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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, nmgreens@yahoogroups.com
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  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Active Opposition: Broken Heart/Land - The Demise of the Family Farm
  • Date: Sun, 09 Nov 2003 04:40:18 -0700



The Active Opposition: Broken Heart/Land - The Demise of the Family Farm
http://www.linktv.org/programming/programDescription.php4?code=active_farm
Length: 01:30 Type of program: Current Affairs

Broadcast Times
Tuesday, November 11 10:00 PM
Wednesday, November 12 4:00 AM
Wednesday, November 12 10:00 AM
Wednesday, November 12 4:00 PM
Sunday, November 16 7:00 PM
Monday, November 17 12:00 AM
Monday, November 17 6:00 AM
Monday, November 17 12:00 PM
More
On November 11th at 10PM ET (7PM PT), host Peter Coyote joins
musician/activist Willie Nelson and panel of farmers, activists and
agricultural experts to explore the plight of a dying breed: The Family
Farmer. Family farms in the US have foreclosed and vanished at the alarming
rate of 500 per week as a corporate agricultural industry, which often wields
monopolistic control over commodity prices, has been firmly established
throughout the U.S.

Millions of dollars in US government subsidies go to only ten percent of
American farmers, while the remaining 90 percent are left to fend for
themselves. Increasingly, they’re giving up. Unable to compete with falling
commodity prices while their costs to raise a harvest far exceeds any
possible return, they migrate by the millions to urban areas. More
distressingly, suicide rates among American farmers now stand at five times
the national average.

Program host Peter Coyote begins “Broken Heart/Land” with excerpts from an
exclusive interview he conducted with country music icon and Farm Aid founder
Willie Nelson:

“When five family farmers go under, one business in that community goes under.
So it’s like the domino effect. You lose all the farmers, and then go the
schools and the hospitals, all the businesses in that town. Everybody folds
up. You got a ghost town, every body moves out and goes on to the next big
town and become a problem over there.”

The problem is not just American, as surprisingly similar economic and
political pressures are affecting small farmers throughout the world. Europe
and the US are now in conflict over GMO food and labeling, while cotton
farmers in Mali and elsewhere in the developing world cannot compete with
cotton prices from subsidized large-scale American farmers. The Active
Opposition explores some of the human and social costs of this transformation.

“Broken Heart/Land” asks if the demise of the American family farm serves as
a metaphor for the end of a healthy, rural society in America? The program
also examines the quality of the food on our tables, as well as the
environmental consequences of large-scale factory farming, including nitrate
poisoning from unmanageable quantities of manure runoff and animal waste.
Guests on this Active Opposition not only identify some of the contributing
factors to this problem, but offer a number of potential solutions.

Guests include:

ANURHADA MITTAL – Co-director of Food First
GARY GRANT - North Carolina farmer and Director of Black Farmers Association.
MARK RITCHIE - President, The Insititute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
MONA LEE BROCK – Suicide hotline counselor
FRED KIRSCHENMANN – Iowa Farmer. President of Leopold Center for Sustainable
Agriculture.
Rhonda Perry – Missouri Farmer and Activist.





  • [Livingontheland] The Active Opposition: Broken Heart/Land - The Demise of the Family Farm, Tradingpost, 11/09/2003

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