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Every Saturday at 4:00pmAbout the Show
Urban Connections
Urban Connections conducts guest interviews covering issues effecting our local, national, international and global communities from a Black perspective. Subjects include current events, trends, history, education, economics, science, political science, health, race, law and more.
Family Farm Defenders is a national grassroots organization with members in all 50 states. It is our belief that healthy safe accessible food is a basic human right and that all communities should be able to control their own food/farm system.
Mission
It is our belief that healthy safe accessible food is a basic human right and that all communities should be able to control their own food system. To this end, FFD supports sustainable agriculture, farm worker rights, animal welfare, consumer safety, fair trade, and food sovereignty.
John E. Peck grew up on a 260 acre farm in central Minnesota, has a B.A. in Economics from Reed College and a PhD in Land Resources from UW-Madison. He has been the Executive Director of Family Farm Defenders for the last decade, and is also a part-time instructor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Madison Area Technical College (MATC). His graduate research focused on community-based management of common property resources in Zimbabwe. He attended the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and participated in global justice events surrounding the WTO meeting Seattle in 1999, as well as FTAA meetings in Quebec in 2001 and Miami in 2003. He has been part of solidarity delegations to Ainaro, East Timor in 2005 and Oaxaca, Mexico 2008, and also participated in the 2007 Nyeleni Food Sovereignty Conference in Selengue, Mali, the Fifth Conference of La Via Campesina in Maputo, Mozambique in 2008, as well as the 2009 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Family Farm Defenders (FFD) incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1994 and was granted permanent 501(c)(3) status by the IRS in 1999. FFD began as an outgrowth of two national grass-roots campaigns: demanding a national referendum to end the mandatory check-off on raw milk that funds the lobby and propaganda efforts of the corporate dairy industry; and to defend consumer “right to know” in response to the stealth introduction of recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) into the nation’s milk supply.
FFD’s mission is to create a farmer-controlled and consumer-oriented food and fiber system, based upon democratically controlled institutions that empower farmers to speak for and respect themselves in their quest for social and economic justice. To this end, FFD supports sustainable agriculture, farm worker rights, animal welfare, consumer safety, fair trade, and food sovereignty. FFD has also worked to create opportunities for farmers to join together in new cooperative marketing endeavors and to bridge the socioeconomic gap that often exists between rural and urban communities.
