Open, transparent and competitive markets are allegedly the bedrock of the American free market system. The idea that any individual can go to market and sell their goods and not face discrimination, be forced to sign unfair contracts or experience deceptive practices is enshrined in more than 235 years of legal precedent.
The greatest tragedy of the above statement is that we celebrate the myth of the free market everyday and organize our daily lives around it even as continual and mounting evidence points to the contrary.
If you want proof, you have look no further than the food that appears on your plate each day. If you start your day with a slice of bacon, an egg or a glass of milk, more likely than not the first bite of your day is taken at the expense of a farmer. Let's avoid the animal's sacrifice for now, but return to the slaughter that's been happening to family farmers in America's supposedly free marketplace.
For the past three decades livestock and meat packing companies have engaged in merger after merger, until the sector is so highly consolidated that it no longer operates as a competitive market. Instead, large industrial packers have used excessive consolidation to unjustly discriminate against small and medium sized livestock producers with unfair contracts and deceptive practices when farmers sell their livestock at market.
Today only 4 companies control nearly 84 percent of beef packing while another 4 control more than 66 percent of hogs. Such concentration has diminished farmer profit and increasingly placed farmers at the mercy of meat cartel contracts, which have proven to be abusive if not corrupt.
This rampant consolidation and the resulting anti-competitive practices have needlessly driven nearly a million farmers off the land over the past 30 years. Since 1980, the U.S. has lost more 600,000 hog farmers and more the 160,000 independent cattle producers in the past 15 years alone. During this time hog farmers have seen their take home pay cut in half as cattle producers have seen it drop nearly 40 percent.
While bacon and burgers are still arriving on America's plates everyday, the loss of farmers and farmer profits and the placing of production into the hand of fewer producers and packers has gutted rural America of one of its best avenues for job creation while simultaneously stalling its chance for long-term economic viability.
Since Walter Goldschmidt published his landmark book As You Sow in 1947, it has been a widely known that family owned farming operations return more money to local economies than their vertically integrated counterparts. The going rate of return for investment in Iowa for every dollar earned by a family farmer is that it is circulated in the community seven times, for a vertically integrated corporate farm it's less than two. In the 1978 edition, Goldschmidt estimated that for every six farmers that go out of business at least one local business closes as well. A quick calculation shows that over the past 30 years, the loss of 1 million farmers has cost rural America -- the backbone of our nation -- more than 166,000 independently owned businesses.
For anyone concerned about jobs or the economy this type of continued loss represents catastrophe.
Fortunately for farmers and those of us who eat, the USDA has written a new set of fair market livestock rules that could potentially level the playing field for farmers once and for all.
Known as the GIPSA rules, for the USDA agency, the Grain Inspection Packers and Stockyard Administration, that oversees their enforcement, the new rules would create a fair marketplace for farmers to sell their livestock without fear of retaliation from packers and integrators, require packers to maintain written records over price deviations and prevent undue preferences.
Today the Senate Appropriations Committee has a chance to make sure that the new rules, which were written at the request of Congress during the 2008 Farm Bill, finally give farmers a fair market.
The only thing standing between the giant packers and the end of livestock production by independent family farmers is the new GIPSA rules which have been widely reviled by the meat industry -- a sure sign of how good they actually are.
After 90 years since the adoption of the Packers and Stockyard Act of 1921, today the Senate can finally ensure that farmers are guaranteed fair contracts under the law and cannot be subject to discrimination or retaliation in the marketplace.
Advocating such principles as fair contracts and individual ownership of land and livestock used to be the foundation of the American Dream and our democracy. If our Founding Fathers were alive today, they would be fighting the Big Meat cartels just as they fought the unjust monopolies of the Stamp Act and the British Crown.
The new GIPSA rules are about creating jobs for future farmers and ranchers, ensuring the survival of independent family farms and securing the economic lifeline of rural America for the next generation. Miraculously, the new rules are not partisan, but they are fair and they will return the opportunity for a new generation of farmers to raise livestock and grow food like our Founding Fathers and Adam Smith imagined, in a functional marketplace that provides equal access to markets for all.
Today a few Senators will decide whether such a notion is central to the American ideal or just a quaint notion after all. If they chose wisely, Americans will enjoy the fruits of independent farm operations for generations to come. If not, they sign the death warrant for family farmers and rural America. These are the stakes, as they always have been, ever since the first colonists took up arms against concentrated wealth and power. In the struggle for freedom and independence, the battle never changes, even if the face of the enemy does.
Originally post on: Food Democracy Now!
Follow Dave Murphy on Twitter: www.twitter.com/food_democracy
NO MORE Monsanto control!!!!!!
http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010-10-20-why-monsanto-paying-farmers-to-spray-rival-herbicides
Why Monsanto is paying farmers to spray its rivals’ herbicides | Grist
Monsanto's ongoing humiliation proceeds apace. No, I'm not referring to the company's triumph in our recent "Villains of Food" poll. Instead, I'm talking about a Tuesday item from the Des Moines Register's Philip Brasher, reporting that Monsanto has been forced into the unenviable position of having to pay farmers to spray the herbicides of rival companies.
If you tend large plantings of Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" soy or cotton, genetically engineered to withstand application of the company's Roundup herbicide (which will kill the weeds -- supposedly -- but not the crops), Monsanto will cut you a $6 check for every acre on which you apply at least two other herbicides. One imagines farmers counting their cash as literally millions of acres across the South and Midwest get doused with Monsanto-subsidized poison cocktails.
The move is the latest step in the abject reversal of Monsanto's longtime claim: that Roundup Ready technology solved the age-old problem of weeds in an ecologically benign way.
Independent farmers had always been the backbone of our country - until about 40-50 years ago when corporate farms began usurping their role. Unfortunately, this was at the expense of not only rural America's economic viability, but also at the expense of the health of all people who eat factory farmed meats.
It's absolutely shortsighted to have agricultural policies that squeeze out the independent farmers, especially when it's inevitable that our supply of fossil fuels is will diminish. At some point in the not too distant future, we will only be able to feed our country with locally raised foods. Which is entirely possible with a paradigm shift.
It's just time to stop favoring the corporate few and to think ahead and put the needs of the vast majority of Americans first.
This shows that the corruption in our country runs deep and that our federal judiciary will protect the corporations that are paying off the politicians and the cushy law firms they go to after they are voted out of office. It shows that the United States has divulged into a banana republic. There is no justice at the federal level if you are a small player and federal judges will ignore the law and prevent a jury from deciding.
I know because it is what happened to my case. The federal judge who got my case was a one of those former politically appointed federal prosecutors whose job it was to get Tyson off on their illegal alien scam case the FBI had developed.
Family farmers have become a piggy bank for corrupt politicians to tap into for big donations by corporations who control vast sections of the economy--- our food. It is nothing less than scandalous.
Tom