🚀 go-pugleaf

From: EcoNet Pesticide Desk <pestdesk>

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  PESTICIDE ACTION NETWORK NORTH AMERICA UPDATES SERVICE
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Upcoming California Meeting to Focus on Key 
Sustainable Agriculture Policy Issues

August 23, 1994 

The California Sustainable Agriculture Working Group 
(SAWG) will hold its first statewide meeting October 8-9, 1994, 
in Modesto.  This meeting will provide updates on key state and 
national policies affecting sustainable agriculture, promote 
exchange and collaboration between a broad range of groups, 
and set directions for the SAWG.  Policy issues to be addressed 
include the 1995 farm bill, pesticide use reduction legislation, 
social justice issues in sustainable agriculture, national 
organic standards, and local food systems and food security.  
The meeting will be highly participatory, emphasizing focused 
roundtable discussions in breakout groups.  Participants will 
include farmers, agricultural professionals, environmentalists, 
consumers, researchers, labor representatives, and activists.

The California SAWG was established in January 1994 to 
promote collaboration between diverse groups concerned with 
food and agriculture, and to work with these groups to 
increase policy support for sustainable agriculture.  The 
California group joins four other regional SAWGs active in the 
Midwest, the Northeast, the South and the West.  These groups 
advance a broad vision of sustainable agriculture, one that 
includes economic and social justice concerns as well as 
environmental impacts.

California SAWG coordinates the state's participation in 
the Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, an unprecedented 
organizing effort targeting the 1995 federal farm bill.  (The 
farm bill, typically approved every five years, is a vast 
package of legislation that includes a wide array of food and 
farm programs.)  Through the Campaign, hundreds of grassroots 
and national groups are working to change national policy to 
encourage alternatives to pesticides, protect water quality, 
expand minority farmer and farmworker rights, redirect 
commodity program payments, support local marketing and 
processing, and redirect federal research and extension 
programs, among other goals.  (These policy goals emerged 
from a two-year consensus building project called the 
National Dialogue for Sustainable Agriculture.)  

Interested readers are encouraged to contact the California SAWG 
office for more information on the October meeting and to pass 
on this information to others.

Contact:  Kai Siedenburg, California SAWG, P.O. Box 1599, 
Santa Cruz, CA 95061; phone (408) 458-5304; fax 454-0433; 
e-mail casawg@igc.apc.org.

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The Pesticide Action Network Updates Service (PANUPS) is a 
pesticide-related news service posted weekly by the Pesticide 
Action Network North America Regional Center (PANNA). PANNA is 
located at 116 New Montgomery Street, #810, San Francisco, CA 
94105. Tel: (415) 541-9140. Fax: (415) 541-9253. To receive a 
standard information packet about the Pesticide Action Network 
send a short e-mail message to panna-info@igc.apc.org.
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