Modern Hunger: How the Berkeley Student Farms Coalition Stands Up to Big Agriculture

Abalone shells at the Student Organic Gardening Association (SOGA), components of a larger shrine on the farm recognizing the Ohlone People. (Photo courtesy of Rosen.) 

In 2016, the American dairy industry dumped out over 43 million gallons of milk. Farmers poured gallon after gallon into fields, manure pits, and animal feed. The dairy industry had grown so large that the market was flooded with more milk than consumers wanted, and prices subsequently plummeted. In reaction, dairy farmers destroyed the excess produce to try to raise market prices and increase the industry’s profitability. At the same time, Hurricane Matthew left more than 800,000 Haitians in critical need of food, Yemen entered a civil war and famine that today threatens 14 million people with starvation, and Venezuela suffered through socioeconomic and political unrest that caused its average citizen to lose 24 pounds in 2017. Altogether, the global agriculture industry produces enough food to feed 1.5 times the world’s population. We generate more calories per person than we have at any point in history, and we do it with extreme efficiency. However, approximately 820 million people are currently at risk of starvation, and over 2 billion people suffer from chronic food insecurity. 

All this goes to show that modern famine is man-made. In the past, mass hunger could be blamed on physical scarcity — there quite literally was not enough food for every person. However, physical scarcity is a phenomenon that has long since been laid to rest by modern agricultural technology. Today, there is always an excess amount of food in the world. We’ve reached a point in civilization where hunger has only human causes. 

Here in Berkeley, grassroots activists are working to eliminate the hunger gap. One group is the Berkeley Student Farms Coalition (BSF). BSF is composed of eight small farms spread across the UC Berkeley campus and surrounding area. Though the farms themselves have existed for many years, the cross-campus coalition was only established in June of 2019.  

BSF aims to relieve food insecurity for the populations most exploited by Big Agriculture, which are primarily communities of color and especially indigenous people. As part of every gardening session, the members of BSF make a land acknowledgement to the Ohlone people whose territory we currently occupy here in Berkeley. The acknowledgement, permanently posted on the BSF website, reads: “We acknowledge that our farms and gardens are built on unceded Lisjan Ohlone land in the Village of Huichin, and that they continue to benefit from the legacy and structure of settler colonialism.” UC Berkeley senior Felix Rosen—a manager at one of the eight BSF locations, the Student Organic Gardening Association (SOGA)—spoke with me about this relationship between Big Agriculture and indigenous populations. “Big Agriculture, industrial agriculture, has been designed to exclude people,” Rosen says, “and that exclusion first and foremost involves the violent expropriation of indigenous people from land.” In addition to their land acknowledgement, BSF is currently building partnerships with indigenous groups in Berkeley (such as Cafe Ohlone and the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust), and last year paid a Shuumi land tax to the Ohlone people.

BSF’s most notable contribution to food justice is through its partnership with the Basic Needs Food Pantry, an emergency food relief center within UC Berkeley’s Basic Needs Center (open to any individual affiliated with UC Berkeley). In 2019, BSF provided 50% of the Pantry’s produce, according to Rosen. As of December 2020 the Pantry served 2,271 unique visitors during the 2020-2021 academic year. 82% of these visitors were UCB employees, 14.7% were undergraduates, and 3.3% were graduate students. 

Rosen describes BSF’s mission as trying to “feed the people who have been systematically excluded from agriculture and the industry of food.” This exclusion is the result of several economic factors, not just Big Agriculture. Recall that 82% of the 2020-2021 visitors to the Food Pantry were UC Berkeley employees. Worker’s rights advocacy is a long-fought and ongoing issue on the UCB campus and in the wider UC system. In May of 2019, two of the largest UC unions (the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Local 3299 and the University Professional and Technical Employees-Communications Workers of America) went on strike to protest the outsourcing of UC jobs to private companies. The frequency with which UC employees must rely on the Basic Needs Food Pantry is the result of two institutions exploiting the same population. First, the UC fails to provide its workers with adequate compensation. Second, Big Agriculture drives up market prices by destroying excess produce. This leaves UCB employees without sufficient purchasing power to access nutritional food (a problem which afflicts much of America’s working class). One can thus see how the fight for food justice is intertwined with a larger, societal issue of industrial exploitation that includes worker’s rights and income inequality. 

The exploitation enacted by Big Agriculture also damages ecological balance. BSF, unlike Big Agriculture, utilizes agroecology to ensure sustainability. Agroecology, as Rosen explains, is a “practice that responds to Big Agriculture and the harmful practices that degrade ecological systems.” In keeping with agroecology, SOGA enforces a “no till” policy to protect the land from degradation, and instead of subscribing to monoculture crops (popular in commercial farming), SOGA rotates crops to keep the soil healthy. 

Ultimately, food justice is an issue about the exploitation of land and people started by settler colonialism and maintained today by unrestricted capitalism. It is about ensuring access to nutritional meals, and thus protecting the human right to a healthy life. To eliminate the hunger gap, it will be necessary to forge systems focused on building local and international communities. This does not necessarily imply the dismantling of capitalism, but it does mean that capitalism in its current form must be restructured. 

The mass inequality we witness today in regard to food access can be remedied, and independent farms like BSF are on the front lines of the movement.