Build Back Better: Healthier Food Systems
Build Back Healthier Food Systems
Help power change. It takes support from environmental champions like you to build a more healthy and just world.
Building back better food systems means making three fundamental shifts: from toxic and chemical intensive to healthy and ecologically regenerative; from corporate controlled to democratically governed; and from a system that embodies the deepest inequities in our society to one that advances justice and fulfills the needs of all eaters and producers now and in the future. To build back better, we need to:
Ban toxic pesticides
Our government must protect people and pollinators from toxic pesticides.
Congress and the Biden Administration must reverse Trump’s environmental rollbacks, starting with banning brain-damaging chlorpyrifos. Regulatory and legislative reforms, including banning bee-killing pesticides and reforming the rules by which EPA approves pesticides in the first place, are also critical federal actions.
Tackle corporate consolidation
Congress and the Administration must act boldly to reduce corporate consolidation in the food system.
The Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act should become law and the federal government should pursue robust antitrust enforcement, including breaking up the largest food and agriculture corporations.
Phase out factory farming
We must phase out factory farming, while fostering a just transition to more climate-friendly, equitable and ecologically regenerative food systems.
We must retool and massively expand existing programs like the Conservation Stewardship Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program to reward farmers for regenerative farming. The Farm System Reform Act, which would place a moratorium on new factory farms, should become law. The Biden Administration should also significantly curb greenhouse gas emissions from industrial agriculture, including tracking and mandating methane reductions from factory farms.
Support farmers
The federal government must address the needs of small, sustainable and historically disadvantaged farmers.
Congress should pass, and the President should sign, the Justice for Black Farmers Act into law and the USDA must reverse decades of discrimination against Black farmers and other farmers of color.
Revamp school food
We should revamp the federal school food program to serve healthier and more climate-friendly food.
Over 29 million children — many from low income families — would benefit from this policy shift.