* Food First (FF) divides its work into three major Program Areas:

(1) Building Local Agri-Food Systems: Lamenting that “corporate concentration” in the food industry “is squeezing out small businesses and squeezing taxpayers as agrifoods corporations return again and again to the public trough,” FF seeks to devise “innovat[ive] models” for “sustainable” food-sector businesses that provide “good jobs for fair wages,” particularly for “low-income, African-American, Native-American, Latino-American, Asian-American and immigrant communities.”

(2) Democratizing Development: Land, Resources and Markets: This program area “focuses on the structural causes of hunger and poverty”; “bridges the gap between transnational advocacy and local control over food system resources”; “links critiques of the corporate-dominated food systems with farmer and consumer-led alternatives that ensure justice, equity and ecological sustainability”; “promote[s] the convergence of local, national and international food movements in their effort to transform food systems worldwide”; and works to “bring together the overlapping demands for food and climate justice.”

(3) Forging Food Sovereignty with Farmers: Focusing on “farmer alternatives to corporate control over production and consumption,” the strategy of this program area is to “help farmer movements for food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture to document and share their alternatives among broad sectors of the rural and urban population in order to advance peasant-led food system alternatives.”

To advance these three program areas, FF organizes educational conferences and reality tours; participates in broadcast interviews, public forums, seminars, and activist campaigns; publishes books, backgrounders, and research reports; engages in community organizing and advocacy; disseminates action alerts; and offers mentoring and training services to “cultivate the leadership and solidarity of low-income people of color in the U.S. and disenfranchised communities in the Global South.”

* Food First is a member of the OneWorld Network, an umbrella organization of more than 1,500 leftist groups that seek “to promote sustainable development, social justice, and human rights.”

* The current president of FF’s board of trustees is Joyce E. King, who teaches in the College of Education at Georgia State University. In 2013 King became president-elect of the American Educational Research Association.