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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] "Small Farm Extermination"
  • Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2006 10:35:42 -0600



My question:
Is this the only way to deal with the situation? What are they leaving out?
Anyone?

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------

"Small Farm Extermination"
http://www.celdf.org/GuestEditorials/SmallFarmExtermination/tabid/202/Defaul
t.aspx
Thomas Linzey, Esq. 675 Mower Road, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania 17257

Multinational agri-business corporations set out almost forty years ago to
exterminate family farmers and take control of food production in the
United States. That chilling proposition, which has been asserted by
farming communities across the Country over the past decade, gained support
last week with the release of a document authored by several agri-business
corporations.

The 1962 strategy memorandum, entitled "An Adaptive Program for
Agriculture", was drafted by a group of multinational corporations called
the "Committee for Economic Development" and it lays out a detailed plan
for the decidedly un-American corporate takeover of an American institution
- the family farm.

Chapter 6 of the memorandum calls for a two pronged strategy, either "(a)
leakproof control of farm production by agri-business corporations" or "(b)
a program, such as we are recommending here, to induce excess resources -
primarily people - to move rapidly out of agriculture."

One of those "excess resources" - an Illinois hog farmer named Keith Bolin
- was one of the farmers who read the paper. In an interview done shortly
after Farm Aid, Bolin spoke of the absolute control being exercised over
hog prices by agri-business corporations. He explained that "Many factory
farms are packer owned and packer controlled. And when the packers are
short of hogs and they don't want to bid up for my hogs, they flood the
market with their own and drive the price down. They force me to chase the
market down. They use their own hogs to drive the price lower." Last year,
Bolin lost thirteen months of net worth. Last month, he canceled his health
insurance to cut his operating costs. Next year, he sees himself taking a
job off the farm.

In blunt testimony before the Senate Ag Committee, he stated that "this is
not about efficiency or inefficiency. It's about control of our food supply
by a few multinationals who are not loyal to Main Street, or rural America,
or the American flag."

What do the Bolins of the Midwest have in common with Franklin County
farmers? Plenty. The "get bigger or get out" or "go corporate or go
bankrupt" sentiment has pervaded all facets of farming - whether you live
in Illinois or Pennsylvania. Whereas fifty head of dairy cows used to put
food on the table for the family, a hundred head is now necessary to make a
living. Hog-growing contracts leave the family farmer holding the bag for
water pollution. Poultry farmers find themselves squeezed into building
capital-intensive animal factories.

Under this new global free-for-all - with rules written by a small handful
of powerful agri-business corporations - hog, poultry, and beef farmers are
forced to compete with corporate factory farms in the Midwest and overseas
competition using cheap labor and lacking any health or safety protections.
Combined with homegrown corporate franken-food endeavors to splice
artichoke genes into chickens, to patent seed supplies to force farmers to
buy new seed corn every year, and to control the basic genetic building
blocks of life, eating itself has become a hazardous affair.

It's a world turned upside down - one that favors multinational
corporations over family farms, and one that favors profits over people and
communities. The local result: a juice business in Adams County can now buy
apples from China cheaper than ones purchased from growers right down the
street.
If we don't find a solution which fundamentally rights these priorities,
our communities will continue to lose their ability to make critical
decisions over what they eat and how food is grown. Losing the ability to
make those decisions means putting our health, our local economies, our
environment, and our families at risk.

One of the solutions lies in re-building competitive markets - stimulating
direct sales of locally grown food and building farm cooperatives which can
compete for market share. As one commentator recently noted - our "free"
markets are currently in shackles - with corporate producers building
strategic alliances with each other that leave us out in the cold. The
populist revolt in the 1800's was spurred by the same closed systems - and
was driven by farmers and rural communities seeking to protect their right
to make a living free of corporate control.

The critical piece of building markets involves catering to the blossoming
consumer demand for organic and locally grown vegetables, fruits, and
meats. Factory farms, by their very nature, are incapable of producing
"clean" foods - free of antibiotics and hormones. Nor can "clean" poultry
or hogs be produced without the intensive animal confinement so common to
industrial farm factories.

The second part of the solution is more fundamental - reclaiming our
democracy so that "we the people" can assert local control over food
production decisions. It means following the lead of the nine Midwestern
States which have adopted statutes prohibiting non-family owned
corporations from owning farmland or engaging in farming. It means
convincing our Township governments to take steps to protect our family
farm industry. It means reclaiming our State legislature so that our
interests don't get trumped by those of the dozens of corporate
agri-business lobbyists which stalk our elected Representatives daily.

It also means asking "by what authority" do multinational corporations
continue to pervert our laws, control our communities, and pull the strings
on our elected representatives. It means demanding and challenging every
decision, every law, and every entity which stands between us and a
sustainable future in which decisionmaking power lies in the hands of the
many and not just the powerful few.

In short, it means that we cannot build a diverse, healthy system of
farming which provides a good living for family farmers without confronting
the power and authority exercised by corporations which have a vested
interest in building unsustainable food production systems.

If we don't accept that challenge, we'll all become "excess resources."
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