Harry Truman said: “No man should be president who doesn’t understand hogs.” The problem with our recent presidents, however—including los dos Bushes and Bill Clinton—is that, while they certainly don’t know pig stuff about the four-legged varieties, they are expert on the care and feeding of those two-legged oinkers who are the CEOs and lobbyists of global agribusiness corporations.
With an oink-oink here and a ton of campaign cash there, agribusiness giants are able to dictate America’s food and farm policies in both Republican and Democratic administrations. This is why our present policies are so bass-ackwards, discombobulated . . . and stupid.
Ag policy is not written for farmers and consumers—the two groups whose well-being logically would be the rationale for having any policy at all—nor is it written in the interests of workers, conservation, small business, rural communities, good health, or even good food. Instead, it’s written for the profit and global expansion of names like ADM, Cargill, McDonald’s, Monsanto, Nestlé, Phillip Morris, Tyson, Unilever, and Wal-Mart.
These powers have none of the dirt and grease of honest farm toil under their fingernails. They’re well-manicured, soft-hands people who work in faraway executive suites, genetic-engineering labs, banks, and the backrooms of governments. With the complicity of our presidents and Congress critters, they’ve industrialized, conglomeratized, and globalized food—a substance that, by its very nature, is agrarian, small-scale, and local.
Here are some products of this perverse policy:
Out of each dollar you spend on groceries, only 19 cents goes to the farmer, with corporate middlemen grabbing the rest.
Thousands of efficient family farmers are driven out of business each year by rising costs and falling commodity prices.
As farm prices continue to fall, consumer prices keep going up, creating windfall profits for conglomerate shippers, processors, and retailers.
An $8-billion-a-year federal farm program delivers zero dollars to thousands of farmers, while feeding some $500,000 a year to the likes of Charles Schwab, the gabillionaire stockbroker who gets taxpayer subsidies to grow rice at his California duck-hunting club (the rice paddies attract migrating ducks for his friends to shoot).
Agribusiness dumps 8 billion pounds of pesticides on farmlands each year, with the result that 45% of America’s groundwater is dangerously polluted, while farm families, farm workers, and people living next to the fields suffer poisonings, cancers, birth defects, and death.
A handful of corporations monopolize each and every aspect of the food economy —from seeds to chemicals, grain shipping to cotton trading, processing to retailing.
o Workers in fields, processing plants, and supermarkets are routinely paid poverty wages, exposed to injury and death, harassed, fired without cause, and denied the right to organize.
Food itself has become a clear and present danger, as quick-profit agriculture has given us mad-cow disease, feces contaminants, irradiation, infusion of sexual hormones, genetic manipulation, a toxic stew of chemical additives, and an epidemic overdose of fats and sugars. ... [ read more ]
Help us out by throwing some cash in the bucket:
"For too long," wailed the senator in a heart-tugging cry for justice, "some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process."
