I appreciate your invitation to have me speak this noon.
The National Catholic Rural Life Conference was founded 78 years ago in 1923 in the library at St. Louis University, In the 1930's Monsignor Luigi Ligutti became NCRLC's President and Executive Secretary. Ligutti had founded a highly successful rural community development project in Granger, Iowa with the support of the Roosevelt administration. This project was meant to help hungry mining families in Iowa who had become displaced. It provided a solution to physical hunger, the hunger for community and the hunger for God. Monsignor Ligutti believed that ethic and religious diversity would be a key to success. So he invited Catholics, Protestants, and mixed marriage families to participate. In addition, he invited Italians, Germans, and Croatians to become founding family members. Each family got some acreage for their own food production; a building was constructed for community meetings to cement the community together. And while the community had a mixed religious community, everyone understood that there was a spirituality informing the project at its very heart.
This community development project, a faith based initiative with federal government support, in the 1930s stands as a contrast to that advocated by the current Bush nominee for the position of undersecretary of Rural Development, Iowan Mr. Thomas Dorr who praises homogeneity as the basis for successful rural development, saw large scale hog confinement operations as the road to economic success in Iowa's pork production, and opposed Iowa state government support for sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.
In 1980 the National Catholic Rural Life Conference led in a series of listening sessions in rural America which eventuated in a pastoral letter: "Strangers and Guests, Toward Community in the Heartland." The opening paragraph of "Strangers and Guests" of 20 years ago can be applied to today: "We are witnessing profound and disturbing changes in rural America. Land ownership is being restructured, agricultural production is becoming more heavily industrialized and concentrated in fewer hands and the earth is all too frequently is being subjected to harmful farming, mining and development practices. Such changes are adversely affecting our rural people, their way of life, their land and the wider national and international communities which depend on them to satisfy their hunger." (Strangers and Guests, page 1, paragraph 1).
Children in the rural America increasingly require food to be provided during school hours because there is inadequate food at home. School child participation in school lunch programs averages about thirty percent. But in some locations upwards of a 400 % increase has been described. Farm families report that some parents take turns eating. From North Dakota to Texas food shortages have grown as reflected in the reports of the food banks from these areas. Food bank use has grown significantly as shown by case samples of counties in Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Texas as reported in a University of Wisconsin study. In a recent report from the largest food bank in the country, Second Harvest there is talk of parents who go hungry so their kids can eat, who put off paying utility and phone bills, who insist that their children attend remedial summer-school programs simply so that they can get a meal. "Families are struggling in a way they haven’t done for a long time," said Brian Loring, executive director of Neighborhood Centers of Johnson County, Iowa, which provides lunches to more than 200 kids at five locations during this summer. It probably is startling to hear the dimensions of physical hunger in the heartland, where our Governor of Iowa speaks of our state as "the food capitol of the world."
"Trampled Dreams" a recent study from the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Nebraska documents widespread poverty and hunger in agriculturally based communities of the Great Plains. Hispanic populations in the midwest have grown tremendously in the past five years. Iowa and Nebraska’s Hispanic populations, for example, grew by more than 150 percent in the last decade. Asian and Pacific Islanders grew by nearly 50 % in Iowa and 86 % in Nebraska. These are the people who process our food. They spend most of what they earn on housing, leaving little remaining to feed themselves.
A proud generation of farmers and ranchers in the world's most advanced agricultural society is depending on donations of food from social service agencies, church pantries and soup kitchens to feed their families. The rural poverty rate is 23 percent higher than in urban communities and in some areas it's nearly three times the national average. Some farmers in the United States have lived below the poverty line for more than 40 years.
In one of the major food production, processing, and retailing centers in the world, in rural America. Physical hunger is not diminishing, it is increasing.
When they are polled, rural America residents prefer to live in rural America. But rural America communities are being displaced, places depopulated by an alternative dynamic, the hunger for profit. The rural America is the home of Monsanto, IBP, Archer Daniels Midlands, ConAgra, Cargill, Pioneer Hybred, Wal-Mart, and on and on. These are the leading food companies in the world. They and a few others control livestock, grain, and poultry processing and production. Wal-Mart is the world’s leading retailer. It is the US’s leading food retailer. Food is looked upon as merely a commodity, listen to the former head of ADM: Dwight Andreas: "The food business is far and away the most important business in the world. Everything else is a luxury. Food is what you need to sustain life every day. Food is fuel. You can’t run a tractor without fuel, and you can’t run a human being without it either. Food is the absolute beginning." (Dwayne Andreas, ADM, Reuters, 1/25/99). And each company is eating up the smaller ones. Regularly the food cartels advertise over the public airwaves, on radio and television conveying their image of themselves as moral leaders trying to save wildlife, feed the starving, and take care of the poor. The biotechnology companies have a $50 million dollar campaign to convince the public that they have only the best intentions in the world. They are promoting "golden rice" claiming it "could" cure blindness in Asian children and back up their claims with million dollar full page ads in the New York Times.
The livestock companies have their Meat Institute and the Poultry companies have the Chicken Council. Remember for years the Tobacco Institute served Tobacco companies the same way, educating the public based upon "sound science" that there were no risks to smoking cigarettes.
The problem of hunger in rural America cannot be understood apart from the globalization goals and practices of most of the major food cartels that make their home in the rural America, extracting its wealth and exporting it for profit. And so we have a worldwide economic El Nino which travels the globe uprooting families, devastating communities, exploiting low wage workers, extracting resources, flooding locales with capital and extracting plunder, buying politicians and disrupting democratic processes.
Already it is doubtful that we have really free or fair markets. In current market concentration, a few rural American firms control 45 percent or more of the markets for poultry, meat, beef, pork, lamb, wheat, soybeans, and corn processing. These firms have consolidated grain, egg, poultry production; they are gaining on beef and pork production and they are rapidly closing the door on diversified seed production. Since processing firms purchase products from the farmers, this creates only a few markets for each of the major agricultural products. Farmers and farmworkers are in the same place: at the bottom of the food chain! And dramatically, rural communities are shutting down leaving the best landscapes for wealthier amenity seekers.
Meanwhile, "Big Food" brings us increasing foodborne illnesses. The Center for Disease Control asserts an increase in foodborne diseases is linked to food industry consolidation and the decrease in effective microbe resistance in humans from the antibiotics used to industrialize animals for large confinement facilities. Hudson Foods of Nebraska went out of business due to E.Coli for which they had to recall millions of pounds of beef. Egg farms and broiler factories hold millions of chickens. One winter’s Hong Kong chicken flu was attributed to densely packed poultry creating a breeding ground for a mutant flu. From Minnesota to Texas, large confinement animal operations are being constructed threatening local communities, fouling air and water, threatening human health, market access for small producers, exploiting immigrants, abusing animals.
The global economic El Nino is creating a fecal flood, a veritable deluge of animal waste on a scale such as a Noah could imagine. Predatory firms are creating Jurasic Parks out of bucolic family farm regions, they exploit immigrant labor and despoil our watersheds. They promise technological marvels. Their results are dinosaur disasters like a deadzone in the gulf, antibiotic resistance in our bodies, fishkills by the millions, the depopulation of rural America, increases in respiratory illnesses threatening the many rural America elderly with the dangers of pneumonia and increased physical hunger in our families: roblems for which our federal government provides excuses and our state governments hide their heads in the sand, lest they lose these engines of "economic development."
So the hunger for community in rural America is sundered by the hunger for profits of the large multinational food corporations. They are doing to us what they’ve always done: maximizing profits, externalizing as many costs as possible, and colonizing our lifeworlds in the same way they have countries to the south.
At the National Catholic Rural Life Conference we have a campaign directed at eaters, those who shape the structure of agriculture and the structure of our food system. It is part of our effort to support sustainable agriculture and a major part of the collaborative partnership we have been proud to be a part of with our friends in the family farm/sustainable agriculture communities. By our choices we shape the world. Do you purchase food from retailers who support family farmers? Do you eat food that was grown by farmers who treated their animals with dignity and respect, who raised the animals humanely? Are there farmworkers, mushroom pickers, apple warehouse workers, chicken catchers, vegetable pickers, processing plant workers, immigrant laborers involved in your food preferences? Does your food habit contribute to global climate change? Is the food you eat part of a sustainable food system that contributes to the well being of unknown future generations, to a healthy environment, to a local community in a rural or urban area which has a great deal of vitality. Or will the food you eat come from a system which depopulates the countryside and demeans farmers, farmworkers, food process workers, corporate executives and their families?

Eating is a moral act. We are what we eat!

Eating is a moral act. Our tables need to include those who've been excluded. Our talk needs to include our farmers, their families, the rural communities, our environment, our landscape, our countryside, religious and moral values. We are what we eat. By our choices we shape our world. Let us continue as the Iowa Food Policy Council to try to change the world into a place of justice and peace. Let us continue to shape a more equitable, environmental food system. Let us continue to promote an economy of location and not just an economy of scale, to foster an expanded role for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, the Practical Farmers of Iowa, the Iowa Network for Community Agriculture, and other institutional carriers of the New Agriculture, which is not all hog lots and biotechnology, and which is not either a pining for quaint good old country days. We need to add in every community the important social roles of community based food circles, a food system local entrepreneurial facilitators, local committees to work on import replacement projects. We need to keep on this work for creation, for biodiversity, for democratic empowerment and inclusiveness. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. WE are on our way! To a new, creative, healing side of the agricultural street in Iowa. To a new agricultural future in Iowa. Eating is a moral act. As eaters we can shape a new agri-culture in Iowa, and provide in our fields, new opportunities for new possibilities.


Thank you. Resources:
Catholic Charities USA study available on www.catholiccharitiesusa.org
1999 Parish Social Ministry Survey

Center for Rural Affairs: www.cfra.org
Trampled Dreams

Center on Hunger & Poverty, Brandeis : www.centeronhunger.org
Household Food Security Study Summaries, 2001

Food Research and Action Center: www.frac.org
Hunger in the US

National Council of Churches : www.ncccusa.org
(click on "A to Z Index" (Welfare Reform Survey)

National Farmers Union: www.nfu.org
Concentration Studies: 1999, 2000

Second Harvest: www.secondharvest.org
Hunger 1997: The Faces & Facts

The United States Conference of Mayors: www.usmayors.org
A Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness in America’s Cities: 2000
December 2000