Choking on Column About Agriculture

James Flanigan’s “Agriculture’s Example Is Food for Thought” (March 3) goes a long way to sound like a promotional piece for corporate agriculture.

What Flanigan and other boosters of the increasingly global nature of our food system fail to acknowledge is the cost to all of us of this “system”: deadly pesticides (that do not even try for approval in the U.S.), loss of our topsoil at disaster-producing levels, farm worker illness and disintegration of the small family farm.

We also ultimately pay (via our taxes) for marketing of U.S. entities such as McDonald’s or Sunkist in places like Russia or Thailand, as well as in large cash outlays to nonfarmers.

Here in Los Angeles, many of us are working not only to ameliorate the effects of hunger, but also to build a more sustainable, accessible, affordable food system for all.

The city-sponsored Volunteer Advisory Council on Hunger has proposed a Los Angeles Hunger and Food Security Partnership to review city policy as it relates to food and hunger issues, making recommendations to the City Council and the mayor and fostering food--related community economic development projects throughout the city.

While it is increasingly difficult to steer the Titanic that is American agriculture, efforts in Los Angeles for a more secure food system do have a chance of success.

CAROLYN OLNEY

Associate Director

Interfaith Hunger Coalition

Los Angeles