This week President Obama returned to Iowa, where he launched his successful bid to the White House, to speak about "jobs and economic security" in rural America. According to the White House, his bus tour is not a campaign trip, but veteran political observers would disagree. For farmers and rural advocates this tour is really about something much larger than electioneering or a new jobs program, it's about the survival of rural America.
While the plight of urban decay has been widely publicized in the mainstream press, similar issues facing our country cousins (myself included), lack of well paying jobs, rural brain drain, food deserts, poverty and lack of access to quality health care, have either been ignored or largely misunderstood by policy makers and the press. Today, more rural Americans are on food stamps and face bleaker economic prospects than their urban counterparts, despite the romantic image of small town life often portrayed by the media.
For the past 50 years, rural America has seen it's best, brightest and most mobile flee the countryside in search of jobs as federal farm, economic and trade policies have slowly bled family farmers off the land. Since 1960, when John F. Kennedy was elected, America has lost over 1.7 million family farms, the backbone of rural economies, with the number of farmers in the U.S. today being outnumbered by prisoners.
Despite increases in farm productivity and improved planting and harvesting equipment, more insidious economic factors like increased industry consolidation, poorly designed subsidy programs and over specialization in industrial livestock production, with poor contract protections, have hallowed out the countryside. Instead of prosperity, industrial agriculture has created vast profits for corporations at the top of the food chain, but left a growing number of rural America's Main Streets to resemble ghost towns and its residents poorly prepared or able to meet the nation's important challenges for the 21st century.
While many people in urban areas have never met a farmer or someone who produced the food that appears on their plate each day, despite a growing national awareness of food and agriculture issues, most Main Street businesses in rural America realize that their livelihood and very survival are tied to the economic wellbeing of the local farm economy.
And if you want to save rural America, you have to save the family farmer.
Obama's Rural Agenda, circa 2007
Since the president's Rural Tour is about creating jobs and economic opportunity for rural America, it might help to start out with a refresher of what President Obama promised the first time he toured the state, which helped him on his road to unexpected victory during the Iowa caucus.
When Obama first ran for president in Iowa, he cultivated a serious grassroots reform platform in agriculture that included:
That last one was important. I remember receiving an advanced copy of Obama's Rural Agenda before it was released in October 2007 and reading those words and thinking we finally have a candidate who understands rural issues and is willing to do something about it.
In the past 30 years, since Ronald Reagan took office, the U.S. government has stopped enforcing antitrust laws, while recklessly encouraging an orgy of corporate mergers. During this time, food and agriculture production has become one of the most concentrated sectors in the U.S. economy. General economic theory states that when 4 or less companies control more than 40% of market share that industry is no longer competitive, competiveness being the lifeblood of capitalism, innovation and democracies.
Today just 4 companies control 84% of the beef packing industry, 66% of the pork packing industry and just one company, Monsanto, controls genetically engineered seeds for corn, cotton, soybeans and canola on more than 90% of the acres that are planted with GMO seeds. Such excessive market concentration has given corporations an increased stranglehold on supply, shrinking both profits and markets for family farmers. Since 1952 farmers have seen their share of the food dollar that they receive shrink from 47¢ on every dollar spent on food to barely 20¢.
Antitrust Investigation to Nowhere?
To his credit, President Obama and his staff listened to the plight of family farmers when he caucused in Iowa. As a result, last year the Obama administration launched a series of workshops to investigate anti-competitive practices in food and agriculture. These workshops were potentially so historic that I felt compelled to travel across the country to all 5 of them in hopes of witnessing the dawn of a new era in agriculture, when our government would finally stand up for family farmers instead of promoting agribusiness profits.
Regretfully, the Department of Justice has so far refused to issue a report or take any meaningful actions against the largest violators.
Even worse for farmers was the news last month that DOJ antitrust chief Christine Varney was leaving the administration without finishing the job to join a white glove law firm in New York. For many farmers, who have endured the corrupt practices of agribusiness for decades, Varney was seen as the last best hope of freeing farmers from an unfair system that has driven hundreds of thousands livestock farmers out of business and shackled them with abusive contracts.
In December of last year I traveled to Washington DC to deliver more than 200,000 comments from farmers, citizens and Food Democracy Now! members in a private meeting with Christine Varney and other DOJ and USDA staff to explain the urgent need for antitrust enforcement. As always, Varney was committed in her personal statements, but did let it slip that others who were part of the investigations were potentially opposition. With Varney leaving, family farmers and rural America may never get the justice they deserve.
Hope for Rural America?
Even now an important decision waits on the president's desk that will have more to do with creating jobs and economic security for rural America than any bus tour or another White House briefing paper on jobs.
During the 2008 Farm Bill, Congress required the USDA to write rules that addressed problems of market manipulation and unfair contracts to protect livestock farmers. Known as GISPA, for the USDA agency that overseas their enforcement, Grain Inspectors, and Packers and Stockyard Administration (GIPSA), the new rules would create a fair marketplace for farmers to sell their livestock without fear of retaliation, require packers to maintain written records over price deviations and prevent undue preferences.
More than anything, the completion of the DOJ/USDA antitrust investigations, with significant enforcement actions, and the finalizing of strong GISPA rules will determine the fate of the family farmer and rural America for the century to come.
If President Obama truly wants to create jobs and economic security for rural economies and see farmers thrive, he'll follow through on the promises he already made to Iowans and make sure that farmers have the access to fair markets that they deserve.
In reality, the best way to create jobs is by saving the ones that you already have. The same is true about keeping farmers on the land. The equation for success in rural America has never changed, make sure farmers receive a fair price in the marketplace and the wealth will spread, our communities will prosper and our nation will flourish. After a century of listening to false promises by DC politicians, rural America is paying closer attention to what these folks do once they're elected, versus what they say on the campaign trail. And it's time that Washington got down to the business of putting farmers first, after all their jobs just might depend on it.
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Ike, JFK and Johnson actually had an ag policy that sought actively to reduce production because we had such a great surplus. Programs designed to pay farmers not to grow ended up contributing to the centralization of farm land into few and few lands. The reduction of the farm workforce in American dropped from 50% to 3%. That was a political decision, no less shocking than the disparity between minimum wage and CEO pay.
Family farms have little lobbying power; big corporations do. Guess who wins?
The empty promises Dems make, & open hostility by Repubs to smaller farming operations is criminal, IMO. Politicians only talk farm policy when campaigning, but when they look for campaign contribution cash go straight to the trough of big-money & bend-over for their wants/benefit. We are indeed witnessing the destruction (pre-meditated IMO) of the “family farm†with near all farm policy legislation bought-&-paid-for by giant corporate entities that only care about short-term profits, not workers, consumers, safety, or sustainable farming practices (6 pounds topsoil washed-away to produce 1 pound of grain). If we don’t reverse this ignorant/greedy subversion of our nation’s regional food-production capabilities, we will be seriously plowed.
http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/pesticides/
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/03/07/Monsantos-Many-Attempts-to-Destroy-All-Seeds-but-Their-Own.aspx
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22301669/
One processor handles much more than 50% of the US PIstachio crop, and a few packers cover virtually all the almond and dried raisin markets ( two giant "co-ops" are part of that)
Market forces fail when there is that kind of imbalance between buyers and sellers, and those markets inexorably force farms towards factory style production as with hogs and chickens and turkeys, more employees with factory type jobs and fewer owner operators, who live on the farm or NEARBY towns. A Board of Directors in Denver or Brussels is not quite the same thing
Now that I've got that off my chest, let me say that the author makes many good points. When I consider the rural area where I grew up, it is a lot like Ireland -- it has spun off a tremendous amount of people and talent leaving little behind but struggle. I would like to plant the seed of one more idea.
A house in rural America typically wouldn't have appreciated much in value in decades because there are so few jobs. I live in a Cape Cod house in a flourishing metro area, but the same house in many rural Midwestern towns would cost about 1/4 or 1/5 as much and command about 1/10 of the property tax. If all of the baby boomers whose retirement plans are threatened would consider these communities to make their savings go much further, think of what rejuvenation could result -- festivals every weekend, nifty restaurants, breweries, wineries, trams and trollies, countless virtual grandma's and grandpa's for every baby. I read comments from a guy in upstate NY who had found just that and was loving it.
Most of the ag states, lean right, and therefore the support of ag subsidies continues, like oil subsidies, and the subsidy that is illegals, picking, proccessing and packing the products in non-union workplaces. See how the conservative machine keeps on keeping on?
When people like Dave Murphy say that corporations, meaning, I think, big public corporations, like, for instance General Mills or Kellogg's or Chiquita or Dole, or whomever, own farm land, I say "show me". They don't. There are a few rare exceptions. Smuckers has owned some raspberry ground, I believe.
Most, not all of this article is nonsense. There IS a high degree of concentration in the seed and meatpacking industries. He should have written about that as a separate piece. Contracting practices between meat farmers and packers and legislation concerning it would have been another good, separate, piece.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blfarm4.htm
As you will see, both the number of farms and the size of the farm population has dropped steadily for over 150 years. This is driven by basic farm economics and changes in opportunities in other occupations. Attributing the declines to farm policy just demonstrates ignorance of American history.
Until comparatively recently, farmers received low prices for their crops, augmented by Federal supports. As costs went up -- for equipment, seed, fertilizer, etc. -- the income from any given acreage dropped. Steadily increasing yields both helped and hurt. As income per acre dropped, family farms bought each other up to get enough scale to continue to be economical. The average size of farms has been increasing, the number of farms and farmers dropping, for over 100 years. It has been driven by economics, pure and simple. The process is both inexorable and irreversible.
Fewer farms/farm families per county meant many little towns disappeared. There was no longer enough business to support a grocery or hardware store -- or doctor -- outside the County Seat or whatever viable towns survived. Kids left because if you didn't work on a family farm or in some company that brought in illegal alien labor (chicken, meatpacking, etc.), there were no jobs.
You can moan about this all you want but it's as certain to continue as the tides.
Creating local food systems should be our number one priority . This would create "real world" economy . And help us manage our environmental resources , soil , water air. It's really not that complicated. Non material wealth and all that ,
Good luck with your farming skills. My dad and I always joked that farming was for people who thought Vegas style gambling too tame!
It has been a black eye for rural America to lose the tremendous number of farms, but just as destructive to lose the small groceries, hardware stores, implement dealers, etc. Drive around in rural areas and you will find countless small towns with empty main streets, and probably a closed school. None of that has been good for America.