Message to President Obama: Why Trade Will Not Save Rural America
In Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack’s op-ed this week in the Des Moines Register, he recognized that hunger could not be solved by raising production, because production is in fact at record highs. Grappling with how these increases in productivity have not led to increases in profit, he explained that even though we’ve lost a million farmers in the last 40 years, “income from farming operations declined as a percentage of total farm family income by half.” He continued, “Today, only 11 percent of family farm income comes from farming, which may explain why fewer young people go into farming and why many families rely on off-farm income opportunities to keep their farms.” Vilsack gets the situation right, but his remedy is wrong. Instead of encouraging diversity and altering the pattern of overproduction which pits large farm owners against small by shrinking margins, the Obama administration’s way of dealing with the discrepancy in rural America is through increasing trade.
In his State of the Union address last Wednesday, President Obama covered a lot of ground. His primary goal was to focus on job creation, but he left out one important occupation–in a nation where the average farmer is 57 years old, we need farmers. He mentioned the obesity crisis, noting that the First Lady would be dedicating her efforts there, and then made this comment about doubling our trade in goods and commodity crops in the next five years:
To help meet this goal, we’re launching a National Export Initiative that will help farmers and small businesses increase their exports, and reform export controls consistent with national security. We have to seek new markets aggressively, just as our competitors are. If America sits on the sidelines while other nations sign trade deals, we will lose the chance to create jobs on our shores. But realizing those benefits also means enforcing those agreements so our trading partners play by the rules. And that’s why we’ll continue to shape a Doha trade agreement that opens global markets, and why we will strengthen our trade relations in Asia and with key partners like South Korea and Panama and Colombia.
He has thus far stuck to his word. According to the USDA, $234.5 million is being given to 70 U.S. trade organizations to help promote American food and agricultural products abroad (you can see who this money is going to, from the Cotton Council International, which received a whopping $20 million, to trade reps for perishables like the California Prune Board, which received nearly $3 million). The Farm Bureau is thrilled that this administration is poised to aggressively pursue trade agreement negotiations with other countries as it clearly benefits big producers. So is Republican senator and erstwhile Bush Jr. Secretary of Agriculture nominee Mike Johanns from Nebraska, who had this to say:
With unemployment at 10 percent, we should be pursuing every possible avenue to promote good opportunities for job growth and business investment. Our businesses, farmers, and ranchers produce the highest quality products in the world and deserve an opportunity to compete on a level playing field.
The problem is that places like South Korea have expressed that they don’t want our goods if they contain hormones, antibiotics or genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Worse, though, is that our products are not traded on a “level playing field,” but instead are sold at an unfairly low prices in developing countries, made falsely cheap by our subsidy system. Developed world subsidies have been the prime barrier to negotiations at the Doha Development Round trade talks, which began in 2001 and continue to this day with no agreement–which many consider a victory for developing nations. And while Obama seeks to cut subsidies in his budget, it will be an uphill battle, especially without a stricter definition for who is a farmer.
Ben Lilliston, Communications Director for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy had this to say about the administration’s plan for increasing trade:
The goal of doubling commodity trade is not feasible or wise. This emphasis on export markets is odd given that it runs directly counter to a lot of the Administration’s work to support local food systems. And expanding exports would definitely come at the expense of local food systems. The reality is that we’ve tried to expand agriculture exports for the last 50 years. That goal represents a lot of what is wrong in U.S. farm policy: a push to lower commodity prices–to make us more competitive internationally; an emphasis on just a few commodity crops; and support for large-scale operations over smaller, more diversified farms. An emphasis on exports has benefited multinational agribusiness firms, but not farmers either in the U.S., or in other countries. U.S. agribusiness companies have a several decade record of exporting commodity crops like corn, soybeans, rice and wheat at prices below the cost of production–a practice known as dumping. The result has been devastating to poor countries trying to develop their own food production. The loss of food production in many poor countries is a major contributor to growing hunger around the world. What makes the proposal so strange is that the Administration has to know this is not possible. Even agribusiness companies–who I’m sure love the proposal–know it’s not possible to reach.
Here is what trade agreements looks like in action: as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), U.S. corn sold cheaper than it could be produced, putting millions of Mexican farmers out of business–simultaneously quashing the diversity of the corn varieties and genetically contaminating locally grown corn with GMOs. As a result, these jobless farmers have made their way across the border to pick fruits and vegetables in America (often in slave-like conditions), or work mind-numbing jobs in slaughterhouses. But NAFTA’s destructive legacy runs deeper still. Last October, Mexico was ordered to pay the corn-processing giant Cargill a $77 million dollar fine for imposing a tax on high fructose corn syrup in an attempt to protect their domestic sugar farmers.
Vilsack’s op-ed focused on rebuilding rural America. However, when dollars leave the farm community headed to corporate multinationals for seed, chemicals and equipment, and the products produced on the farm are not food but commodities that then leave the community too, how can broadband and increased trade be anything more than band-aids for rural America? In the face of facts like climate change, to which agriculture contributes at least 30% of carbon emissions, decreased water availability and uncertain oil resources, trade veils the real problems facing the food system. What we need is balance: balanced opportunities in rural areas, a balanced ecosystem with diversified crops that feed local populations, and a balanced number of farmers to knit that community together. More farmers means more jobs, more stewardship of the land, and better quality food–and as a result, a thriving rural economy.
Up next, watch for the administration to start pressuring Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) to release his hold on Islam Siddiqui, Obama’s nominee for Chief Agricultural Negotiator, who’s pesticide lobbying past is not behind the pause. Indeed, who else but a Big Ag lobbyist could they get to take on such a mission seemingly bound for disaster?
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If we want your opinion we'll ask for it
So growing a garden on a roof is what makes someone qualified to comment on production agriculture? Obviously someone who lives in New York City and has a cute little garden knows waaaaaaaaay more about agriculture than say an actual farmer.
Of course finding an actual real farmer that would agree with Paula Crossfield is next to impossible. I know this because, speaking as a family farmer, she is a complete fool. One thing I enjoy doing is showing her articles to other farmers in my community. We laugh at how moronic her ideas are. Then we usually get a little depressed over the fact that idiots like her influence policy decisions that effect our lives.
Just because you read internet articles about Monsanto and grow some tomato plants on your balcony doesn't mean you know a thing about real agriculture!
Something Stinks Alright
I come from a rural background and one side of my family still farms. Reading Crossfield's article is a history of what the last several decade's of US ag policy has been about. You and your dull-minded buddies (assuming it's not just a lonely key board commando) can giggle and infantilize her opinion about where things are headed, but she's summed up where things have come from rather accurately. I don't see any specific criticism of the facts she brings to the table and she gets it right.
NAFTA sent cheap corn south and cheap labor north.
That's an indisputable economic fact that people of all political persuasions tend to agree on, but may not agree on the solution. You don't even seem to agree on any facts, because you seem to think it's somehow beneath you to do so. I know what hog shot smells like and you and your buddies smell fishier, like you're maybe more like bullshit.
There's certainly no need to keep subsidizing certain grains, for instance, versus ag products that tend to result in value-added production chains that increase returns to the farmer, investors in the production chain, and to the ultimate consumer. There's certainly no need to subsidize farmers earning more than $250,000 a year. And that's basically the kinds of policies that are at stake and reforms that need to be made. I think there's a lot of common sense in what Ms. Crossfield is writing about, if you bother paying attention.
Why Food Inc. Should Make Us All Retch
by Charles Clover
A two-year-old boy called Kevin ate a hamburger on holiday with his family. Ten days later he died, his organs overwhelmed by a mutant form of the E coli bacterium found mostly in feed lots or so-called concentrated animal-feeding operations - vast animal-fattening centres, without a blade of grass, where cattle stand up to their ankles in muck all day. These are where America now produces much of its beef.
Robert Kenner's film Food Inc, released in Britain tomorrow, follows Kevin's mother, Barbara Kowalcyk, though the offices of Capitol Hill as she lobbies politicians to pass Kevin's Law. This would re-empower the US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, to close down meat processors that regularly distribute contaminated meat. It is amazing that it does not have these powers, or rather that they have been taken away by industry lobbying. It turns out that many of the people who sit, or sat, at the head of the FDA came from the industry it is supposed to be regulating.
There is no doubt that Food Inc - based on Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma - is a powerful and forensic film with an unerring eye for human stories about the cruel US industrial food system, which abuses animals and workers in many ways.
British audiences, however appalled, are bound to look away and say: it can't be that bad here, can it? They will be right, up to a point. There are no British equivalents of the feed-lot operations that turn subsidised maize into meat that sells for less than vegetables. We have banned growth hormones and still rear most of our cows on grass. Our regulators are independent and have not so obviously been corrupted by political and legal appointments.
Yet feed lots have crept into Italy. American pork producers, such as Smithfield, now have vast operations in Poland and Romania.
There are signs that the downside of super-efficient, globalised agriculture is coming our way: it's already within importing range of our supermarkets. The film may just be, as Schlosser put it drily to me last week, a preview of coming attractions.
The beef, chicken and most processed food found in American supermarkets all have one thing in common: they depend on cheap subsidised maize, which Americans call corn. The United States subsidises maize in disgraceful ways, just as the European Union used to subsidise other commodity crops. Subsidies encourage the use of fertilisers, boost carbon emissions and skew the whole American agricultural system to make the unhealthiest calories the cheapest.
Yet, I hear you saying, this maize dependency is an American phenomenon. And isn't industrial agriculture the price that has to be paid for feeding the world?
Well, maybe - but I know representatives of British farming who have emerged from the film pretty shocked by what could happen to them at the hands of the monopolistic agri-industrial corporations that are the villains of Kenner's film.
We see big chicken processors enslaving smallholders by insisting on constant "improvements" that keep them in debt. We see big companies exploiting immigrant workers. We see investigators hired by Monsanto prosecuting farmers suspected of keeping patented genetically modified seed for re-use the following year. For farmers, this is scary.
And for the rest of us? We have just a slim chance in global markets to influence our future. We can vote three meal times a day by using our power as consumers to promote the kind of local, sustainable food that we want.
But those of us who call for proper food increasingly face the accusation from advocates of intensive agriculture that we are being unrealistic and elitist, because only the rich have the luxury of fussing about the provenance of their food; the poor just need to eat.
Food Inc strikes this argument a killer blow. The camera follows a Mexican-American family around southern California. The quietly articulate father has diabetes. The mother explains that she would like to cook her children healthy meals, not give them hamburgers, but she has no time because she works long hours and they cannot afford it. You can buy a double cheeseburger for 99 cents. You will pay more than that for a head of broccoli. American industrial agriculture makes the poor the most likely to become obese and get diabetes.
Kenners film argues persuasively that it is ordinary working people who are the real victims of America's super-efficient, industrial form of agriculture. The rich will always eat what they want.
It follows that we in Europe should be vigilant against Food Inc slipping in by the back door. We should try actively to prevent Food Inc becoming Food Ltd.
As Schlosser puts it: if you see someone ahead being clubbed, you don't go further down the alley. His point is well made. I recommend you see this film.
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