When we fight for wildlife and wild places, we’re also fighting for a better life for humanity. We work to address the overconsumption of beef because it drives climate change, deforestation, and the slaughter of native wildlife like wolves. We take on the factory farms that pollute waterways and harm marine life and vulnerable human communities. We fight pesticide applications that poison our food, farmworkers, and ecosystems too.
The health of people and the health of ecosystems are both threatened by the same systems of exploitation. That’s clear in Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ embrace of anti-immigration and anti-diversity policies, which imperil the U.S. food system and everyone who depends on it.
Since President Donald Trump took office in January, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has unleashed a string of harmful actions targeting immigrants and other vulnerable populations. What I’m sharing below is just a few examples. Read Center Food and Agriculture Policy Specialist Leah Kelly’s excellent Medium post for a full rundown of the USDA’s recent vile undertakings.
SNAP, WIC, and other food-assistance programs are vital components in the humane effort to help food-insecure families. But following Trump’s lead, the USDA is working hard to keep undocumented immigrants, people with temporary protected status, and DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipients from participating in these lifesaving programs. Without food assistance, millions of vulnerable people will suffer more nutritional insecurity.
The U.S. food system relies on the labor of immigrants, who make up a major portion of food workers and farmworkers, especially in the dairy industry. Yet the administration has been harassing them, conducting raids on orchards, dairy farms, meatpacking facilities, and restaurants.
Meanwhile the Department of Labor has announced that it will stop enforcing a Biden-era rule that protected immigrants who came to work on U.S. farms. That’s inhumane, and many farms won’t survive without the labor of hardworking migrants, who are already some of the most exploited workers in the United States.
The USDA’s attacks on small farmers continue through the termination of millions of DEI-related contracts and grants that supported farmers in low-income urban areas, local Tribal communities, community-supported agriculture, and more — the key life support for healthy and sustainable food in these communities.
As we all know, school food is a primary source of nutrition for many children in the United States. With your help, the Center works to make sure children are fed healthy, sustainable, wildlife-friendly meals — but the Trump administration is trying to stop children from receiving food and nutritional support.
The USDA has also rescinded guidelines that prohibit discrimination against LGBTQIA+ students in school meal programs and declared it will no longer consider race and sex as socially disadvantaged designations in pandemic assistance, indemnity payments, farm loans, and conservation programs.
We know of several other frozen programs, including the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which serve fresh local foods from small farms to schools and food banks.
The agency also canceled funding for the Patrick Leahy Farm to School Program — an exceptional example of connecting local communities and farmers with school meals — and ended the program running regional food business centers. These attacks not only hurt children and small farmers but limit access to sustainable food security across the nation.
The USDA has gleefully gutted climate and environmental initiatives. It canceled the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, a $3 billion flagship conservation program popular among farmers for its help boosting public and private investment in climate-smart projects. Although the Center has had our criticisms of the program, its cancellation destroys the hard work of well-intentioned farmers and efforts to deploy meaningful climate solutions in food and farming.
And the harms don’t stop there. The agency has also canceled the Working Lands Conservation Corps and ended contracts through the Equity in Conservation Outreach Program, as well as pausing payments through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program; the Conservation Stewardship Program; and Conservation Outreach, Education and Technical Assistance.
All these efforts to destabilize programs and reorganize the department are an attempt to weaken our work for a sustainable future. But we’re fighting back. Stay tuned for more about our ongoing legal, legislative, and other work to bring justice to the food system and fight for a healthy planet.
And you can do one thing right now to fight Big Agriculture’s toxic hold on our food system:
Tell the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ban pesticides that other countries already consider too dangerous to use.
Get ready for the Food Justice Film Festival
The Center’s sixth annual Food Justice Film Festival is just around the corner, on Oct. 23 - Oct. 26. Indigenous food sovereignty, BIPOC land reclamation and agricultural heritage, community foodways, and food access are just some of the themes it will explore. In the next Food X, you can sign up to watch the films — as well as interviews with people behind them — for free.
For the wild,
