|
Another
Corporate Assault |
Down
on Farms
|
 |
|
No
job
security.
No minimum
wage.
Small
farmers
are in trouble,
and they have
corporations
to blame. |
|
Photo
©1999 Michael
Kaufman, Impact Visuals |
Trouble
in Paradise
At first glance, Delaware County, New York,
seems like the place that time forgot. Picturesque farmhouses
and barns sheltered by towering spruce trees are tucked into
the valleys. Holstein cows dot the hillsides. Little villages
still cluster around their single general store.
But on closer look, you notice that some of
the farmhouses are abandoned. Many of the barns are
collapsing. And "for sale" signs are everywhere.
In fact, time is moving at a fast clip in this
old dairy-farming county on the edge of the Catskill Mountains
some 150 miles northwest of New York City. You can measure
time passing by counting the number of cows in the pastures.
In the five short years between 1992 and 1997, for instance,
20 percent of the cows disappeared.
Just About Broke
This area has lost 40 percent of its farms
just since 1982. What had been a cohesive, full-time local
farm community is losing its hold on the economy and the
culture, replaced by a service economy catering mostly to
second home owners from New York City and suburbs. Former
dairy farmers can now be found selling real estate or working
at the hardware store — or more likely, living elsewhere.
Pastures are reverting to woods or being converted to golf
courses.
It never was easy being a dairy farmer. But
now it’s next to impossible, because the price farmers are
getting for their milk doesn’t cover the cost of producing
it. As a result, most dairy farmers, like other farmers, are
just about broke. In 1996, the average farmer took in only
$8,000 in farm income. Most small farms survive only because
someone in the family has an off-farm job.
Family farmers don’t have a speck of job
security. Nor is there a trace of a minimum wage. And, like
other workers, farmers can point the blame at corporate
America, which has managed to get our government and global
institutions to tilt the world’s rules in their favor.
The Corporate Farm
The flip side of Delaware County might be
northern Missouri, where Premium Standard Farms, the country’s
third largest swine producer, slaughters more than two million
hogs a year. The company raises the pigs in hundreds of
football field-sized metal buildings that sprawl across 45,000
acres. The hogs’ waste is washed into large dirt cesspools,
then pumped onto adjacent crop fields, often finding its way
into area streams.
Since 1980, two thirds of independent hog
producers have been driven out of business by huge operations
like this one.
The poultry business is even more
concentrated: 45 percent of the industry is now in the hands
of Frank Perdue and three other corporate moguls. They control
every stage of the chicken-making process, from the moment the
hen lays the egg till the chicken turns up on the grocery
shelf wrapped in cellophane.
A handful of agribusiness companies control
the beef industry, and four companies control 79 percent of
all cattle slaughter.
A recent study by University of Missouri
Professor William Heffernan found that four firms control over
40 percent of the processing of major commodities produced in
the Midwest — and a number of those biggies produce more
than one thing. ConAgra, for instance, is a top processor of
beef, pork, turkeys, sheep, and even seafood.
Controlling the
Entire Process
It’s not just that these huge firms have a
monopoly on a particular product. They often control the whole
process of production, storage, transport, marketing, and the
rest. They also sell farmers their seeds and fertilizers. For
instance, Heffernan points out that a few giant companies
control a large percentage of grain elevators. Another handful
have a grip on the port facilities that handle food exports.
Often mega-corporations will contract with small farmers to
produce a particular item, but maintain complete control of
everything else, leaving farmers with little say over how and
what they farm and what price they might get for their goods.
"Increasingly," Heffernan concludes,
"the major decisions in the food system are being made by
an ever-declining number of firms, a growing number of which
are involved in the food system clusters. They are primarily
concerned with maximizing their profits...Con Agra says its
major mission is to increase the wealth of its stockholders.
But these firms are in a position to decide which people in
the world will eat."
An orgy of corporate mergers has only worsened
the problem. After Bill Clinton’s Justice Department okayed
a merger between giants Cargill and Continental Grain over the
summer, family farm groups have gotten some Democrats to call
for a moratorium on agribusiness mergers.
'Frankenfoods'
"Increased vertical integration of food
corporations means that farmers are losing their independence,
their ability to have any control over their marketing, and
ultimately the loss of consumer confidence in both the safety
and health of the food supply," fourth-generation farmer
Bill Christison recently told an international meeting of
farmers.
One reason Christison, who is president of the
National Family Farm Coalition, mentions safety and health is
that he is part of the growing
farmer-consumer-environmentalist alliance challenging the
genetic engineering of food — another power grab by food
industry giants. By developing and patenting genetically
engineered seeds, corporations are gaining even greater
control over the food supply and over farmers’ choices.
(And, many believe, endangering people and the environment
with their scientifically unproven "Frankenfoods.")
The Price of Progress?
One common response to the demise of the
family farm and the agribusiness takeover is resignation.
Family farms are quaint and all, but really — aren’t they
a relic of the past?
Farm activists hasten to disagree.
"The family farm is the best and most
viable system of agriculture," argues Carolyn Mugar, a
founder of Farm Aid and a Labor Party member. "Families
who own and operate the farm take better care of the soil than
corporate boards that are distant and don’t care about the
future of that land or that community." Furthermore, she
says, smaller farms are just as efficient as giant ones — or
more so.
And there’s proof.
The latest evidence comes from a study by Dr.
Peter Rosset, executive director of Food First and the
Institute for Food and Development Policy.
Large-scale farmers, he notes, tend to plant
acres and acres of the same crop that can be more easily
handled by huge machinery. "But while a monoculture may
allow for a high yield of one crop, it produces nothing else
of use to the farmer," says Rosset. "The bare ground
between the crop rows...invites weed infestation. The presence
of weeds makes the farmer invest labor in weeding or capital
in herbicide." And so, although the yield per unit area
of one crop, like corn, might be lower on a small farm, the
total output per area — which might include a dozen crops
and various animal products, is "far, far higher."
More Efficient
|
 |
|
Growing
interest in Farmers' markets and organically grown foods
has given small farmers a boost. Photo ©1999 Michael
Kaufman, Impact Visuals |
Small farms, Rosset concludes, are "more
productive, more efficient, and contribute more to economic
development than large farms. Small farmers also make better
stewards of natural resources, conserving biodiversity and
safe-guarding the future sustainability of agricultural
production."
One interesting byproduct of the
corporatization of farming is the way it has forced many small
farmers to find new niches. And one of the biggest new niches
they’re filling is organic agriculture. Small farmers are
benefiting tremendously from the growing appetite for locally
grown food, farmers markets, and food that hasn’t been
genetically engineered or sprayed with carcinogens.
So the environmental advantage of small farms
grows, on average. And the alliance between small farmers and
environmentalists deepens.
Partly because they use fewer pesticides,
small farms — especially organic ones — can offer better
conditions for farmworkers, says Mike Ferner of the Farm Labor
Organizing Committee, a Labor Party affiliate. "By
definition, fruits and vegetables grown organically require
more hand labor for cultivation," he says — meaning
more demand for farm labor. "Also, by definition, that
work is safer, since there are no pesticides. And the skill
level of farm labor is better recognized." Ferner adds
that good wages and benefits for farmworkers are an essential
part of any decent rural policy. He points out that
farmworkers, like farmers (and unlike corporate absentee
owners), live in the farm communities and support the local
economy with the dollars they earn.
Farmers Need Fair Prices
If small farms are more efficient and have so
many other benefits, how have corporate farm products managed
to take over the grocery store?
Ask the Democrats and Republicans, architects
of our current farm policy. In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the
so-called "Freedom to Farm" bill.
|
 |
|
Good
wages and benefits for farmworkers are central to any
decent rural policy. Photo
©1999 David Bacon, Impact Visuals |
"I call it the Freedom to Farm for
Nothing bill," says Al Achtner, an LP activist who is a
national rep for the American Federation of Government
Employees in Iowa City. Achtner said it was passage of that
1996 bill, along with welfare reform, that finally drove him
away from the Democratic Party and into the Labor Party.
Essentially, the legislation rolled back
Roosevelt-era farm supports, leaving small farmers to walk an
economic tightrope with no safety net. It’s not that the
supports were so complete or structured so perfectly, say
farmer advocates. But they were something.
Pathetic System
"What we’re seeing in the country right
now is the result of that disastrous policy," says Mugar.
"Now we’ve adopted a pathetic system where we have to
come up with emergency measures every fall to keep farmers
from going under. Farmers don’t want this kind of system.
They work very hard, and they should be getting a price that
covers their cost of production. Instead, when farmers go to
sell their product, the price is controlled by the elevator,
by the marketplace they’re stuck with. There really isn’t
a free market in agriculture. That’s why we have to
guarantee a fair price for farmers — it’s really the
equivalent of a minimum wage. And we need some kind of supply
management system."
Farm activists maintain that putting a floor
on farm prices wouldn’t necessarily mean a jump in food
prices at the grocery store.
"The farmer’s share of each dollar
spent on food at the retail level has been shrinking since the
1950s," says Erika Batchellor of the National Farmers
Union. "But consumer prices have remained fairly steady.
So you’ve got this big gap, and you have to ask — Where’s
that money going? Well, it’s going to corporations. It’s a
result of the corporate concentration in every sector of
agriculture, all along the food chain. This is something we’ve
been trying to tell consumers. Farmers and consumers both have
an interest in reducing the control these corporations
have."
The 1996 farm bill had more to do with global
corporate interests than anything else. Agreements negotiated
under NAFTA and the World Trade Organization essentially call
for elimination of supports for domestic agriculture — or
any other measures that might hinder "free trade."
When Clinton and friends were trying to get the farm bill
passed in 1996, they argued that free trade would open up huge
new export markets for U.S. farmers, and they wouldn’t need
that old safety net anymore.
But a recent report by the Economic Policy
Institute found that in the two years after the farm bill’s
passage, the U.S. has seen a $13 billion decline in its farm
trade balance. "The combination of export dependence and
deregulation that has guided U.S. agricultural policy for the
past few years has failed to raise family farm incomes or
reverse relentless declines in the real prices of basic farm
products, leading to financial ruin for a rising share of
family farmers," notes the EPI report.
Corporations in Control
Republicans and many Democrats have been
staunch advocates of this kind of farm policy. Part of the
reason, of course, is money. During the 1998 elections,
agribusiness interests dispensed nearly $43.3 million to
federal candidates and parties, according to the Center for
Responsive Politics. Big money contributions help explain how
it is that, even while small farmers got whacked with the 1996
bill, the big sugar industry still manages to hold onto its
federal subsidy, and Archer Daniels Midland still gets a tax
break for its ethanol. Farm Aid cites Census Bureau data
showing that the largest farms get nearly twice as much
government support as small ones.
As farmer George Naylor of the Iowa Farmers
Union told a congressional delegation this summer:
"Putting a happy face on farm policy that squeezes family
farmers off the land and expands the profits and markets of a
few giant corporations has been the job of conservative
politicians and administrations of both parties for many years
now."
— Laura McClure |
