in the same fashion.

It is plain for all to see that women who grow food companies’ raw ingredients are facing hunger and unfair pay. But so far none of the companies has stepped up to lead the way.  Food companies know about these inequities. Behind the Brands is telling them it’s time to deal with them systematically.

Yesterday Oxfam released the Behind the Brands Report and Scorecard aimed at shedding light on the global food system and its massive social and environmental footprint. The food system employs one billion workers (or a third of the global work force), uses 70% of the world’s fresh water, emits close to 30% of all greenhouse gases, and sources from hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers, many living on the edge of survival. Oxfam’s campaign is aimed at giving consumers and investors a little more power to influence the companies controlling that system.

The Scorecard is built on an interactive web platform, allowing anyone to trace their favorite products and brands back to the parent company. On the site, the Scorecard ranks the top ten largest food and beverage companies (the “Big 10”) by evaluating the companies’ policies, commitments, and suppliers. People can dig deeper into the scoring of a specific company across seven themes relating to poverty and their supply chains: smallholder farmers, workers, women, land, water, climate change and transparency. The site enables people to then send messages about the issues most important to them directly to the companies.

A scorecard of this nature is sure to provoke pushback, and here are a few things we have heard or anticipate hearing from company executives:

First, the Big 10 will point the finger at other powerful actors in the food system such as governments, retailers, traders, etc. Oxfam also works to hold these actors accountable. (See our prior report on the big traders.) But the major food and beverage companies exert enormous influence, particularly with respect to certain commodities. The food system can be roughly illustrated below, with billions of consumers at one end, 1.5 billion farmers at the other, and a small group of companies in the middle. We estimate that 500 companies control 70% of that food system. In some sectors as in cocoa, three companies, Nestle, Mondelez and Mars, purchase 30% of the global cocoa supply. We also know that these companies benefit from having great influence through their marketing, trade groups, public sector and business contacts—well beyond their particular market share. Ultimately, we chose to target the Big 10 since they serve as the critical bridge between consumers and the wider system.

Companies will also lament that we don’t give them sufficient credit for good work on the ground. There is merit to that critique. We know of good projects and we’ve even worked with companies on some of them. However, we couldn’t possibly measure all the projects across 14 commodities in the developing world, and that wasn’t our intention. These projects get plenty of visibility already. They benefit from the vast corporate marketing prowess of the major brands and we will highlight some of effective projects on our platform.

Our Scorecard asks the bigger questions: Are companies acknowledging the full range of their impacts? Are they measuring and reporting on those impacts? Are they committing to basic norms and standards? And are they using their influence and supplier codes to push those commitments down through their supply chains? Those are the building blocks for addressing these issues comprehensively. No company should be able to claim it is responsible if it doesn’t acknowledge the problem of land grabs, or assess discrimination against women, or disclose its major suppliers, no matter how many demonstration projects it has.

The flip side of our high level focus is that the Scorecard doesn’t examine particular scandals either. Coca Cola scores better than most among the companies on worker rights, despite a long-standing campaign (“Killer Coke”) for the murders of union organizers at a bottling plant in Colombia. Oxfam considers a company’s public commitments, transparency, and supplier codes as good proxies for practice, but we also recognize the limitations. The Behind the Brand Campaign offers a platform to raise both good and bad practices on the ground, and we will be digging in to certain Scorecard themes and company conduct over the course of the Campaign, starting with cocoa and gender.

Finally, companies (or more likely stakeholders) may complain that we are only looking at one end of the supply chain. We do in fact cover some issues more broadly, transparency and greenhouse gas emissions for example. But, we acknowledge that there is plenty more to consider with these brands, starting with nutrition and obesity. If anyone questions the capacity for mendacity of major food brands, the scathing New York Times cover article last week on the “hyper-engineered, savagely marketed, additive-creating battle for American ‘stomach share’” should put those doubts to rest. We simply weren’t able to tackle all of that in one Scorecard, but see this initiative as filling an important piece of the puzzle.

The Big 10 have already shown that they are willing and able to address complex issues, particularly when they see a business case or feel sufficient pressure. Oxfam’s Behind the Brands campaign is all about both sides of that—highlighting the bottom line and strengthening the consumer, investor, and public constituencies who bring the heat.

Vicky Rateau is the GROW Campaign Manager at Oxfam America.

As a society, we get upset by food companies processing horsemeat to sell to us in the grocery store.  It’s troubling to customers; some don’t like the idea of not knowing what’s in our food.

Could we extend that same concern to the people who grow the food that end up in our refrigerators and cupboards? Could we get as enraged that food companies are looking the other way from land grabs in developing countries as families lose their farms or access to water?

There’s a range of injustices and violations that are often included in food products.

Oxfam’s GROW campaign is kicking off a new initiative today, Behind the Brands, to rank the policies of big food companies on important issues like treatment of workers and farmers, equality for women, land, clean water, climate change, and transparency. Oxfam has spent over a year pulling information together through research and engagement with food companies, so that for the first time, people will be able to see what the goes on behind products like M&Ms and Oreos. The main report contains a Scorecard that ranks the top 10 food companies, based on nearly 3000 data points that touch on issues rarely considered in mainstream sustainability ratings.  Oxfam plans to push hard for improvements in coming years, with campaigns planned in more than 12 countries, including the US, Mexico, Brazil, China and countries across Europe, which are major markets for these companies.

Behind the Brands complements the other parts of the GROW campaign (now in more than 45 countries) where Oxfam is focused on encouraging responsible government action on food and agriculture, as well as consumer behavior.  But governments and consumers aren’t enough. The big food companies with huge supply chains and enormous market power must also be part of the solution. They can help address the range of social and environmental challenges with food supply chains today. Ultimately the private sector’s share of the responsibility for basic human development based on ethical policy decisions should not be left to the competing forces of the marketplace.

The ten companies examined in Behind the Brands have aggressive sustainability efforts in some corners of the world, for some commodities, and in some sectors on sustainability issues. As the ten largest food companies, they should. But they have the ability to do more. Their supply chains employ millions of people in developing countries who grow and produce their products. They have the power to help tackle hunger, inequality, and vulnerability for the world’s poorest people. And at minimum, we agree they shouldn’t look the other way if land and water are being taken to grow the ingredients for their products, or if women are paid less than men for the same work.

Food companies know that women are the target market for their advertising; they put women front and center in their ads because in most households, women make the key buying decisions. But the same food companies often neglect the women who are the core producers of food products. And so, our first campaign action is focused on three of the top 10—Mars, Mondelez (formerly Kraft), and Nestle—for their failure to address inequality faced by women who grow cocoa used in their chocolate products.

No brand is too big to listen to its customers. We know consumers already think hard about the food they buy and want their purchases to make a difference or help others. This campaign is about showing big food companies that they can—and must—improve their policies and practices, and that as consumers we care.

We hope others will join us. In the comments, show us how you’re helping to spread the word.

***

Over the next few weeks, Oxfam America’s Politics of Poverty blog will feature a series of posts that cover each of the Scorecard’s seven themes: workers, farmers, women, land, water, climate and transparency. Stay tuned!

A few weeks before Oxfam’s GROW Campaign launched in 2011, I went up to New York with our president Ray Offenheiser and head of our policy (and lead Poindexter) Gawain Kripke to meet with a handful of journalists. We wanted to give them a sneak peek at what we had planned.

One of our first stops was to sit down with Sandy Keenan, Environment Editor at the New York Times, and two key reporters on the Environment Desk: Elisabeth Rosenthal and Justin Gillis. We had a long conversation about the issues of GROW and the emerging trends that we were seeing around the world.

Cracked, dry earth outside Magartu Baleha's home near East Shewa, Ethiopia. Photo: Eva-Lotta Jansson / Oxfam America

They asked difficult questions, probed the soft spots of our research, and challenged us to back up our point of view with credible evidence. It was a good conversation, one clearly grounded in knowledge and experience with the immense and complex challenges that come with trying to feed a growing population without breaking the planet. This is not always the experience one has when talking to reporters. In fact it was utterly unique. No other outlet had this depth of knowledge actually backed up by the resources and mandate to reach a mainstream audience.

So it is with great disappointment that I read today that the “paper of record” is dismantling its environment desk, reassigning the reporters and editors to other beats. The change, they say, is not prompted by budgetary pressures but what Inside Climate News calls “the shifting interdisciplinary landscape of news reporting.”

Times managing editor for news operations told ICN that environmental stories are, “partly business, economic, national or local, among other subjects. They are more complex. We need to have people working on the different desks that can cover different parts of the story.”

That’s all well and good but it is hard to see this move as anything but an unmitigated disaster for people who care about how the challenges facing our environment impact our lives. The Times environmental coverage is heads and shoulders above what any other mainstream outlet in the US is offering. It is literally without comparison in its quality and quantity. Certainly there are good reporters outside the confines of the Times. Most other outlets have offered shrinking coverage of the political and policy decisions that impact our planet. The Times, led by its Environment Desk, has continued to push the conversation forward on a range of issues.

In theory, this tradition could continue without the benefit of a dedicated team. But color me skeptical. In my experience the issues reporters choose to pay attention to, and the lens through which they approach their coverage, is heavily shaped by the beat to which they are assigned. The title a reporter has on their business card can play a major role in determining what gets written and what does not.

It is certainly true that environmental issues are business issues. They’re national political issues. They’re local issues. But try getting a national political reporter to write a nuanced and thoroughly reported article about the threat climate change is posing to food systems. Try getting a business reporter to write about the ways in which American and European biofuels policies are influencing the ability of poor Guatemalans to get enough to eat. I wish you good luck.

The Times has been a leader in environmental coverage because it has shown a commitment to covering the issue via the Environment Desk. We can only hope that the desk’s closure does not turn out as bad as it seems for environmental coverage.

A little over three months ago, I sat attentively listening to the give and take between Nigerian Female Food Hero, Susan Godwin, and Chicago Council on World Affairs Senior Fellow, Roger Thurow. Thurow was moderating a panel at the World Food Prize Symposium called A Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World Sustainably? Also part of the discussion were Sir Gordon Conway, scholar and author; plant breeding and genetics pioneer, Gebisa Ejeta, and Jane Karuku, President of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

Roger Thurow and Susan Godwin at the World Food Prize Dialogue. Photo: Jacob Silberman.

Now, an online dialogue, The Future of Agriculture, is considering much the same question about addressing hunger in the face of many challenges ahead. This discussion also includes my acquaintances, Susan Godwin and Roger Thurow. Mrs. Godwin writes eloquently on the challenge of passing the legacy of farming on to the next generation in  My Daughter Wants to Be a Farmer. Thurow again plays the role of summarizing and connecting the dots at the end of week one of the conversation.

In the first week, writers like Bill McKibben, writer and founder of 350.org, and Jose Graziano del Silva, Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), argued that moving away from an agriculture dependent on fossil fuels could not only benefit the planet but set the stage for a more resilient and productive agriculture.

Joining McKibben and del Silva were thought leaders with very diverse points of view and from different parts of the world. All considered what future farming might look like if we better considered the role of women, risk, farmer-based knowledge, and less reliance on fossil fuel.

The discussion continues through this week with a new set of essays posted each day. So far the discussion has been lively. But to help build our understanding we need broad participation and dialogue. So please take some minutes each day to visit http://blogs.oxfam.org/en/future-of-agriculture. The essays are short; the implications for our future tasks are great.

After reading both Roger Thurow’s and Susan Godwin’s online contributions, I thought back to that hall in Iowa with over 800 people attending. Mrs. Godwin told how her community and other had asked her what she might offer to all the highly educated and important people that she might address in the US. She said that most important she would tell them how her work had improved the lives of her family and the other women in her community. And after a pause, during which the audience grew even more quiet, she declared, “I will tell them that I am a farmer!”

That day, that large crowd filled with educators, scientists, political leaders, and activists rose to their feet. They acknowledged that the hope for a well-fed future depends on the efforts of all stakeholders, and ideas from all sectors.

The Future of Agriculture discussion is no different. Join the conversation today.

In late October, a week before Hurricane Sandy arrived on the East Coast of the US, I entered a maelstrom of food and people in the scenic region of Italy at the southern foot of the Alps. It was the Terra Madre event in Turin, northern Italy, the biennial occasion that draws over 200,000 people from around the world to celebrate and discuss food production, preparation and enjoyment. And next Monday is Terra Madre Day, a day to celebrate our locally grown and produced food.

Carlo Petrini established both Slow Food and Terra Madre “to counter the rise of fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.”[1] At the opening ceremony, the sage of the Slow Food movement declared that “caring for food means caring for all living beings.” And after long applause, Petrini added that promoting the dignity, well-being, happiness and community means taking a “political approach.”

African garden display at Terra Madre. Photo: Jim French

I attended the October event as an Oxfam America delegate upon invitation of Slow Food USA. During the opening event, sitting by my side was Frederick Msiska, a farmer from Malawi. He coordinated a Slow Food Garden Project in his country and had come to help construct an amazing 400 square meter African garden in the Oval pavilion at Terra Madre. Showcasing the vast variety of vegetables, fruits, grains, and medicinal plants that grow on the continent, the garden was a visual symbol of the cultural communities working to support a diverse and healthy food system. It also expressed a political idea: the value in investing in and empowering small scale producers to help support a well-fed, fair, and sustainable planet.

Esther Jerome and Marianna Yatsyshina at Terra Madre. Photo: Giorgio Gori

Frederick Msiksa was joined by hundreds of small farmers from developing nations. These included Tanzanian Food Hero, Esther Jerome, and, Grow Method honoree from Siberia Marianna Yatsyshina. these small-scale producers represented the ideal of what can happen when people are given the means and resources to grow, prepare and market food. But they also spoke about the injustice that occurs when companies, governments or wealthy investors buy up or seize land and displace people, or when native fisheries are decimated by industrial operations, or when indigenous practices and skills are neglected and lost.

The theme of this Terra Madre: “Good, clean, fair.” seemed to me like a good fit with the GROW Campaign triad of Food, Justice, Planet. Slow Food’s broad global network is more often associated with the pleasure of preparing and consuming good food rather than justice issues.But, in a world now facing climate change, conflict over land and water, and the need to meet the world demand for food while eradicating hunger and safeguarding the environment, the common ground of Oxfam and Slow Food is growing.

A well-fed world is one that must cultivate justice and sustainability and produce nutritious and good tasting food.

A few months ago, I was talking to my colleague Kimberly, about how difficult it is to talk about the future of agriculture in public without things spinning out of control. Most people don’t much care. But those who do, REALLY CARE. It doesn’t take long in any conversation, for example, before someone in the conversation begins accusing someone else of being part of a corporate conspiracy, or someone accuses a whole community of being “peasant romanticists”. The energy and anger of the interchanges sometimes seems out of proportion and quite unconstructive.

Oxfam has been engaged in agriculture policy and programming since our early beginnings—so we brush against these partisans all the time. Indeed, there are many partisans among us. Often, our favored course is to keep our heads low and avoid the rough and tumble.

But, that’s not really possible in the current era. With the launch of our GROW Campaign, we have put the issues of food, hunger, and sustainable, inclusive agriculture at the center of Oxfam’s public engagement and the heart of our policy agenda. So, how do we broach these subjects without instigating mortal combat and without making Oxfam a target of every possible interest and ideology?

Well, the best idea we came up with was to host a conversation and hope that good ideas and some elements of a consensus emerge. So that’s what we’re doing.

Starting Monday, we’re hosting a ten-day Future of Agriculture online discussion and debate. We’ve invited experts and leaders in the field to contribute provocative essays, and we’ll invite everyone else to weigh in. That means you.

Set your browsers and ready your keyboards. And jump right in!

Two campesinos (farmers) in northern Guatemala (2012). Pablo Tosco/Intermón Oxfam

Paul O’Brien is the vice president, policy and campaigns, for Oxfam America.

Washingtonians: I regret to inform you that we need your home. Please remove yourself and your belongings by the end of the month, or we will have our armed goons do it for you. Unfortunately, we are not going to talk about this, and there is no money for your troubles. We need your land. It is for the greater good. Thank you for understanding.

Sound crazy? Somewhere in the developing world, that speech, or something like it, will probably happen today. Over the last decade, in developing countries, a land area larger than Washington, D.C. has been sold from under the feet of poor communities every day. 500 million acres—enough to feed a billion people—have been traded, mostly to cash-rich countries, foreign agribusiness and equity investors over the past 10 years. Think about California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas being sold off in a mad, unregulated, land rush without any real transparency on who is doing the buying, under what terms, or what they plan to do with the spoils. All those Southwesterners wondering what the hell happened to their land and their lives?

Why am I writing about this now? Honestly, because we are launching a report today laying out these facts, Our Land, Our Lives, and I want you to read it and join our new campaign. We may have an opportunity to meaningfully address this madness in the next few months.

The World Bank is about to gather the mighty in Tokyo for their Annual Meeting. It’s the coming out party for the new Bank president, Jim Kim—and we are going to hear what he cares about. If he makes stopping bad land grabs a priority, the Bank could play a massive role in fixing this Achilles heel in the global food system.

Early signs are discouraging. Today, the World Bank rejected our report recommendations, claiming “[the Bank] does not support speculative land investments or acquisitions which take advantage of weak institutions in developing countries or which disregard principles of responsible agricultural investment.”

Having watched the Presidential debates last night, I’m acutely sensitive to spin, and that feels like spin to me. Of course the Bank doesn’t actively “support” bad acquisitions or investments in land. But here is the thing—they don’t even know if their land investments are good or bad for affected communities. When we asked them to show us good large scale land investments where communities weren’t kicked off their land and were adequately compensated, they couldn’t find one.

That’s why we are asking the World Bank Group to take a breath! We want them to temporarily stop funding new large scale agricultural land acquisitions until they can be sure these deals aren’t going to violate human rights or harm communities. We want the Bank Group to put solid guidance in place, particularly because we want the 100+ major investing institutions that follow the IFC’s Performance Standards to take basic, reasonable precautions when doing a land deal.

Personally, I still have hope that Jim Kim will commit to doing this in Tokyo. My gut says he is “one of us”—a development activist who wants the poor to know what his institution is doing across the board. He can be proud in other areas: A new aid transparency index rated the Bank second of all major donors on aid transparency this week. Human Rights Watch (notoriously hard to please) recently applauded the Bank for using transparency to fight corruption.

The Bank knows that information is power. It is time to acknowledge that fact in the global land free-for-all. Our report suggests precisely how the Bank can lead an honest public effort to grapple with this issue.

And let’s not spin this proposal as an investment-killing idea. Oxfam has called for greater investment in poor countries for decades. We want communities to benefit from sound investments in agriculture. The Bank can leave its head in the sand and ask communities to trust the market’s invisible hand, or sort this mess out before we see even more community-used land disappear.

Even if all the corn grown in the US was used for fuel, it would replace only one out of six gallons.

Ethanol has been touted as the solution to our energy and climate crises. But, turning corn into fuel only compounds global hunger. America cannot build our own energy security on the back of people living in poverty—it is morally indefensible and wrong for our own energy, climate, and national security interests. We have an opportunity right now to press the pause button on misguided US corn ethanol policy by telling the EPA to waive the corn ethanol mandate.

Ethanol is not the answer to our oil dependency. Even if all the corn grown in the US was used for fuel, it would replace only one out of six gallons. Ethanol is also not the answer to our changing climate—which itself is driving food prices higher. Corn sounds all natural, but between massive changes in land use needed to grow corn for fuel and the energy costs to process that corn into ethanol, it is hardly greenhouse gas neutral.

Meanwhile, ethanol is contributing to global hunger. Last year, 40 percent of corn grown in the US went to fuel instead of food. If all the land used to grow biofuels for the EU in 2008 had instead been used to grow food, it could have fed 127 million people for an entire year. Major land grabs are happening all over the world, often propelled by the market’s demand for biofuels, leaving marginalized communities without access to traditional land and water to grow food.

Hunger is a moral issue, an economic issue, a health issue, and a national security issue. There were riots around the world in 2008 when food prices spiked. Right now, Yemen is in the grips of a terrible food crisis—almost half of the population is hungry, including one million children. It is not in our national security interest to have people starving in Yemen or in any fragile state.

The governors of North Carolina and Arkansas have asked the EPA to waive the renewable fuel standards mandate, which requires at least 10 percent of unleaded gasoline be made from ethanol. Waiving the corn ethanol mandate will lead to an estimated 7.4 percent drop in global corn prices, which will in turn lower prices for meat, milk, eggs, and more. For people living in poverty who spend up to 75 percent of their income on food, this small change can make a big impact.

The EPA has opened up a public comment period on the waiver, which ends October 11, and so far, more than 5,000 Oxfam supporters have responded. Send in a comment today and stand up for the one billion people who go to bed hungry every day.

Credit: Oxfam America Action Corps and  Grazioso Pictures Inc.

Last week, I managed an (almost) zero mile meal. My backyard chickens provided eggs for a crustless quiche, flavored by garden-grown cherry tomatoes and basil, with freshly dug roasted potatoes on the side. The food was all local—almost. You need olive oil, salt and pepper to flavor, well, everything. And for dessert there was coffee and chocolate, wonderful foods that don’t grow so well in Massachusetts—but that do come in fair trade varieties that ensure small-scale farmers and farm workers around the world get a fair deal.

The meal was a reminder that “Eating Local” is just one part of the food justice equation. Buying fair trade is another. And there are many more. As Oxfam prepares to mark World Food Day on October 16, we’re thinking a lot about all the components of food justice. We hope you’ll do the same by holding a World Food Day meal and talking about how you can fight world hunger from your kitchen table.

Oxfam’s GROW Campaign recently released a report, Food Transformations, which detailed the power of consumers to contribute to global food security. For instance, meat production alone takes up eight percent of the world’s water supply. If a family of four substituted lentil burgers for beef burgers for just one night, they would save the equivalent of 17 bathtubs full of water. That is a small change with a powerful impact. To help consumers harness this power, Oxfam has launched the GROW Method, five easy ways to feed your family healthy and delicious meals while ensuring everyone on the planet has enough to eat, always.

The steps seem simple and straightforward: waste less food, eat local and seasonal, support small farmers worldwide, eat less meat, and cook smart. But nothing is simple when it comes to the politics of  the plate. When the USDA raised the idea of employees participating in Meatless Monday this summer, it sparked a political firestorm. Meanwhile, a stalled Farm Bill threatens to harm food security from Michigan to Mali, and ethanol mandates are requiring much needed food to be used as fuel. As food prices rise and Oxfam and other organizations warn of a potential global food crisis, the price of political and personal inaction also rises. Order our free World Food Day 2012 resources, and consider holding a World Food Day Meal to celebrate the culture and community, power and politics of food.