Food First

Food First, also known as the Institute for Food and Development Policy, is a nonprofit think tank located in Oakland, California. Its goal is to analyze the causes of global hunger, poverty, and ecological degradation and to work with social movements to develop solutions. Food First carries out research, analysis, advocacy, and education, empowering farmers and communities to achieve three interconnected goals: wrest control of the food system from transnational agrofood industries, claim their right to define their own food and agricultural systems, and ensure access to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods.

Food First was founded in 1975 by Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins. Both were groundbreaking researchers and authors. Lappé's Diet for a Small Planet was among the first tomes to connect individual eating practices to ecological degradation and world hunger, whereas Collins's Global Reach focused on the effect of multinational corporations on poverty in the global South. The two met at the first World Food Day shortly before founding the organization. Food First continues its founders’ tradition of publishing. Early highlights include Lappé and Collins's Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity and David Weir and Mark Shapiro's Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World. Circle of Poison contributed to the formation of the Pesticide Action Network, a leader in the pesticide reform movement.

Food First studies and publicizes the effects of the international political economy and political ecology on food and hunger. Its work uses food as a lens to critique global public policies such as U.S. involvement in Central America and the rise of neoliberal privatization and deregulation. It has inspired thousands of students, educators, and citizens to better understand that hunger is not a consequence of lack of food but of policies designed to maximize wealth at the expense of people's abilities to meet their most fundamental needs.

Food First is aligned with social movements opposing the architects of corporate globalization and takes particular issue with structural adjustment programs requiring poor nations to privatize resources in exchange for development aid. In addition to research and education, it has enacted this opposition through strategies ranging from congressional briefings to nonviolent protest. Notable publications in this area include Walden Bello's The Future in the Balance: Essays on Globalization and Resistance and current Executive Director Eric Holt-Gimenez's Ten Reasons Why the Rockefeller and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations’ Alliance for Another Green Revolution Will Not Solve the Problems of Poverty and Hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In addition to its critique of transnational agribusiness, Food First envisions an alternative model that meets the needs of small producers and low-income consumers. To this end, it opposes the development and planting of genetically modified foods, which deepen producers’ reliance on agribusiness corporations while threatening both human and environmental health. Instead, they support organic farming and agroecology, as well as local, farmer-led control of food policies. Food First has published many works opposing genetically modified organisms, including Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer's Breakfast of Biodiversity: The Truth About Rain Forest Destruction and Miguel Altieri's Genetic Engineering in Agriculture: The Myths, Environmental Risks, and Alternatives.

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