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Final push for a better farm bill

Highlights

Visit the Food and Farm Blog
for the latest Farm Bill updates
and other delectable morsels

Visit Farm Policy News for intelligence on the Farm Bill

Take Action

Find out who the Conferees are and call them, as the Farm Bill goes into its final phase...

(maybe)

If you haven't yet, subscribe to Farm Bill Updates and Action Alerts

Background

Soon, the bill will be in Conference and the White House is threatening to veto it. Our partner, the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, has provided excellent primers on the various pieces of the Farm Bill:

Mainline denominations farm bill priniciples

PC(USA) on food, farm and agriculture

Learning More

What the farm bill is and is not

A Fair Farm Bill for the World's Hungry

Five oft-cited reasons for farm programs actually symptoms of a more basic reason

Industrial Livestock Companies’ Gains from Low Feed Prices

National Family Farm Coalition's Food and Farm Bill Backgrounder

Learn about cotton subsidies from Oxfam America site

Articles on cotton and farm bill reform

Visit Resources for additional educational resources

From God's initial command to be good stewards of creation to the Prophets' call for justice among governments and nations, people of faith in every age are called together to work for the common good. Inspired by Jesus' command to care for poor and hungry people, we join together to support policies that promote economic justice, strengthen rural communities at home and around the world, care for the land as God's creation, foster right relations among nations and achieve an end to hunger.

Contact Andrew Kang Bartlett to get involved


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]


Farming family in front of crops, hoop house, barn and house. Photo credit: David Abazs
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]

Your reactions and ideas are encouraged.
Please email or call (888) 728-7228 x5388.

Prepared by Andrew Kang Bartlett
Associate for National Hunger Concerns

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