Agriculture and Food Systems

Chemicalized and industrialized corporate agribusiness is driving family farmers off the land, rural America into depression, and ecosystems to collapse while failing to end hunger and malnutrition. This corporate agribusiness model is also depleting water aquifers and soils and driving insects to extinction, all leading to the collapse of ecosystems and food production itself. The Wall Street parties, funded by agribusiness giants, are fully complicit in the degradation of our agriculture and food systems for corporate profit.

We need a rural reconstruction program that revitalizes agriculture and reintegrates town and country, with a just transition to organic agriculture and green manufacturing. We support sustainable agroecological practices and Food Sovereignty - the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. We must transition to sustainable agriculture and food systems that will ensure environmental health, economic profitability for working farmers, and social and economic equity. 

A Jill Stein administration will:

  • Socialize big agribusiness and dismantle the corporate oligopolies that control the farm input industry (seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, machinery) and the food and fiber processing industry into cooperatives and public enterprises democratically owned by and serving consumers and working farmers
  • Provide technical and financial assistance for regenerative organic agriculture, permaculture, and sustainable forestry
  • Increase investments in urban food systems to increase access to nutritious foods while also fostering local and regional circular agro-economies
  • Support the use of natural systems to absorb carbon
  • Democratize food production*
  • Rapidly phase out the use of biocides, chemical fertilizers and corporate farms
  • Ensure parity pricing and supply management programs that guarantee working farmers a decent income above production costs
  • Mandate living wages and fair labor standards for farmworkers and other food workers
  • Support land reform and a new homesteading program to give new farmers access to land and farming resources
  • Support diversified green manufacturing in rural towns based on biodegradable agricultural feedstocks
  • Ban pesticides, herbicides, neonicotinoids, and all other known carcinogens or neurotoxins from public use
  • Protect public lands, water supplies, biodiversity, parks and green spaces
  • Phase out plastics as much as possible, starting with single-use plastics 
  • Use the Precautionary Principle to fully investigate all new products, substances, and technologies before widespread introduction
  • Ensure justice for Black farmers
  • Codify Rights of Nature

“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” -Chief Seattle