HEAL FOOD ALLIANCE ENDORSES CHAIRWOMAN STABENOW’S FARM BILL FOR RURAL PROSPERITY AND URGES SWIFT BIPARTISAN ACTION
The Senate farm bill includes key HEAL priorities, such as support for small farmers, climate resilience, and nutrition assistance, but falls short on worker protections.
November 18, 2024
NATIONAL – With just weeks left in her tenure, U.S. Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) introduced the “Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act,” a Senate draft of the farm bill that includes many of the HEAL Food Alliance’s top priorities, such as additional funding to enhance rural prosperity and expand access to nutrition. The HEAL Food Alliance, a national coalition of health, environment, agriculture, and labor organizations, welcomes the introduction of this long overdue bill and urges the Senate to swiftly advance negotiations towards its passage.
“We’re glad to finally see a measure that reflects the needs of people working across the food system,” said Nichelle Harriott, Policy Director at the HEAL Food Alliance. “Our members have told us again and again that they need a farm bill that includes essential protections for food and farm workers who continue to endure hazardous working conditions and exploitative labor practices, disaster relief for small farmers facing climate-related challenges, and critical safeguards to reduce hunger, including continued support for vital nutrition assistance programs like SNAP. There’s still a lot of work to be done to ensure full equity and sustainability but this bill is a promising step in the right direction.”
The Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act mirrors the partisan Senate framework released in May 2024. According to Chairwoman Stabenow, who retires at the end of this Congress, the bill “builds off the proposal by investing new resources and including innovative, new ideas to deliver the assistance farmers need faster.”
Specifically the bill:
- Allocates $20 billion in new resources for beginning, underserved, and small farmers, and those burdened by severe weather and reduced incomes;
- Invests $8.5 billion to expand access to nutrition assistance programs like SNAP, benefitting vulnerable populations like seniors, college students, and military families;
- Leverages the Inflation reduction Act (IRA) funding to support climate-related conservation programs, helping farmers build resilience to climate change, and incorporating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) into conservation practice standards;
- Holds corporations accountable for violating labor laws like child labor, and prohibits the USDA from awarding contracts to these bad actors.
However, as HEAL noted earlier this year, the bill still falls short by omitting critical protections for meatpacking workers from dangerous line speeds, as outlined in the Protecting American Meatpacking Workers Act (PAMWA), and fails to address the pressing need for heat protections for workers exposed to extreme temperatures.
The HEAL Food Alliance urges Congressional leaders to prioritize swift, bipartisan action to pass a transformative farm bill that truly supports working people, vulnerable communities, and our environment. We look forward to a new farm bill that serves the needs of all of us.
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The HEAL (Health, Environment, Agriculture, Labor) Food Alliance is a national multi-sector, multi-racial coalition. HEAL is led by its member-organizations, who represent about two million rural and urban farmers, ranchers, fishers, farm and food chain workers, Indigenous groups, scientists, public health advocates, policy experts, and community organizers united in their commitment to transformed food and farm systems.