Tonight's Guest: Ilene Bezahler

Since Ilene Bezahler founded Edible Boston 9 years ago, Boston area farmers' markets increased from 65 to 300. The magazine's circulation and objectives have grown as dramatically.

80+ Edible magazines in the US and Canada promote local food businesses and sustainability but now seek more multi-faceted impacts. Edible Boston is embarking on food policy coverage in an upcoming series on local farmers' production costs. Ilene isn't stereotypical - her grandmothers weren't good cooks; her food heritage is one of experimentation and no particular ethnic tradition. Describing the magazine's changing stories and her relationships with food businesses, the interview makes you realize that entrepreneurial publishers in the "local foodspace" can help lay the groundwork for food system change.

Tonight's Guest: Adrienne Altstatt

Adrienne Altstatt has been the fulltime farmer at the centuries-old Wright-Locke Farm in Boston's near western suburbs for 4 years.

It's a community farm that serves the multiple roles these farms perform when they're close to large metro areas. It raises vegetables and some livestock, helps meet consumers', farmers' markets' and restaurants' demands for healthy, locally grown food, teaches youth and adults about food and farming, and generally embodies values about community that are associated with local food movements. In late December Adrienne leaves for 2 months of refreshment and refueling before the new season begins. WFD catches her for her reflections on the past year, when everything is in place for the cold weather ahead.

Tonight: Future Farmers of America

When 60,000 FFA/Future Farmers of America youth convened in Louisville and were addressed by Tyson Foods' CEO, a Greenhorns member and young Virginia apple farmer, Eliza Greenman, was there under a banner saying Ban Factory Farming.

The show reveals much about the hearts of future young farmers, big ag's bid to capture them, and the country's stakes in what and how they learn. Eliza notes the integrity and respect shown by the teens. She's shocked by the seductiveness of big ag messaging: youth with access to land (their families' farms) are being primed to feed the world in 2050 and be proud of their role. And the listener may hear the consequences of battling agricultural paradigms on young farmers' self-concepts.

Tonight's Guest: Danielle Andrews (Boston Urban Garden)

Danielle Andrews, urban farmer for The Food Project, describes why urban agriculture requires wearing many hats today.

The farm is a social enterprise using revenue generation to fulfill its mission. Teens raise produce in Boston's Roxbury community; it's sold to EBT purchasers in farmers' markets and to high end restaurants. Danielle, teens and community members create cooking classes, build family gardens, and utilize a 10,000 square foot greenhouse as a neighborhood resource. But The Food Project isn't singlehandedly using agriculture for community development. Danielle facilitates the agriculture side of a partnership with the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, which provides the organizing expertise, and jointly they use urban agriculture for community development and empowerment.

Tonight's Guest: Diana Robinson

Diana Robinson describes the Food Chain Workers Alliance and its Thanksgiving 2013 actions.

Nearly 20 million men and women in the US grow, harvest, produce and serve food at every stage from field to table. Yet farm workers aren't covered by US labor relations laws; law enforcement to protect immigrants and undocumented workers is poor; and the majority of food chain workers lack benefits, earn poverty wages, and have difficulty unionizing. Diana shows how the US food system, developed on slave labor, still exploits its workers, the majority of whom are members of minorities. Projects she describes are a fine example of what a diverse coalition membership committed to social and economic justice can accomplish.

Tonight's Guest: Sanjay Rawal

The feature length documentary Food Chains opened Friday before Thanksgiving. This documentary examines the plight of United States farm laborers and spotlights the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and its worker-driven Fair Food Program.

"With an eye to expanding people's hearts as to the contributions of the millions of workers that make our meals possible", Sanjay Rawal's film describes huge inequities in the supply chain and what consumers can do to help change it. The interview enables Sanjay to share facts about the improved working conditions for CIW members, the still deplorable conditions and grinding economic insecurity still faced by unprotected farmworkers, and the comparatively huge profits of the grocery stores in the supply chain.

Tonight's Guest: Liz Warran (Fast Track)

Important matters for farmers and agriculture will be considered during the 2014 lame duck session in Washington - country of origin labeling (COOL), the Keystone XL Pipeline, Fast Track and the TransPacificPartnership (TPP).

Tonight's show reviews all 4, concentrating on implications of Fast Track for meaningful debate on the wide-ranging, highly contested and mostly secret terms of the TPP, the massive proposed trade agreement among 12 Pacific rim countries. Fast Track literally cedes legislators' constitutional treaty'making authority to the Executive, limiting debate to a total of 22 hours and permitting only an up or down vote. Guest Liz Warren heads the National TPP Coalition. She also describes the broad alliance of organizations who oppose the TPP - and why.

Tonight's Guest: Hans Muzoora

Hans Muzoora works in public private agricultural development partnerships in Africa, most recently in Zambia, as a Ugandan sustainable agriculture and rural development consultant.

Because farmers need broad based agricultural extension assistance to be able to have sustainable livelihoods (escape poverty), Hans doesn't question whether countries must partner with NGOs and corporations. World Bank-forced structural readjustment programs destroyed their national agricultural extension capacity. But partnerships' results hinge on structures that assure equity for the people they are supposed to benefit. Seeds' suitability and quality are crucial, but much also depends on ways goals are framed, outcomes are assessed, and standards are defined to favor producers as well as consumers. Hans recounts the details equally important for food sovereignty.

Tonight's Guest: Herschelle Milford

After 10 years of fighting forced removals during Apartheid, Surplus People Project (S.P.P.) has worked for 23 years to transform the rural economy through land, water and agricultural reform.

Herschelle Milford is a global south movement leader working toward food sovereignty and climate justice. The interview explores different ways people can lack food sovereignty by comparing South African black farmers, who cannot own land, and US black farmers who have lost land or can't afford to farm. Herschelle was in Seattle for the Africa-US Food Sovereignty Strategy Summit (see www.seattleglobaljustice.org/blog/news-events/). She describes the work of the S.P.P. in South Africa's Western and Northern Cape, organizing and doing participatory action research with small-scale farmers, farm dwellers and women.

Tonight's Guest: Shirley Sherrod

The Food Sovereignty Prize was awarded in Des Moines this week, the 5th year this prize has been given to underline and highlight agriculture practiced with different objectives and values from that honored by the World Food Prize, also awarded in Des Moines at this time and typically given to agribusiness corporations. We re-air a US story chosen to highlight the Food Sovereignty Prize ceremony. A black farmers' daughter in the 1950's, Shirley Sherrod wanted to escape rural life, but her father's murder in 1965 redirected her to civil rights activism and then co-founding New Communities, a 6000 acre land trust modeled on a kibbutz, on which black Americans could farm and live. She describes working with the conditions black farmers faced - during those years, at the USDA, and now, when she is fostering opportunities for women farmers and creating the new site for New Communities