THE BEAST AND THE SMILER
“What can one believe quite safe if the world itself is shaken, and its most solid parts totter to their fall … and the earth loses its chief characteristic, stability?”
Among the diverse responses to this week’s election results, it is probably significant that for so many (myself included) the reaction was primarily somatic – a feeling of being sick to the stomach. Like finding out you were being cheated on, that it had been going on for a long time, and that it was at least partly your fault. Media bubbles are surprisingly solid until they aren’t. In any case, it seems like what Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has been calling “forgotten rural America” will be getting more attention and analysis in the coming months. CivilEats article from a couple weeks ago linking Trump to the farm crisis in the 1980s is a good place to start. Market analysts are predicting that 2017 will see many of the commodity price pressures for farmers that brought about the downfall of so many family farms in the 80s.
As for how farming and food systems will fare during Trump’s presidency, Eater has a review of the implications for food policy. The president-elect’s love of fast food is well documented and interesting in light of Aimee Hosemann’s article at Savage Minds about diet and identity, specifically on veganism and religious conversion. Arturo Rodriguez from the United Farm Workers explained their endorsement for Hillary in an interview last week, most notably saying that Trump has little awareness of the role migrant labor plays in enabling the US food system. It remains to be seen how Trump’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric will impact farms and farmers on both sides of the US-Mexican border.
While there may be a slew of bad news coming out of the border region (see: deforestation for avocado plantations and the social costs of export agriculture in Baja), recent attention to the traditional acequia system of commons water management is cause for at least some comfort. The National Young Farmers Coalition has an interview, and the Agrarian Trust’s Our Land 2 symposium is going on all November.