Racial Equity in Organic - NOC's Accountability & Focus
As NOC, we acknowledge our own privilege as a mostly white organization. We acknowledge the institutional racism that has formed our current agricultural food system, and continues to impact people’s relationships with their food, their communities, their access to land, their relationship to agriculture, and with one another as individuals.
Accountability
As a coalition, we are committing to prioritizing racial equity in our organization and strategies, and have committed to listen, understand, learn, amplify, work, and act to address and dismantle systemic racism. We are holding ourselves accountable to ensure this is a deep, long term, and sustainable commitment.
In the fall of 2019, we created a “Racial Equity Statement”, setting our intentions as we prioritize this crucial work. In this statement, we listed some actions we committed ourselves to taking. While we realize there is urgency to the work of antiracism, there is also an absolute need to be thoughtful, careful, and intentional with each step we take, particularly as a currently mostly white organization.
Recently, we developed indicators for each action we outlined in our statement, holding ourselves accountable to making deep and continuous progress as an organization.
Some of these accountability measures include:
Holding a monthly racial equity learning space for coalition members.
Having each NOC team member attend a formal racial equity training each year.
Identifying and documenting barriers to accessing organic certification for underrepresented communities.
Including findings in publicly available blog posts and NOSB Comment submissions.
We will be checking progress on these accountability measures quarterly, and issuing a report on progress achieved in the summer of each year.
Barriers to organic certification
We know farmers of color are underrepresented and racist policies and institutions have continuously robbed people of color of their land and access to farming. As a result, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, 92% of organic farmers are white (94% of conventional farmers are). At the Pittsburgh pre-NOSB meeting in the fall of 2019, the organic advocates present acknowledged that although the underrepresentation of farmers of color is not singular to organic, “we” as a community need to do better. Meeting attendees agreed that organic needs to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive to meet its inherent purpose.
An obvious first step to reach this goal is to understand the issue: what has led the current farming demographics to be the way it is today? Our coalition members are sharing information with each other, and gathering a list of resources publicly available here. A second, parallel step, is to understand the barriers specific to organic. This is where NOC’s platform and network can most directly move the needle. We are building relationships with organizations led by farmers of color, seeking information, and being active listeners.
NOC will be publishing additional blog posts in the coming months to update coalition members, network affiliates, and the broader organic community both about the processes we are building to become an equitable and anti-racist coalition, and some of the findings around barriers to accessing organic certification for communities of color.
Note
As always, we welcome and strongly encourage any type of feedback. Please do not hesitate to reach out to Alice, NOC Coalition Manager, at alice@nationalorganiccoalition.org.