Local Food Under Attack! Defend Community Self-Governance!
| |
At the federal level, all seems lost. With former Monsanto lawyer-lobbyist Michael Taylor ruling as Food Safety Czar, it’s little wonder that the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) – granted vast new powers under the Food Safety Modernization Act – continues to criminalize family farmers who keep a few cows, pigs or chickens and sell to their neighbors, while ignoring poultry laced with arsenic and illegal antibiotics, MRSA-tainted pork and pink slime.
At the local level, people are finding ways to defend local farmers from federal attack. In March 2011, the town of Sedgwick, Maine, population 1,012, became the first town in the United States to declare its "food sovereignty" by passing a Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance. To date, six towns in Hancock County, Maine, have passed the ordinance, as have localities in Vermont, Massachusetts, and California. Food sovereignty laws have been introduced at the state level in Georgia, Montana, North Carolina, Utah and Wyoming.
Blue Hill is one of the five Maine towns with a Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance. Last November, Dan Brown, owner of Gravelwood Farm in Blue Hill, Maine, was served notice that he is being sued by the State of Maine for selling food and milk without State licenses, a direct challenge to the local law.
Local food sovereignty supporters are mobilizing to protect Farmer Brown and defend the ordinance. On April 17, the We Are All Farmer Brown Campaign will deliver a petition signed by over 2,300 people to Gov. Paul LePage asking him to drop the lawsuit against Dan Brown and Gravelwood Farm.
Act Now to Defend Local Food Sovereignty!
Go to Augusta, Maine on April 17th
If you can’t go to Augusta, bring Farmer Brown to your community by showing the film about him, and his brave stand to defend food sovereignty, called, You Wanted to Be a Farmer. This could inspire your community to pass a Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance.