Why We Do Policy
RAFI works with many types of farmers at varying points in the development and operation of their businesses. In the course of that work, we learn about what factors in the current system are either contributing to the success of their business or making it harder for them to make a living. When we see similar conditions impacting multiple farmers, they can usually be traced back to policies that create or intensify those conditions.
Policy shapes the environment in which farms thrive or fail, and determines the rules we play by. Policy shapes the structure of industries. Policy directs where and how we spend our tax dollars. Policy can build a system that continues to concentrate wealth and power with fewer and fewer people, or it can strive to make systems fair for individual farmers and communities.
Simply put, policy is a big lever. Those with the most wealth and power will continue to use that lever to consolidate their wealth and power. We believe that farmers, rural communities, and all those who labor in agriculture must also be at the table as policy is made.
Our Policy Principles
As we pursue policy to make this vision a reality, we aspire to the following principles:
- Our policy positions should be grounded in accountable relationships with the stakeholders who are affected by those policies. Our policy work is directly informed by the lessons we learn as we provide services to farmers and community members, then ground-truthed with them to make sure we are on the right track.
- Our policy work should build stakeholders’ skills to organize, lead, and pursue advocacy on their own.
- While recognizing and addressing the urgency of immediate crises, which are symptoms of bad policy, we must also take a systemic approach to our policy work and seek to address the root causes of the crises we see.
- We recognize that our agricultural system in the United States was, from its very beginning, built on racism, injustice, and exploitation, which continue today in many forms. We must address both the historical impact of this injustice and the ways it shapes our agricultural system today.
- It takes a movement. We collaborate with other organizations and coalitions to build critical mass for positive change.
What We Mean by “Policy”
Functionally, policy is any decision whose implementation will affect a large number of people — in our work, this usually means farmers.
Given the complexity of federal, state, and local governments, when we talk about “policy,” we mean not only the writing of a law (legislation, also called “authorization”) but also the way the law is interpreted (regulation and rule-making) and implemented. Good decisions at all three levels are necessary for a policy to be useful to farmers and rural communities. This means working with legislators in Congress as well as with implementing agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the NC Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
While RAFI’s recent policy work has been focused on federal policy, we have previously worked at the state level in North Carolina.
