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Suggestions
As part of Food, Farming and Economic Globalization: North America Consultation, participants formulated a number of suggestions for future work on globalization and food issues, including:
Attitudes
- Savor food. Make eating together a celebration. Live with a spirit of gratitude.
- Recognize that stewardship does not equal frugality. In today's marketplace, responsible choices are not always the least expensive.
Actions
- Buy locally grown products, and fairly-traded products, including coffee, for church events.
- Build relationships between producers and consumers. Create urban-rural links.
- Reconnect to the land through such activities as recovery of self provisioning skills (garden mentors, church gardens). Encourage retired gardeners to mentor young people so they can learn gardening and food preservation skills.
- Build and strengthen communities through food-related activities.
- Make nutritious food, including fresh fruits and vegetables, available to those on the lowest economic rungs; seek economically just societies in which there are good jobs and adequate incomes for all people, so that everyone can afford nutritious food.
- Reflect theologically on food, land and care of the earth in our churches, schools and institutions.
- Embrace a "manna-based" food system in which everyone has enough and no one has too much (2 Cor. 8).
- Help our churches become places for discernment, support and accountability for our choices as producers and consumers. Challenge consumption how much is enough?
- Help young farmers buy agricultural land from older farmers to ensure its use for food production.
- Support farmers who treat employees well. Befriend migrant workers and promote fair labor and immigration laws.
- Bring together Mexican, American and Canadian farmers (including non-Mennonites).
- Promote peacemaking in rural congregations divided by competing agribusiness interests. Help deflect feelings of fear and judgment when some farmers make changes. *Model respectful listening.
- Provide training about food systems in MCC worker orientation and through materials for the wider MCC constituency
- Create a database of stories, gifts and agricultural adaptations that MCCers have gained from global experience.
Public Policy Advocacy
- In pursuit of affirming dignity, community and healthy relationships and protecting and sustaining natural resources and the Human Right to Adequate Food,
- Public policies, both domestic and international, should permit priority to local production for local consumption.
- International agricultural trade policies should ensure stable fair exchange that provides sustainable livelihoods for those involved.
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