The
Last Farm Crisis
William
Greider
November 20, 2000
Table of Contents:
The New Politics
of Food
The Vanishing Market
Who Pays for Fast
Food?
Tractors
and Tree-huggers Unite!
The
New Politics of Food
The contemporary triumph of
free-market capitalism has revealed to farmers, if
not to other Americans, the bitter last act in this
drama. Farmers can see themselves being reduced from
their mythological status as independent producers
to a subservient and vulnerable role as
sharecroppers or franchisees.
The control of food
production, both livestock and crops, is being
consolidated not by the government but by a handful
of giant corporations. While farmers and ranchers
suffered three years of severely depressed prices at
the close of the 1990s, the corporations enjoyed
soaring profits from the same line of goods.
Growers
are surrounded now on both sides--facing
concentrated market power not only from the
companies that buy their crops and animals but also
from the firms that sell them essential inputs like
seeds and fertilizer. In the final act of unfettered
capitalism, the free market itself is destroyed.
In farm country these
developments are often described, with irony, as
America's top-down version of collectivization.
"It's interesting," said James Horne, who
leads an Oklahoma center for sustainable
agriculture. "Our system of support payments
for the farmers survived about as long as the Soviet
system did, around seventy years. Now, here in the
United States we're doing exactly what the Russians
are undoing in their agriculture. They're
decentralizing and we're centralizing."
Farmers tend to express the
point more pungently. "We're in a death
struggle out here, and we're getting our butts
kicked," said Fred Stokes, a former career Army
officer who retired to raise cattle in his home
state of Mississippi. Stokes calls himself a Reagan
Republican, but frequently begins a statement by
saying, "Now, I'm not a socialist but..."
"The thing that bothers
me most is the Big Brother aspect of this
deal," he said. "It's clear the government
is more concerned with mining big profits for these
corporations than it is with food security or family
farmers. It's all about more money for a handful of
guys who will be the elites. The rest of us wind up
swinging machetes. You talk about feudalism. This
thing makes farmers indentured on their own land;
they're going to be the new serfs."
The media's usual take on
this new farm crisis is a tearjerk feature story
that begins with a worried farm couple poring over
bills at the kitchen table, children crying in the
background; and it closes with a romantic elegy for
Jefferson's doomed yeomanry. Too bad, but that's the
price of progress, end of story.
I intend to skip
over the pathos of farm families, widespread though
it is, and focus instead on the intricate economics
of monopoly power and why collectivized agriculture
promises ruinous social consequences for the rest of
us. Farming, as an industry, is inescapably
different from other sectors--since weather is
always a big wild card in production--but the
patterns of concentration and control in food
production provide a visible primer for what's also
been under way in the larger economy.
The same great
shifts in structure and market domination are fast
forming in finance and banking, telecommunications,
media and other sectors. The much-celebrated
entrepreneurial spirit is steadily
neutered--"rationalized," the players
would say--by the same rush of mergers, acquisitions
and "strategic alliances" among supposed
rivals. (See Adam Smith on how businessmen always
yearn to escape from price competition through
collusion.)
Some farmers and ranchers
are mobilizing for a last stand--those at least who
haven't been thoroughly demoralized by recurring
crises during the past twenty years. But this time,
they recognize that farm rebellion is bound to fail
unless they can persuade city folks--consumers,
environmentalists, church activists and humanists,
even animal rights advocates--that this political
struggle involves much more than saving the family
farm.
Its purpose is also restoring the promise of
safe and wholesome food, protecting consumers from
monopoly pricing and stopping techno-agriculture's
harsh new methods for abusing the environment as
well as animals. "To win this thing--and we're
way behind--we've got to connect with the general
public and let them know they've got a dog in this
fight," Stokes explained.
Toward that end, the
Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM), an
interstate group of farmers, ranchers, political
leaders and professionals that Stokes heads,
assembled an unusual cross-section of kindred
spirits at a church retreat center in Parkville,
Missouri, a few months ago. Around the conference
table for three days, sharing expertise and
background papers, were agricultural economists from
major land-grant universities in the Midwest and
South, antitrust experts from law school faculties,
rural sociologists and community advocates,
environmentalists and leading critics of such
notorious practices and products as hog factories
and genetically manipulated seeds.
They produced a
comprehensive "vision statement" on how
Americans might seek to replace industrialized
agriculture with a "whole-food system"
that incorporates humane values and quality, that
moves farm economics away from high-tech,
capital-intensive bigness and toward the diversity
that is possible if smaller farms survive. Their
report and papers (available at www.competitivemarkets.com)
provide an intellectual starting point for serious
conversation about food between city and
countryside--the threads that might become fabric
for a political alliance that could have far more
strength than embattled farmers alone. The warm,
serious spirit of the Parkville gathering reminded
one of Seattle, where the turtles and Teamsters
discovered their mutual self-interest.
This political initiative,
however, raises an ironic banner for left-liberal
social reformers because it calls them to rally on
behalf of "competitive markets." That may
seem a wrenching twist for many who have devoted
their political energies in recent decades to
holding back the market ideology's relentless
encroachment on public space and public values, and
to fighting the many battles over deregulation and
privatization.
Nevertheless, if people's social
values are to prevail in this fight, it has to begin
by defending the marketplace against the collusive
power of emerging monopolies. Aroused citizens must
likewise reawaken government and push it to confront
this new landscape of concentrated economic power.
The legal doctrine called antitrust got its name
from oil, banking and many other "trusts"
100 years ago--combines that pursued the same brazen
impulse to strangle free markets and control prices
to the injury of smaller competitors and the public.
A century ago, the Populists and Progressive
reformers understood the centrality of free exchange
of goods, honest pricing and markets free of
collusion to the vitality of democracy and
individual freedom. This generation has to relearn
the economics. Then it must invent a robust new
vision that challenges the present circumstances of
globalizing market power.
In fact, a feisty new
politics is already bubbling up around the nation,
based on this same understanding. In Wyoming and the
northern plains, citizen activists are forcing
passage of laws to control the megafarms. The
Western Organization of Resource Councils includes
six state councils, from Idaho to the Dakotas, that
unite independent ranchers with environmentalists
against the big guys.
In North Carolina angry
citizens were already confronting the hog factories
that pollute coastal rivers and estuaries before
Hurricane Floyd came along and unleashed ruinous
tides of manure overflowing from the hog-farm
lagoons. In dozens of states the activists are also
organizing direct-marketing devices that will
sustain smaller farmers: open-air produce markets,
cattle ranchers selling grass-fed beef to consumers
by subscription orders and other conduits that boost
farm incomes by cutting out agribusiness. These
efforts seem frail alongside the corporations, but
the big guys are no longer dismissing organic-food
marketing, as they did a generation ago.
Rita Wilhelm, a graphic
designer and mother of three from Annville,
Pennsylvania, seems typical of the grassroots
action. She was alarmed when a hog factory was built
down the road--9,200 animals clustered in barns on
120 acres, with manure lagoons and an overpowering
stench. "I grew up in the country,"
Wilhelm said, "but this is far beyond making a
living--this is making a killing." She and
neighbors--after discovering that Republican
Governor Tom Ridge was already on the other side,
weakening environmental regulation to attract these
strange new factories--organized Pennsylvanians for
Responsible Agriculture, which now connects similar
activists in thirty-nine groups across seventeen
counties. Her local colleagues include farmers, an
environmental engineer, even two township
supervisors.
Their primary issues are not
only the destruction of water supplies and clean air
but also unsafe food. "If you're going to eat
synthetically produced food with all the chemicals
and everything, you're going to get that out of it,
and now that's showing up in health problems,"
Wilhelm said.
The group's new website (www.pfra.org),
she hopes, will help local farmers to find direct
customers for their free-range beef, pork and
poultry. With help from a young environmental
lawyer, Thomas Linzey from Shippensburg,
Pennsylvania, the group has lobbied county and
township boards to enact an anti-corporate farming
ordinance--legislation Linzey borrowed from nine
states in the West and Midwest. As president of the
Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, he has
promised to defend, for free, the first corporate
challenge to these legal barriers that local
governments are erecting.
This same story pops up
regularly across the nation. The home-grown
activists have come to this realization: If there is
any hope of liberating the food system from
corporate control, they must first help rescue
smaller producers from their fate, so they can
endure to develop the alternative modes of farming
(actually, old farming methods, in many instances)
that will deliver food in ways that are both
nature-friendly and humane. "I think the
conversation changed when we started talking about
markets," Linzey observed. "Then you could
bring together a much larger group of
interests." He added, "We are literally in
a war with the agricultural extension offices,
because their regulatory system is set up simply to
support large, concentrated production."
The
Vanishing Market
Let's name some names. The
dominating leaders in grain trade and processing:
Cargill (which swallowed Continental, the
second-largest grain trader), Archer Daniels Midland
(ADM), ConAgra. Beefpacking: IBP, ConAgra, Cargill
(as owner of Excel). Cattle feedlots: Cargill,
Cactus Feeders, ConAgra. Pork processing:
Smithfield, IBP, ConAgra, Cargill. Hog growers:
Smithfield (the largest pork processor has bought
the largest and second-largest hog producers, Murphy
Family Farms and Carroll's Foods), Cargill,
Seaboard. Biotech and seeds: Monsanto, DuPont/Pioneer,
Novartis, Aventis. Supermarkets: Kroger,
Albertson's, Safeway, AHOLD (Giant), Winn-Dixie,
Wal-Mart.
As the repeated names
suggest, a few far-flung firms are positioned on
many sides of the market at once and, indeed, are
incestuously connected through a dizzying galaxy of
"strategic alliances" and cross-ownership.
Smithfield, the world's largest hog producer and
pork processor, recently bought a 6.3 percent stake
in its putative rival, IBP, the second-largest pork
processor. ADM already owned a 12.2 percent share of
IBP.
This cross-ownership will continue, as IBP
itself is to be acquired in a friendly takeover by
the Wall Street brokerage firm Donaldson, Lufkin
& Jenrette (which was recently bought by Credit
Suisse First Boston). Some analysts are watching to
see if Smithfield makes a rival bid for the
meatpacking giant. Cargill and Monsanto have
fashioned a labyrinth of joint ventures that runs
from fertilizer and seeds to grain and raising
cattle, hogs, turkeys and chickens, then on to the
slaughterhouses.
Sector by sector, four firms
control 82 percent of beefpacking, 75 percent of
hogs and sheep, and half of chickens. Major
supermarket chains are now concentrated regionally,
though not nationally. Four firms hold 74 percent of
market control in ninety-four large cities; experts
anticipate a new merger wave that could swiftly
increase that percentage while doubling the four
firms' overall national concentration up to 60
percent.
And so on. As antitrust theory would
predict, this kind of market leverage ought to give
companies a pricing advantage over farmers and
ranchers, and it has, according to Wisconsin law
professor Peter Carstensen. The spread between
prices paid for livestock and the wholesale price of
meat has widened in the past few years by 52 percent
for pork and 24 percent for beef, he reported.
Yet these extraordinary
levels of concentration unfolded without government
opposition. The consolidation quickened after Ronald
Reagan's antitrust division at the Justice
Department swept away the old rules and thresholds
for opposing mergers and takeovers. Reagan's lawyers
effectively gutted the theory with a narrow
laissez-faire interpretation that declared bigness
no longer a problem if it could not be proven, in
advance, to distort consumer prices. Cheap food was
consecrated as the only issue that matters to the
public.
The Clinton Administration, notwithstanding
its activism against Microsoft, has been generally
passive on big mergers of all kinds and nearly as
pliant as the Reaganites were (among leading seed
companies, sixty-eight acquisitions occurred between
1995 and 1998). Consumers may judge for themselves
whether they have benefited at the checkout counter.
The disadvantage for farmers
was compounded greatly as the companies moved
aggressively into vertical integration--acquiring
top-to-bottom elements in the chain of production.
Owning feedlots or signing output contracts with
individual farmers for poultry, hogs, cattle and, in
some instances, grain and soybeans has given the
processing companies their own "captive
supplies." Their privately held stores of
livestock mean giants like IBP no longer have to
rely on auction-price purchases in the open market
for most of their supply. In fact, according to
farmers, the companies regularly deploy this
leverage to depress market prices for the
independent producers.
Such practices are
ostensibly illegal, and the Agriculture Department
has belatedly promised to look into them. Mike
Callicrate, a feedlot owner in St. Francis, Kansas,
has filed a class-action damage suit against IBP on
behalf of cattlemen, one of a number of promising
legal challenges under way. "Captive supplies
are just devastating to the cash market,"
Callicrate explained. "IBP would come to your
feedyard and bid you a very low price--a bid not to
buy, we call it--because they are just searching
around for the weakest cattleman.
Who needs to sell
today? Of course, they intimidate him too, by
saying, 'If you don't take this price today, we're
not going to buy your cattle three weeks from now.'
When he does take the low price, the word goes out
instantly and everyone else gets nervous. Then IBP
takes the price down further because they don't need
the cattle right now; they've already got their own
supply [in feedlots or under contract]. What's their
motivation? They just want cattle to be available at
lower prices when they do want to buy. You've got a
very well organized buyer dealing with very
disorganized sellers."
The final blow to small
producers came in 1996, with enactment of the
Freedom to Farm Act, the law intended to phase out
the federal government's price-support payments and
production-restraint mechanisms (better known among
farmers now as the "Freedom to Fail" Act).
The Clinton Administration, much as it did in
welfare reform, made common cause with Republican
ideologues to repeal a New Deal landmark.
The
premise was that market forces, once liberated from
the Feds, would gradually reconcile supply and
demand in farm output, mainly by persuading many
marginal farmers to get out of the business, thereby
insuring decent prices for those who survive. The
law failed utterly to do either. As surpluses and
collapsing prices engulfed farm states, politicians
from both parties blinked. Instead of gradually
reducing the federal support payments (supposedly to
zero after seven years), the public's subsidy for
farmers has doubled and tripled in size--$16 billion
in 1998, $23 billion las! t year--as Congress
repeatedly enacted "emergency" relief
measures. With that great trauma, the last act for
agriculture began to unfold.
Among the consequences, the
capital-intensive treadmill for farmers sped up, and
they became even more eager to embrace whatever
innovation promised to boost returns. Just as farm
prices were cratering, Monsanto and others began
promoting genetically altered seeds for corn and
soybeans with cost-cutting promises, and this new
technology swept the landscape. "These farmers
are so desperate for profitability," Fred
Stokes said, "they grab whatever is offered to
them.
Offering GM seeds is like selling them a bag
of cocaine." His grain-growing colleagues in
the Organization for Competitive Markets affirm that
they have seen no bottom-line benefits from GM
seeds. As agricultural experience has long
demonstrated, the first farmers to adopt new
production technologies will enjoy higher returns,
but the effect soon wears off when everyone is using
the same stuff. The result is still higher yields
and greater productive capacity--more surpluses than
the market can absorb.
Exports, as many farmers
have figured out, are not going to save them. The
logic promoted by agribusiness and the Agriculture
Department--not to mention global-trade boosters in
and out of government--was that greater efficiency
would allow lower prices on US crop exports and thus
give US farmers the edge to grab market share from
other grain-growing nations. Roughly the opposite
has occurred during the past thirty years, despite
the inflated promises that accompany each new trade
agreement (most recently with China).
Agricultural
economist Daryll Ray of the University of Tennessee
has documented a stair-step decline in the US share
of global trade in corn, soybeans and wheat,
starting in the 1970s. "What the past fifteen
years have taught us is that lower crop prices do
not cause competing exporters, including Canada, the
European Union, Brazil, Argentina and Australia, to
fold up shop and give the United States their market
share," Ray explained. "When US prices
drop, our competitors quickly lower their export
prices as well." Importing countries, he added,
do not increase their food purchases significantly
when supplies are plentiful and prices lower.
Nations, like people, buy what they need, but they
do not eat twice as much just because the food is
cheap.
The more momentous
consequence of the price collapse is that in the
past few years it drove many more farmers into
accepting the status of contract producers--growing
crops or livestock under fixed-price contracts with
the corporations. Richard Levins, an agricultural
economist at the University of Minnesota, said these
production contracts covered about $60 billion by
1997, almost one-third of farm-level crop and
livestock sales, and have expanded greatly since.
Mainstream authorities regard supply contracting as
the future.
"Old MacDonald's farm is being
absorbed into what might be called New McDonald's
Farms," Levins observed. In other words,
farming begins to resemble a fast-food franchise to
run a burger joint or an auto dealership. The
operator buys the supplies and equipment from the
brand-name company and produces to its uniform
specifications. "They are going to put cattle
in buildings, too," Levins predicted.
"It's not there yet, but cattle will be raised
indoors eventually."
While contract status will
effectively end the entrepreneurial culture in
farming, it also ostensibly frees small producers
from the harrowing instabilities of market prices.
Or does it? Farmers foresee that the supposed
stability of contract farming will actually leave
them utterly dependent on the handful of
agribusiness firms and without alternatives. Neil
Harl, a veteran agricultural economist from Iowa
State University, explained: "Let's say we're
down to two huge hog-slaughtering firms, and each is
90 percent vertically integrated.
The new contract
[offered to a hog-factory operator] is considerably
less attractive than the expiring contract. The
producer is told, Take or leave it. If the closest
competitive option for hogs is 900 miles away--and
is also heavily integrated--clearly a producer in
that situation is likely to be squeezed."
Agriculture's emerging
pattern of organization begins to resemble what is
under way in other major sectors, including
globalized manufacturing. The model is no longer the
huge industrial behemoth but the "virtual
corporation" that owns very little in hard
capital assets itself--that is, factories--but
organizes a complex, floating network of affiliated
producers and subcontractors who adhere to its brand
standards--think of Nike. One can predict that the
consolidated food industry will likely respond to
periods of slack demand in the same way the auto
industry or shoe manufacturers do--dropping
subcontractors, closing factories, discarding
workers.
The deeper implications are
about power, as Jeremy Rifkin explains in The Age of
Access. If there is no other place for smaller
producers to sell, then access to the network
becomes the crucial privilege. And who exactly
controls the access? Or has the power to expel and
punish weaker partners? This is among the veils that
a strong new antitrust doctrine must look behind.
Farmers at long last will
find themselves in the very same predicament that
confronted industrial workers in other sectors 100
years ago. Harl believes that, unthinkable as it
sounds, farmers must sooner or later pursue labor's
remedy--collective action--by organizing unions that
restore their bargaining power and by creating
producer cooperatives large enough to compete with
the big guys. "There was stability in
Russia," Harl mused. "Russian agriculture
was stable because the center told everyone what to
do. And we will get stability if Cargill tells us
what to do. But is that what Americans want?"
Maybe they do. Most
consumers have seemed at least indifferent. Why cry
for small farmers, a New York Times feature asked,
when modern consolidations are wiping out so many
other local enterprises, from independent bookstores
to neighborhood groceries? But aside from the
questions of food quality and safety or social
equity, there is another threat that consumers might
ponder: If this nexus of collaborating corporations
acquires the market power to control total farm
output and stabilize prices, then it will also have
the power to inflate food prices on behalf of
greater profit. In the last act, cheap food
disappears right along with the free market.
Who
Pays for Fast Food?
The short answer is nearly
everyone, one way or another, even those who have
never encountered a Big Mac or extra-crispy KFC. The
economies of scale gained from bigness do matter,
but only up to a point. The real source of
efficiency in consolidated agribusiness is a
long-familiar operating principle of capitalist
enterprise--push the true costs of production off
the company's balance sheet and onto someone else.
"They maintain their profitability by shifting
costs off on the community," said William Weida,
an economist at Colorado College who counsels many
grassroots groups opposing hog factories. "You
don't put in a proper lagoon. The costs of dealing
with animal waste are avoided by the owners and
shifted to the surrounding population as health
problems, traffic, social problems and
pollution--odors, chemicals and pathogens in air or
water.
You don't pay the worker more than you
absolutely have to. You do take advantage of every
public subsidy available. But the biggest cost issue
is that hogs are a lot like humans and are sensitive
to disease. That means the life of these projects is
only about twelve years because the buildings become
so contaminated they can't use them any longer. Too
many hogs die. Then they pick up and leave, and the
community is stuck with the damage."
Oddly enough, one of the
government's most vigorous champions of
supply-contract farming and the hog-factory system
is the Federal Reserve, which is supposed to
regulate money and credit, not agriculture. Its
Center for the Study of Rural America at the Kansas
City Federal Reserve Bank last spring sponsored a
conference on rural economic development titled
"Beyond Agriculture." Mark Drabenstott,
the center's director, has relentlessly promoted the
factory concept as the inevitable wave of the future
and argues that corporate consolidation allows rural
communities to put aside farm issues so they can
pursue brighter prospects for development.
One speaker at the Fed
conference, an Italian official from the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, suggested that small farmers may still
be needed on the land, if only to protect the lovely
landscape. "It is true in Tuscany," Mario
Pezzini allowed, "that, if you remove all the
olive trees, the beauty of the region will be
destroyed."
A much grimmer portrait of
the future was described by Professor Thomas
Johnson, an agricultural economist from Missouri.
Johnson warned the Fed conference of the emerging
specter of "isolated rural communities"
where most of the large factory farms and
packinghouses are located. The food factories will
operate with the most advanced technologies, yet
local public services, especially education, will be
minimal.
Incomes will be significantly lower,
populations stable or declining, the tax base weak
and eroding. "These communities will rival
inner cities as the primary destination of
international immigrants," Johnson said.
"These immigrants will largely work at close to
minimum wages for value-added agricultural
processing or other manufacturing firms." The
pattern is already visible in rural backwaters and
on Indian reservations--sites chosen by agribusiness
on the assumption that very poor people will not
object to anything that promises a little income.
In other words, this very
sophisticated corporate system for food production
is in the process of creating new pockets of poverty
across prosperous America--places where people
without much income or influence dwell in an
environment that is ruined both physically and
socially. If you think about history, this is what
coal and steel and other emerging manufacturing
industries did a century ago, when immigrant workers
and others were clustered in coal camps and mill
towns. Government is still dealing with the messes
those industries left behind, and taxpayers will
someday pay for the new ones that agribusiness is
generating. In a variety of ways, cheap food assigns
its true costs to many unwitting victims.
First, consider the
situation of workers. The consolidating packinghouse
industry first boosted its "efficiency" by
breaking unions and busting down wages, next by
drawing hapless immigrant workers into
slaughterhouse jobs that were already dirty and
dangerous. Then the companies sped up the assembly
lines--and the Agriculture Department accommodated
high-speed production by "modernizing" its
own inspection system. Professor Ronald Cotterill,
an antitrust authority at the University of
Connecticut's Food Marketing Policy Center,
described current working conditions as "now
clearly more dangerous and debilitating than at any
time since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle," in
1906. Some brave workers are rebelling.
In Omaha, a
joint organizing campaign led by the United Food and
Commercial Workers and the Industrial Areas
Foundation's church-based community organization,
Omaha Together One Community, has signed up a
majority of the workers at the ConAgra beef
packinghouse. The workers are demanding union
recognition.
Then there is public health.
Salmonella poisoning has staged a comeback, thanks
to the greater efficiencies in slaughterhouses and
meat inspection. Just as the assembly line was sped
up for workers, factory farms also speed up the
birth-to-slaughter cycle of animals with heavy
injections of growth-accelerating antibiotics and
hormones. Europeans, fearful of the chemical
residues in food, prohibit these practices, and the
US government responds by denouncing such concerns
as barriers to free trade. No one really knows what
the consequences will be for human health.
The
Organization for Competitive Markets warns: "It
is likely that the rapid buildup of pathogens and
chemicals in our surface water--much of which is due
to the improper handling of animal wastes--will lead
to some kind of major disease outbreak or health
problems in the next few years." Health issues
include overuse of antibiotics; the emergence of
new, antibiotics-resistant pathogens; the effects on
children of bovine growth hormone in milk products;
and the risk of unintended genetic migrations from
biotech seeds.
The monarch butterfly, we are
informed, may pay the price for GM corn. Government
regulators often prove to be unreliable guardians of
safe food. In Britain the threat of mad-cow disease
was actively kept from the public until people
started dying. In the United States, Aventis won EPA
approval to sell its GM corn seeds by promising to
keep the corn segregated from human consumption, but
it went into taco shells.
There's also the issue of
food security. Given the usual abundance of food,
it's unsettling to hear agricultural experts explain
how a sudden crisis could occur in the US food
supply. According to William
Heffernan of Missouri, "Biotechnology
eliminates diversity, and there's a lot of
uncertainty about what results from the
homogenization of breeds, the entropy of the gene
pool, the concentration of production that generates
new pathogens." He adds, "The control of
the animal genetics pool is concentrating, and the
genetic base for domestic animals is narrowing.
For
example, more than 90 percent of all commercially
produced turkeys in the world come from three
breeding flocks. The system is ripe for the
evolution of a new strain of avian flu for which
these birds have no resistance. Similar concerns
exist in hogs, chickens and dairy-cattle
genetics." Food security may also be threatened
by the fragile economic condition of producers and
extreme price swings. "If we had two droughts
in a row like 1988," Daryll Ray of Tennessee
warned, "we would see the farmers slaughtering
their animals and we would have food
shortages."
And finally there is the
cruel treatment of animals. In slaughterhouses,
Missouri hog farmer Keith Mudd told me, the line
moves so fast that on occasion workers are sawing
the legs off an animal that is not yet dead (anyone
who doubts this should read Gail Eisnitz's expose,
Slaughterhouse). The Humane Farming Association,
based in San Rafael, California, circulates a film
on hog factories that provides stomach-turning
glimpses inside the production system--sows dead or
dying, chewing frantically on the bars and metal
flooring because they have been made psychotic by
close confinement, where they cannot root or even
turn around.
heir piglets are removed soon after
birth and the sows are swiftly reimpregnated--high-speed
birthing that continues until, sore and exhausted,
the animal drops. The film also shows hog production
in Sweden, where growth-accelerating antibiotics are
forbidden by law and the animals are raised and
fattened in natural settings and normal routines.!
Animal-rights advocates remind us of this
admonition: The ways in which people treat animals
will be reflected in how people relate to one
another.
Tractors
and Tree-Huggers Unite!
State Senator Paul Muegge
from Tonkawa, Oklahoma, a grain and livestock farmer
who chairs the State Senate's agriculture committee,
joked about his odd reputation in Oklahoma politics.
"I'm known as a wacko tree-hugger myself,"
he admitted. "Me and a friend figured out
awhile back we can't beat these tree-huggers;
they're everywhere. So we started talking to them,
and within a year we got some things worked out. We
had alliances with family farmers and
environmentalists on the hog-waste issue, and that
coalition simply swept over the state." The
white-haired Muegge is among those who encouraged
the Organization for Competitive Markets to initiate
the broader conversation on food.
The OCM vision statement
doesn't attempt to strategize on the politics, but
it lays out the big picture in persuasive detail and
proposes some ambitious goals. Some of them are:
- Reinvigorating antitrust
enforcement. If the Justice Department remains
passive, state governments and private lawsuits can
lead the way. Litigation should not only explore the
breakup of existing consolidations but also develop
a broader antitrust doctrine that encompasses
producer prices and the antisocial consequences of
monopoly power.
- Stabilizing the production
system. OCM proposes a global food reserve,
coordinated with other major grain-producing
nations, that can reduce the highs and lows of price
swings without re-establishing the old price-support
system. Food reserves would also serve as the
nation's "rainy-day fund," protecting
against food-supply risks from weather or genetic
catastrophes.
- A whole-food system. By
involving consumers, rich and poor, in agriculture
policy, the government would change directions
fundamentally. Instead of subsidizing the
industrialized system, public funds would go to
farmers who are making the difficult transition to
alternative farming, which is both sustainable and
humane but which has lower yields. Agricultural
research, including at some land-grant universities
now corrupted by corporate sponsors, would refocus
on social objectives. Campaigns to require honest
food labeling and to eliminate dangerous working
conditions and antibiotics would also be obvious
priorities.
No one should have any
illusions about how difficult it will be to reform
our current food system--or how hard it is for
country folks and city folks to put aside their
usual differences and learn to do politics on the
same page. Still, as Tom Linzey says, the food
system has to change for our own good and for the
future's. The farmers, like Fred Stokes and Paul
Muegge, who have started the conversation are
opening a door to new politics, brushing aside old
stereotypes that divide the millions of Americans
who ought to be allies. If kindred spirits will
return the favor, something important--maybe even
powerful--could unfold.
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