Cotton: The Great Depression for African Farmers
By Christi Boyd, PC(USA) Mission Personnel

At the age of 39, Abdullaye Djara is the father of 12 children. Like most of the rural poor in northern Cameroon, his family subsists by farming millet, beans and peanuts and by growing cotton as a supplementary cash crop to pay for health and educational expenses. [Read more]

Farm Bill Reauthorization:
Imagining a Sustainable Living Bill

By Leslie G. Woods, Associate, Presbyterian Washington Office

“Give us this day our daily bread,” we pray. Wrapped into the prayer Jesus taught us to pray is an appeal that no one go hungry, even for a day. Indeed, if the Lord’s Prayer reflects a vision of earth “as it is in heaven,” we are called by Jesus and by our own prayers to take active steps to ensure that each person has daily bread: no more, no less. [Read more]

Presbyterian Hunger Program Organizes for Food and Farm Bill Reform
By Fritz Gutwein, Farm Bill Reform Organizer, PHP

The Farm Bill touches everyone in this country (and many outside the U.S.)— everyone who eats, and especially those who struggle to have enough to eat.
This year, people of faith are turning their attention to the food polices of our nation and how they are shaped by the Farm Bill. [Read more]

Farm family on their Round River Farm in Finland, Minnesota

A Better Farm Bill:

"If you eat, you can't afford to yawn!"

"Oh yeah?" (Yawn…)

Just give me a chance here. It was a rain-drenched Friday afternoon, and people gathered at Bellarmine University in Louisville to learn everything they could about the Farm Bill. To call it the Farm Bill is misleading, because this federal legislation - due for review and renewal this year - should be called the Nutrition, Farm, Health, Energy, Environment and Rural Development Bill since it covers so much of what shapes our food system and society. [Read more]

PC(USA) on food, farm and agriculture

General Assembly Statements on Agriculture
Whenever the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) addresses the complex question of the nation’s food and farm policies, we refer to a General Assembly faith conviction “that God our Creator has made the world for everyone, and desires that all shall have daily bread” (UPCUSA, Minutes, 1979, p. 189). This underlying conviction of a right to food shapes convictions about agriculture and rural life in this country.

For almost half a century, various General Assemblies have spoken strongly in support of “the family farm as basic to a sound agricultural economy.” [Read more]

We Are What We Eat
The 2002 PC(USA) General Assembly report describes the revolution in food and farm policy and recommendations on how to shape a food system that is just, healthy and sustainable. [Download the report]

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