Good Food and Clean Water: Will Corporate Agriculture Ever Deliver?

Food & Water Watch is working to reform our industrialized food system. Most of the work is predicated on an analysis that the current food system – including production, storage, and distribution – is profoundly broken. It is largely controlled by a handful of large corporations, and results in unhealthy food that is produced in unsustainable, inhumane, and environmentally destructive ways. Michele Merkel, Co-Director of Food & Water Justice (FWJ), will discuss how FWJ brings transparency and accountability to the environmentally devastating practices of factory farming. Michele Merkel is co-director of the Food & Water Justice project, which is designed to bring a new, complementary legal approaches to the already successful community organizing, outreach and legislative work done by Food & Water Watch. Michele was formerly the Chesapeake Regional Coordinator for Waterkeeper Alliance. At Waterkeeper, Michele helped to develop and implement the campaigns of the eighteen Waterkeeper programs that protect the Chesapeake and Coastal Bays. Prior to joining the Alliance, Michele was Senior Counsel and co-founder of the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP). At EIP, she was responsible for developing legal campaigns under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, focusing mostly on industrial livestock production and municipal sewage issues. Michele previously served as an attorney for the United States Environmental Protection Agency and worked for a few years in the criminal defense section of a private law firm.