HIFS Speakers

Claire Hope Cummings is an environmental lawyer and journalist. As a reporter, for the last ten years she has covered food and farming issues for public radio and television, written cover stories for national magazines, and published in other periodicals and on line.

Claire specializes in stories about the environmental and political implications of how we eat and how food reconnects people and place. For six years she was food and farming editor at the flagship public radio station of the Pacifica Network and produced and hosted a popular weekly radio show on food and farming. Claire is an influential and highly regarded public speaker who has keynoted national and international conferences. She has been awarded grants and support for her work including a prestigious two year Food and Society Policy Fellowship.

Claire has been involved in agriculture for over three decades. She was an attorney for four years in the USDA’s Office of General Counsel, has farmed in rice in California, and for two years she had an organic farm in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. For the last 15 years Claire has been active in the local food and farming movement in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives and gardens on 10 acres in rural Marin County. She was a founding member of the local food policy council and helped develop policies, county-wide planning tools and legislative initiatives that supported the phenomenal growth of sustainable agriculture in the area. Claire served on the Boards of Directors and was general counsel for Community Alliance with Family Farmers, Food First, Earth Island Institute, and the predecessor organization for Center for Ecoliteracy. Currently, Claire advises The Columbia Foundation and its sustainable agriculture program.

As a lawyer, Claire represented and advised environmental and native groups on land trusts and cultural preservation throughout the U.S. In Hawai‘i Claire represented the Halawa Valley Coalition and The Hawai‘i La‘ieikawai Association during the H3 litigation and was a founder of Hui Aina o Hana. Claire has been devoted to traditional Hawaiian culture for decades and is a member of Halau Hula Na Pua O Ka La‘akea.

Claire has published articles and has contributed to many books and films. She coauthored the Environmental Media Service’s Reporters and Editor’s Guide to Agricultural Genetic Engineering and wrote the Farmer’s Guide to Genetic Engineering for the National Family Farm Coalition and Farm Aid and is an expert in the regulatory issues involved in agricultural biotechnology. She has been studying its social and environmental impacts in Hawai‘i, and for the last 5 years, Claire has been advising local groups and done several speaking tours throughout the islands including presentations to Kauai Agricultural Advisory Board, to activist and organic farming groups, and the general public, educating them around the risks of genetically engineered crops and the multiple benefits of a traditional and diverse local food and farming economy.

Her book Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and The Future of Seeds will be published by Beacon Press in March 2008.

Links to Claire’s published work are at www.clairehopecummings.com.