One of the reasons I supported Bernie Sanders for president was his support of family farms against the abuses of agribusiness. Agricultural policy and food security should be at the center of our plan for the future because we have a large global population and dwindling resources. Our goal must be food security. I want to discuss an article in the February 2016 issue of Harper’s entitled The Trouble With Iowa. This article makes it clear that agricultural policy in the United States is not concerned with a quality life for farmers, promoting food security, or encouraging the responsible use of resources. We must find a way to end the abuses of agribusiness.
The problems listed in the Harper’s article are no mistake. They are the result a deliberate effort by industrialists to end the political power of small farmers. Today, the abuses of agribusiness are obvious but the financial interests behind the abuses resist efforts to correct the problem
Restore the Political Power of Family Farming
The plight of the family farm raises fundamental questions about what kind of society we want to have. Back in 2014 I imagined a new kind of community centered around family farms. I said that one of the things this community would have to do is develop its own candidates for public office. Sadly, that wasn’t a new idea. That’s exactly what farm communities used to do. We’ve actually been moving away from that ideal, until today when there is no one who can stop agribusiness abuses. Giant corporations have made the rivers run so thick with animal waste and synthetic fertilizer that everything the river touches dies. Clearly food security is not the goal of such corporations. Restore the political power of family farming.
Farmers and their enemies
Farmers have been the vanguard of populism since the Civil War. They have fought abuses by railroads, banks, grain merchants, and food processors, and government allies of agribusiness. They’ve also fought the main culprits behind the recent financial crisis–hedge funds. Farmers led the populist uprisings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when unfair economic policies threatened farm family livelihoods. Family farmers banded together to form organizations like the Grange, the Farm Alliance, and the National Farmers Union. They ran candidates and joined with progressive allies in labor and social justice movements. And so farmers were systematically run out of business.
Today hedge funds have become the largest investors in food companies, farmland, and agricultural products. Their speculation in food commodity markets has contributed to price spikes in corn and soybeans. In addition, hedge funds have been proponents of grabbing land worldwide. In this way they help their investors speculate on the effects of climate change on agriculture. 1 (Foodopoly, Page 11) These interests have all worked together to decrease the number of family farms because farming communities are the biggest obstacles to their oligarchic pretensions. This is the story of farmers and their enemies.
Ezra Taft Benson and the Committee for Economic Development (CED)
If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard about this struggle, it’s because it’s been erased from history–especially the post-World War II part (Foodopoly, page 13). In 1955, when Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson moved to reduce crop prices, farmers formed The National Farmers Organization (NFO). Benson, who was both a Mormon apostle and President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture, was determined to destroy the New Deal program for agriculture that ensured fair farm prices. As a representative of the ‘captains of industry’, he saw farmers as excess labor. His cabal organized the Committee for Economic Development (CED) in 1942. (Foodopoly, page 13) In the early 1960s the CED released its report stating its intentions for labor. The solution that Ezra Taft benson and the Committee for Economic Development came up with was to get farm boys off the farm and into vocational training for industrial skills, and relocated to where their labor was needed.
By the time of the August 1962 NFO convention in Des Moines, Iowa, farmers had a plan. At this time the CED was headed by representatives of Ford Motor Company and Sears, so the NFO organized catalogue marches in seven cities. Protesters dumped Sears catalogs in front of their stores and drove Ford cars and trucks in circles around Ford establishments in several cities. These protests caused the companies to reject the report. Then the U.S. Senate and House agriculture committees held hearings to discredit it. The farmers won that battle. (Foodopoly, page 15) But the oligarchs have plenty of time, connections and money, and they never quit. And they had been busy in those years between 1942 and 1962.
During the CED’s first fifteen years of existence, thirty-eight of its trustees held public office and two served as presidents of the Federal Reserve Bank. The organization maintained strong relationships with the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations, helping to direct government research dollars as well as to provide funding for academic research. The strong ties to academia resulted in policy prescriptions shrouded in sophisticated economic rhetoric and focused on weakening the reform-liberalism of the New Deal. They couched their proclamations on shrinking the farm population as moving ‘labor and capital where they will be most productive.’
The CED Influenced President Kennedy to Support a Massive Tax Cut
In 1962 a CED report called for ‘a prompt, substantial and permanent reduction’ in taxes. The CED helped organize the Business Committee for Tax Reduction, endorsed by Kennedy, which actively lobbied Congress. This resulted in the passage of legislation in 1964 cutting individual tax rates by 20 percent across the board and reducing corporate tax rates.
They were aided in these efforts by their propaganda arm. The CED’s information committee included members of several advertising agencies, the editors of the Atlanta Constitution and Look, the publisher of the Washington Post, the head of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the board chairman of Curtis Publishing, and the presidents of Time-Life and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). The CED’s 1958 pamphlet, ‘Defense Against Inflation,’ was discussed in 354 papers and magazines, reaching 31 million people. Everything was done according to plan. (Foodopoly, page 15)
Immediately after its formation in 1942 the CED began creating a postwar program to expand chemical-intensive agriculture and to grant industrial and financial interests more control over it. It worked to create a postwar economy built on massive and profitable industrial growth in the North, which would require an enormous pool of cheap labor.
Today the industrial cities that were so important to the oligarchs are gone. But family farms and food security are nowhere on the horizon.
Agribusiness Has Become Too Powerful
The Harper’s article ends with these words:
The standoff that results from all of this plays out across our continent. Those endeavors that produce food and energy need scale and landscape and are of necessity rural and are of necessity unspeakably destructive. The industries involved must be free to operate on their own terms in the landscape in the nation’s midsection, where the states are red and square. As Stowe Says, all they have to do is to protect the status quo. To do that, they don’t need to play to checkmate; stalemate and gridlock are success enough. Iowa’s caucuses, and for that matter the whole presidential ritual, will do nothing to change this.
The man whom Manning quotes here is William Stowe, head of the Des Moines Water Works. Mr. Stowe has received death threats from the people he’s trying to serve and not because of a decrease in water quality. People are upset with him because Stowe’s department has sued county operators of drainage districts over the fertilizer and hog manure they’ve been dumping into Iowa’s waterways and drinking water. Clearly, agribusiness has become too powerful.
Obama was not able to Rein in Agribusiness
In 2008 Obama found he was not able to rein in agribusiness, and in the Fall of 2011 the Republican-controlled House of Representatives denied funding for enforcing regulations at the Departments of Agriculture and Justice. A similar fate befell the post-World War I effort by populists to abolish futures trading. Commodity speculation, one of agribusiness’s most destructive abuses, continued to plague farmers right up to the 1929 stock market crash.
Today, populists face the same powerful forces . But they have a drastically reduced number of family farms and labor unions in a state of dysfunction. And it is difficult for politicians to keep campaign promises once they take office. One of Obama’s campaign promises was the reform of industrial agriculture. That’s why he appointed Tom Vilsack as Agriculture Secretary. Vilsack had been governor of Iowa and a supporter of reform, but his appointment did not have the hoped-for effect.
Tyson responded to his efforts by joining with Smithfield and other meat producers to mount a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign, complete with astroturf opposition and congressional arm-twisting. Big Ag outplayed Vilsack at nearly every turn, and he quickly backpedaled on the new rules. Finally, Congress killed the reform effort late in 2011. Two years later, with the fundamentals of its business plan intact, Smithfield sold itself to the Shuanghui Group, a Chinese company. What Smithfield sold to the Chinese was less its pork production than its control of Iowa’s politics and its landscape. The irony of some of the world’s last remaining Communists taking over from Iowa’s swine capitalists is outdone only by Donald Trump, who spends whatever time he isn’t using to bash immigrants in bashing the Chinese. He offers no hint of course, about how he might best the Shuanghui Group, which, through finely honed contracts, now controls the landscape of all that beautiful corn in the Midwest.
Agribusiness Abuses free enterprise
So what exactly is this business plan passed on to the Chinese by Smithfield? It is modern-day serfdom. For example, Iowans say their state has been chickenized. Richard Manning thinks it’s more accurate to say it has been Tysonized. Tyson describes the process as vertical integration. Thanks to its efforts over the last 30 years the company owns every step of the process, from producing and delivering feed and hatchlings to slaughter, processing and distribution. During that time, Tyson has even managed to redesign the chicken. They genetically select for animals that will eat high-energy corn and soy while crammed in windowless, climate-controlled factories.
The process depended on a networked system of growers and farmers, who became contractors. The network was organized as a tournament. Tyson delivered hatchlings, formulated and supplied the feed and antibiotics, and took away the birds when they were ready for slaughter…Growers in a given region were lumped in a pool and paid on the basis of a competitive scheme that ranked them according to the pounds of chicken produced per pound of feed. Everything was tightly monitored by a flow of data that measured corn and soy in, McNuggets out. A productivity gain of a few percentage points meant the difference between bankruptcy and a paycheck for many growers.
Agribusiness abuses the environment
So Tyson not only reformulated chickens, it domesticated farmers. Naturally the pork processors wanted to get in on the deal. A large part of the pollution in Iowa comes from the manure produced by these operations. It is not regulated because unlike factory waste, farm waste is not considered pollution. Never mind that twenty-one million Hogs produce the waste of about 45 million people. (Iowa has a population of just 3 million.) The chickens likewise produce more manure than all the people in the state and almost none of it passes through a sewage treatment plant or septic tank before going into the public waterways and drinking water.
The financialization of food and farming has wreaked havoc on the natural world. The long list of the consequences of industrialized agriculture includes the polluting of lakes, rivers, streams, and marine ecosystems with agrochemicals, excess fertilizer, and animal waste (Foodopoly, page 11, cited below).
Agribusiness Causes Obesity and Health Problems
Meanwhile a diet of corn products and products from soybeans, a companion plant of corn, is changing America’s diet. Eighty-five percent of America’s arable cropland is planted in corn, soybeans, wheat and hay. In Iowa, 23 million of 24 million acres is planted in corn and soybeans. This translates into higher consumption of high-fructose corn syrup as well as products containing soybean oil. From 1909 to 1999 the consumption of soybean oil increased a thousand fold. Linoleic acid found in soybean oil is a culprit in the obesity epidemic, and since livestock feed contains soybeans it is even found in the chicken and pork we eat. It may even be responsible for decreased brain development in the population since it supplants omega-3s in our diets. An unhealthy diet is not food security.
Parity is What Food Security Looks Like
Agricultural policy in the United States fostered food security under FDR’s New Deal. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 was intended to achieve parity for farmers. This is how the Adjustment Act worked:
The act provided for acreage reduction and land set-asides to reduce over-production. In addition, the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) established a price floor by making loans to farmers when the food processors or grain corporations refused to pay farmers a price that covered the cost of production. Farmers pledged their crops to the government as collateral against the loans. This ensured that they were paid a fair price. The loan rate, set by the CCC and based on parity, acted as a price floor, because a farmer could sell to a national grain reserve that was established as a last-resort market (Foodopoly, page 15).
The grain reserve was filled when crops were abundant and prices were low; grain was released when crops were scarce. In this way the reserve prevented crop prices from skyrocketing during times of drought or low production. Since this policy stopped products from reaching the market if the price was not fair, prices inevitably returned to a normal level, and farmers could pay off their loans. Together these policies helped keep overproduction in check and reduced commodity price volatility. This meant farmers could make a living without subsidies.
The parity programs worked so well that there was real prosperity in rural areas during World War II and that postwar period. This was strikingly different from the post-World War I era when, without supply management, farm prices collapsed. The programs also worked for Main Street by reducing price volatility, and the grain reserve actually made a profit of $13 million over twenty years as the crops were sold on the commodity market.
Food-Processing and grain industries prefer over-production to parity
The food-processing and grain industries preferred overproduction because it led to cheap prices for the products they needed. This fact still motivates their propaganda.
The story of the destruction of parity reminds me of the biblical story of Joseph whom his brothers sold into slavery. Joseph ended up in Egypt where he was given the job of telling Pharaoh the meaning of his dream. Joseph told the pharaoh his dream was a warning that a famine was coming. Egypt prepared for this famine by storing grain. When Joseph’s brothers traveled to Egypt for supplies they were saved by Joseph’s wise policies. Our situation is the reverse of the biblical story. Agribusiness is the anti-Joseph. Agribusiness fights against food security and sound agricultural policy.
Who Represents Agribusiness Today?
Today the representatives of agribusiness include the American Farm Bureau Federation, which works in concert with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In the twenties this group worked with members of Congress, ‘the farm bloc’, who feared the Progressive movement. The farm bloc was made up of farm-state legislators who wanted to appear to address the concerns of their constituents without changing the overall economic structure. The 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act passed in spite of their efforts to defeat it but it was poorly designed. Although it did manage to curb excesses through the 70s it has not been seriously enforced since the 80s.
Can the Effects of Bad Agricultural Policy Be Undone?
It is possible to remove nitrates from water. However at this concentration Des Moines Water Works would need an equipment upgrade costing up to $180 million. And there are 260 cities and towns in Iowa with the same problem. And even if they all removed the nutrients from their drinking water it would not help the life of the rivers. Or the ocean. Nitrates traveling from the corn-belt down the Mississippi River have killed ‘a Connecticut-size stretch of the Gulf of Mexico.”
The cost-effective way of solving the problem would be to run the drainage pipes into wetlands, plant some permanent pastures, apply less fertilizer and replace much of the corn with other crops. Unfortunately the government would have to stop subsidizing the growing of corn. But at least we know it can be done.
Hope
Iowa’s extreme pollution only appeared in the last twenty years. It’s getting worse by the day, and we don’t have the coalition that was effective in the past. We need a new way of approaching these problems–new organizational structures, new ways of thinking. And I think we are seeing something new.
One of the places America went wrong the first time around was in not accepting help from the Native Americans. We didn’t think we needed any help. Today we know better, and we’re not alone. People all over the world have suddenly recognized a source of help in their indigenous people. Who knows what might come of that? It’s almost like we’ve been given a second chance. Agricultural policy and food security should be a progressive priority.
- Wenonah Hauter, Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America, The New Press, 2015. ↩︎
