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WCC Public Policy Positions: Support Family Farms
Here we elaborate on each of the WCC's 2023 Public Policy Positions. The complete document can be found below. You can learn more about Catholic Social Teaching on the USCCB website.
Support Family Farms. Family farms form the backbone of Wisconsin’s rural economy. Wisconsin must help existing family farmers maintain their operations and encourage the creation of new family farms.
Agriculture touches every one of our lives by helping to provide the food we eat. In Wisconsin, it represents one of the top three industries, along with manufacturing and tourism. Yet, agriculture is not just about producing and consuming, but much more. Family farms not only provide food for the world, they also fulfill God’s call to be good stewards of his creation.
In a 2021 message to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, Pope Francis honored the “valuable role of family farming and rural communities” in creating food systems that provide for the common good and are sustainable, diversified, and capable of withstanding future crises.
In a 2003 statement, Catholic Reflections on Food, Farmers, and Farmworkers, the United States bishops, drawing on Catholic social teaching and the experience of the Church in rural communities, offered six criteria to guide agricultural policy:
- Overcoming hunger and poverty
- Providing a safe, affordable, and sustainable food supply
- Ensuring a decent life for farmers and farmworkers
- Sustaining and strengthening rural communities
- Protecting God’s creation
- Expanding participation
In the statement, the bishops also noted: “We come to these issues from very different perspectives: as farmers and farmworkers, landowners and contract growers, business operators and workers, producers, processors, and consumers. But as Catholics we share a fundamental concern for human life and dignity and a basic commitment to the common good.”
Working the land and raising livestock, family farmers know intimately what it means to embrace subsidiarity and solidarity. They also help our modern world rediscover a closer relationship with the natural world and with God the Creator.
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