O'Brien, of Atlantic, Iowa, and Lawrence, of New York City, had succeeded in creating a working group on food issues in the two years leading up to the September 1995 Beijing conference. Women from business and the academic world participated in good numbers. But the voices of women who actually grew food were in short supply.

"The biggest lack was on-the-ground, grassroots women," said O'Brien in a recent interview. "After Beijing, Kathy and I decided that we really needed to do something to tap into women."

O'Brien, herself an organic farmer, is accustomed to organizing locally and speaking out at the national and international level. She has attended world conferences and addressed the United Nations General Assembly in 1997. She sees a clear need to organize women growers, who tend to view agriculture in a different light than men. Partly in response to the Beijing experience, she has spearheaded—with the support and participation of the Stanley Foundation—the creation in Iowa of the Women, Food, and Agriculture Network (WFAN). The group is still small, but it provides a classic example of a connection between global phenomena and local actions.

"What is happening with our food systems," O'Brien asserted, "is that we have a growing concentration of food processors and handlers. The free market is becoming exclusive to those who are big enough to play in it. Farmers, who have traditionally gotten the short end anyway, have been told that they too have to 'get bigger or get out.'"

Men, O'Brien said, seem to accept that as inevitable. "They say 'this is the program; this is how it is going to be.' But women tend to factor in the social, economic, and political parts of how this plays in their rural communities." And they see farmers getting economically squeezed and increasingly having to take off-the-farm work as damaging to a way of life.

The system, O'Brien contended, is hard on people and their communities. It is ultimately unsustainable. "In some ways I think it is easier for women to advocate change," said O'Brien, "because they haven't had many opportunities in the current system. They have just been saddled with lots of work."

On the local level WFAN is "trying to help women who are interested in food and agriculture issues come together and support one another in the face of an old guard that is not accepting of a new vision." That new vision would offer consumers food that is grown in ways that minimize chemical inputs and genetic manipulation and would provide opportunities for farmers to make a living by growing such food.

Within the United States, WFAN is not alone. O'Brien said she has learned of similar groups of women trying to change agriculture in California, Wisconsin, Illinois, and New York. She is sure there are more. "We haven't formed a network, but I have made contact with women in those states. We're trying to develop a database and, at some point, would like to have a web page."

The prospects for making a difference internationally are enhanced by the fact that throughout the 1990s global networks of women have been created through a series of international conferences held under the United Nations' auspices. At UN conferences on the environment and development in Rio de Janeiro, on social issues at Copenhagen, on women's issues at Beijing, and on habitat at Istanbul, nongovernmental forums have been organized to run parallel to intergovernmental meetings. At those meetings, like-minded individuals and groups have found ways to make an impact on policy, not just at that meeting but by working for change when they return home, and then often meeting again to share experiences—successes and disappointments.

O'Brien is determined to continue this work and expand it to include the voices of other women. WFAN plans to be present this summer at the Second International Conference on Women and Agriculture in Washington, DC. The conference is sponsored by the President's Interagency Council on Women, another—this time official—outgrowth of the Beijing conference.

"Sometimes I feel like the liaison between people I know here and ones I know there," O'Brien said, speaking of her work locally and at the international level. "The UN has made many people aware of these issues." And O'Brien said she hopes that WFAN and similar efforts will increase opportunities for women to be heard everywhere on the subject of food and agriculture.

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