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  • From: "GlobalCirclenet" <webmaster@globalcircle.net>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Death of Independent Family Farms
  • Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2002 07:07:28 -0700

The Death of Independent Family Farms by Peligro

The family farm has been a sustaining myth in America. It's been seen
as proof that if someone was willing to work then they?d be able to have
a little land to live on, at least enough to take care of themselves and
their family. As if we needed more proof that the American Dream has
become little more than a twisted corpse, a story politicians tell us to
put
our dreams to sleep, we need look no further then the situation of the
family farm in the Midwest today. Vast rural areas have become
depopulated, the flat landscape broken only by the occasional empty
barn or shiny corporate tractor rolling through trim endless fields owned
by some soulless corporation. Desolate dusty towns empty of children
seem to sprout up between sad looking Dairy Queens. The cafes and
porches are full of people who can?t find work (since Dairy Queen can
only hire so many people), desperate angry people who, pressured
from all sides, don?t know who to blame or what to make of their world
disintegrating around them.

Like many people here in the Midwest, I?m only the second generation to
have grown up in the city. In fact, I still have relatives working farms in

Northern Minnesota. Urbanites tend not to take farmers seriously, the
'progressives' would much rather talk about colorful exotic groups in rain
forests then the culture being destroyed in their backyard. It's easy to
ignore the fact that in the last 2 generations family and community
farming, the way that most Minnesotans made their living less then a
century ago, has been almost completely destroyed.

Who To Blame?

The main antagonist is, as usual, corporations. Studies by the National
Farmers Union show the agricultural industry has been consolidating
into a handful of "food chain clusters." A very few corporations control
all
stages of production, from manipulating the genetics of the seed until
the foods arrive at the supermarket. Corporations use their size and
monopolies to out-price small farmers and drive them out of business,
after which they raise prices to almost unbearable levels for the
consumer. Corporations manufacture and use expensive chemicals
and biotechnology in order to make it economically unviable for farms to
remain small or competitive. Prices for agricultural products are at the
lowest level in fifty years at the same time as operating costs have
continued to rise to an unmanageable point for families who, in a good
year, already operate in the red.

The results of this consolidation are ominous; communities are
completely disempowered as farmer?s children end up working for
agribusiness on the same land their parents once owned, control of our
basic resource, food, is put into the hands of greedy insatiable
corporations whose only real interest is profit (no matter what the cost in

environmental or health damages to normal people). Corporations, who
drive farmers deep into debt, forcing them to stretch their resources in a
futile attempt to compete with agribusiness, are ravaging the heartland.
Many family farmers work from sunrise to sunset and still end up
making less then they would on welfare.

The problem has been developing since at least the early 1900?s. The
rich and landowners began to apply economic, political, and police
pressure in order to force small farmers out of business. With the rise of
corporate culture in the last 30 years the trickle of losses turned into a
flood, enough that the public had to take notice. Celebrities and
musicians in the 80?s turned out the spectacle called Farm Aid, concerts
and speeches to make the rich celebrities feel good about themselves
as the destruction continued. In the 90?s attention shifted away from the
family farm. By then it was generally considered an anachronism, and a
lost cause. More then 10,000 farmers have been forced off their land in
Minnesota in the last 10 years.

The political system has contributed just as much to the death of the
family farm as the economic system. Midwestern politicians sometimes
mouth support for farmers by passing ineffective Band-Aid bills or trying
to manipulate farmers into voting for them by making big promises they
never deliver on. Often, the legislation passed has only benefit the
parasitic multinational corporations who, as is becoming increasingly
apparent, control the political system. The most sickening example of
this is the recent ?Freedom to Farm Act.? It gives lower prices to
producers and squeezes out family farmers by rewarding the quantity
production practiced by agribusiness. The only tangible result has been
to increase the corporate market share. That?s why, for family farmers,
the bill has been called the "Freedom to Fail Act?. As usual the
legislation was not designed to protect normal people or family farmers
but to pay dues to the economic masters of the politicians, the rich.
Thanks to government legislation, corporate consolidation has only
continued to increase, locking family farms in a desperate struggle for
their very existence.

The rural communities that farms are the foundation of have also been
drastically affected by corporate consolidation. When farms were shut
down, people in rural areas became unemployed and in the harsh
economic climate of the small town, unemployable. Others, formerly
independent workers, became wage-slaves for the new corporations.
The crappy wages they paid help to keep corporate costs low and profits
high, thus helping to drive other farmers out of business. As
corporations bought up more land they imposed their hierarchal and
centralized structure (often called fascism in politics, but by the rich
it's
called just good business!) over local processing infrastructure like
dairies and packing plants resulting in further loss of jobs and the
transition of formerly self-sufficient communities into some of the most
impoverished in the country. The resulting situation is reminiscent of
medieval European relations between farmer and owner, a corporate
feudalism.

Hope and Resistance

This seems like a hopeless situation. But hope, in the guise of action,
springs eternal. Historically, Midwestern, and especially Minnesotan,
farmers have radically defended their lives and livelihoods by any
means necessary. In the 1860?s a movement called the National
Grange was founded in Minnesota, eventually uniting over 800,000
American farmers in an organization that established buying, grain
elevators, and milling cooperatives. The National Grange fought
middlemen and robber barons that charged exorbitant prices, and
resisted the system of large landowners and corporations that
threatened them, saying, ?We are opposed to excessive salaries, high
rates of interest and exorbitant profits in trade. They greatly increase
our
burdens."

The radical self-organization of farmers continued to gain popularity
until, according to historian Steven J. Keillor, 1919, when Minnesota
farmers sold 44 percent of all their production through farmer-owned
cooperatives. 60 hard years of farmer organizing had given Minnesota
390 cooperative grain elevators, 711 creameries, more than 400
livestock shipping associations, 110 farmer-owned stores, 900 rural
telephone companies, and 150 mutual fire insurance companies.

Again, during the Great Depression farmer?s resisted foreclosures on
land with a militancy and solidarity that far outshone traditional
political
solutions. They created new forms of popular resistance; in thousands
of actions throughout the Midwest, they stopped cold the foreclosure of
their neighbors' lands. Their activities were illegal, but they saw a law
that handed family land into the hands of faceless banks or
corporations as illogical and unfair. Radicalism was not simply a
theoretical conclusion of midwestern farmers; they were simply fighting
in the only ways available to them to save their land and their way of
life.

Possibilities for Progress

To bring us to the present day, in 1999 a French dairy farmer named
José Bové led an action against a local MacDonald?s. The farmers
complained that MacDonald?s was not only making horrible food, but
that the industrial and economic techniques they used to do this were
unhealthy for consumers, animals, and small farmers. The anti-
MacDonald?s action united foreign farmers with the anti-globalization
movement that burst out of successful actions against the World Trade
Organization by 50,000 people in Seattle of the same year. It?s
noticeable that their arguments, while coming from different
perspectives and interests, have much in common. Both decry the
corporate control of our economic life that results in less control for
laborers and expensive, sometimes dangerous, costs for consumers.
They see that the same corporate agribusinesses that are currently
pillaging the Midwest are doing the same thing in France and even
India. In New England Farmers are using directly democratic town
councils to pass resolutions against Genetically Modified Organisms. A
similar struggle is going on in Oklahoma where Farmers are trying to
put legal restrictions directly on Agribusiness monopolies. Midwestern
farmers have yet to formally ally themselves with this vibrant new
movement, instead often clinging to the same manipulative senators
and politics-as-usual as their way of life dies.

However many farmers have shown signs of rising consciousness
about the larger causes of the situation. Many have been forming and
expanding cooperative associations, uniting with each other for support
against corporations like they did back in the 1860?s. Others are taking a
further step into direct marketing to consumers in the cities which
focuses on producing and distributing food locally in specialty niches
like organic and sustainable farming, which is becoming more popular
in reaction to increasingly evil corporate schemes like biotechnology
and genetically engineered crops as well as the infestation of corporate
chain stores that have squeezed all small businesses out of cities.

The possibility of an alliance between urban radicals and rural
communities has exciting potential. I?m reminded of the deal set up
between the anarchist squatter federation in Amsterdam and local
farmers to sell food directly to the squatters rather then waste time and
money sending it off to middlemen. That?s just one example of how we
could support one another. Urban anarchists, experienced in
confrontation with the state, could give support to evicted farmers. We
could resist the corporate domination of our lives together- A Food
Liberation Front. Increasingly, our survival issues overlap, genetic
engineering, corporate consolidation, and a lack of any sort of power
over our own lives or the world around us. It becomes clearer that we no
longer reside in different worlds, in fact that we share many common
interests.

In this desperate but hopeful ending I?m reminded of the words of
evicted farmer Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath.
?I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good
rich land layin' fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a
hundred thousand farmers starvin'. And I been wonderin' what if all our
folks got together and yelled ...?


[Daybeak! badly needs monetary support since we give it out free locally.
1$/issue, 10$/solidarity subscription Cash/Checks to Amy Smith/paypal
at website
Daybreak PO Box 14007 Minneapolis MN 55404
daybreak@tao.ca www.freespeech.org/mn/daybreak







  • [permaculture] Death of Independent Family Farms, GlobalCirclenet, 11/12/2002

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