Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Title: Is the Market Structured Right for Most Farmers?
By John Clement
May 18, 2007

One of the main discussion items amongst farm organizations is how to help
the majority of farmers in their quest to obtain adequate income. In this
regard, much of the debate lately has centered on things like expanding
farm
operations, cutting costs, adding value to products, improving marketing
skills or increasing exports. In and of themselves, all of these things are
good, but they miss the main point. 

Underlying many discussions about farm income are some conflicting values
and assumptions about how markets should function. 

Consider the following: today's market rhetoric makes the assumption that a
willing seller and buyer are really all it takes to make markets work.
However, this assumption totally ignores the fact that market exchanges
between buyers and sellers are always accompanied by institutional
arrangements set up by the larger society. Even the most ardent supporters
of free enterprise generally admit that their view of markets would not
work
without courts to enforce contracts, a stable supply of currency, and a
host
of regulations and laws. These arrangements are all institutional in nature
and embedded in a view of how society and markets should function. 

Author Linda McQuaig, in a book entitled "All You Can Eat," spends some
time
chronicling how economies of the past structured their markets. In one
example, she shows how English regulations from the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries severely restricted the role of middlemen in the
economy. 

For example, farmers were required to bring their grain to the local market
as soon as it was harvested, were not allowed to sell to a middleman prior
to harvest and couldn't store the grain in hopes of obtaining a higher
price. Once at the market, common people could purchase grain or flour in
any quantities they wanted, under careful supervision of weights and
measures. After the common people had made their purchases, middlemen were
allowed to buy strictly limited quantities of grain but weren't allowed to
store it in hopes of obtaining a higher price in a later market. 

McQuaig points out that the overriding concern of those older British
markets was to ensure that people didn't use leverage to advance their own
interests over the interests of other people. And they established
regulations and market arrangements accordingly. 

In essence, markets are never free of institutional arrangements. We make
rules and establish arrangements according to which values we think are
important. Getting back to the question of helping farmers to obtain
adequate income, the larger question may simply be: do we have the right
rules and regulations in place to help the majority of farmers obtain
adequate income from farming?


John Clement is the General Manager of the Christian Farmers Federation of
Ontario. The CFFO Commentary is heard weekly on CFCO Chatham, CKNX Wingham
and CHOK Sarnia, Ontario and is archived on the CFFO website:
<http://www.christianfarmers.org/index.html>
www.christianfarmers.org/index.html. CFFO is supported by 4,300 family
farmers across Ontario. 

Note: Please direct correspondence on the CFFO Commentary to John Clement,
General Manager at  <mailto:clement@christianfarmers.org>
clement@christianfarmers.org.

Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario
7660 Mill Rd.
RR 4 Guelph, ON N1H 6J1 
Ph: (519) 837-1620
Fax:(519) 824-1835
email:  <mailto:boconnor@christianfarmers.org>
boconnor@christianfarmers.org
web:  <http://www.christianfarmers.org/> www.christianfarmers.org