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.

Victoria Marzilli is Oxfam America’s New Media Specialist focusing on social media.

In less than a month, leaders of the top eight economies of the world will gather in the secluded Camp David locale for the 38th annual G8 Summit—a forum for discussion on today’s most pressing issues. This year, top priorities include food security and agriculture—and for a few good reasons! Hunger is the world’s number one health risk with one in seven people going hungry. Fighting for food security initiatives at the G8 is just one part of Oxfam’s GROW campaign to build a better food system that sustainably feeds a growing population and empowers poor people to earn a living, feed their families, and thrive.

In addition, the deadline is up for commitments made at the 2009 G8 Summit in L’Aquila—and G8 countries need to move forward with a bold food security initiative that helps 50 million people lift themselves out of poverty through agriculture with a $30 billion commitment over three years. While we’re thankful that food security and agriculture are going to be discussed, we need to make sure that leaders deliver more than just empty promises; 50 million lives depend on it.

So starting today, Oxfam is working together with a big group of other NGOs including Save the Children, ONE, InterAction, and many more, to raise the volume on the issue —so loud that G8 leaders can’t ignore it.

Join us in taking the fight against hunger and poverty to Twitter!

A moment like this could be a turning point for the millions of small-scale farmers working hard every day to fight poverty and hunger, but it’s up to us to hold our leaders accountable.

Take action with us to speak up and ask President Obama to lead the G8 to keep their promises. Click the links below to tweet at the @WhiteHouse!

• .@WhiteHouse #DearG8, help 50 million people lift themselves out of poverty at the #G8! http://bit.ly/HKr4td

• .@WhiteHouse, 1 in 7 people will go hungry. Act now: support food security at the #G8! http://bit.ly/HQYKau #DearG8

You can also send a message to President Obama here and follow all of the conversation by searching #DearG8 on Twitter. And don’t stop there. Share the action with friends on Facebook, at work, and at school!

Since 2009, thirty poor countries have risen to the challenge: they have developed plans to improve agriculture and food security in their countries. Now Obama needs to lead the G8 to keep their promise and play their part.

If you spend any time reading about food policy, you might have felt a strong wind at your back pushing you vaguely in the direction of Zuccotti Park last week. Some of my favorite food bloggerati including Jane Black, Mark Bittman, Tom Philpott, and Kristin Wartman (among several others) all wrote compelling pieces urging those of us in the “food movement” to start to align ourselves squarely within the ranks of the 99%.

And they’re right. As Philpott writes, “as Occupy Wall Street evolves, food policy should be on the plate.” The food movement needs more energy, more creativity, and as Black suggests, a more ruthless commitment to “winning” political battles. If productively directed, the dynamic power that #OWS seems to be building could be a promising addition to the movement’s arsenal. The only problem in reading these articles, is one gets the idea that food reformers don’t actually know all of this already. In reality there are many of us in the food movement who spend our lives doing just this. But, it’s much easier to talk about the injustices and failures of our food system than it is to motivate action on specific winnable battles.

Protest is essential. Voicing anger and dissatisfaction with the countless failures of our political, financial, and food systems helps bring to light the injustice embedded in how these systems can distort our society and undermine our health, security, and general well-being. But, more productive than a generic call to arms to voice our collective anger, is a specific call to action that can help overcome real injustices.

Among the issues raised by Black, Bittman, Philpott, and Wartman are the financial industry’s impact on food prices, the drive by investors to acquire land in developing countries, and the need to raise revenue from the banks that helped create the economic mess we currently face. Here are a few examples of what Oxfam is trying to do on each of these issues to create real, concrete change, and some ways that individuals, including our friends in the bloggerati, can help. Alone, none of these actions will create the bold institutional reforms our food system needs, but they’re a darn good start:

Last week Oxfam released a letter from 461 economists urging regulators to reign in excessive speculation on commodities that drives food price spikes and hunger:

http://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/pressreleases/461-economists-call-for-urgent-action-against-excessive-speculation-on-food-commodities

You can sign your own letter to the top regulator at the CFTC urging strong action here:

http://www.change.org/petitions/world-food-day-action-cftc-should-regulate-commodities-trading-2

Last month Oxfam revealed that major corporations are pushing poor farmers in the developing world off of their land and into hunger and poverty. Since our report release, farmers in Uganda who spoke out against land grabs have felt intimidation and harassment after questioning from the New Forests Company:

www.oxfamamerica.org/landgrab

You can send a letter to the CEO of the New Forests Company, 20% of which is owned by the major international bank HSBC, demanding that he take immediate action now to bring justice to these communities:

https://secure.oxfamamerica.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1273

Around the world, momentum is building behind a tiny tax on bankers that could generate billions of dollars to help with problems at home and overseas:

http://www.oxfam.org/en/campaigns/health-education/robin-hood-tax

You can add your voice to this campaign joining tens of thousands of other advocates in urging leaders of the G20 nations to put this tiny tax into place and help millions of people in the US and around the world get the health care, education, clean water, and nutritious food they need:

http://www.oxfam.org/en/campaigns/health-education/robin-hood-tax

Today’s guest blog is written by Vicky Rateau, the manager for Oxfam America’s new GROW campaign. It originally appeared at Civil Eats here.

The movement for reform to our flawed food system is growing stronger every day. Cooks, consumers, and campaigners alike are waking up in increasing numbers to the dangerous and unsustainable impacts of the way much of our food is grown, sold, and consumed.

This progress could not come at a more important moment. Our global food system works only for the few–for most of us it is broken. It leaves consumers lacking sufficient power and knowledge about what we buy and eat, and almost a billion people hungry worldwide, millions of whom live here in the U.S.

The failure of the system flows from failures of government–failures to regulate, to correct, to protect, to resist, to invest–which mean that companies, interest groups, and elites are able to plunder our resources and to redirect flows of finance, knowledge, and food to suit themselves.

And now we have entered an age of growing crisis, of shock piled upon shock: Vertiginous food price spikes and oil price hikes and devastating weather events that catch us somehow unaware and unprepared. Behind each of these slow-burn crises continue to smolder creeping and insidious climate change; growing inequality, chronic hunger, and vulnerability; and the erosion of our natural resources. The broken food system is both a driver of this fragility and highly vulnerable to it.

But all of this can change, and in fact it already is. Today Oxfam is launching our new campaign GROW. GROW is a campaign for the billions of us who eat food and the one and a half billion men and women who produce it. GROW is a campaign for a better future where we expose and overcome the threats we face and help build movements for a new era of prosperity.

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