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For family farmers, it's time to choose: 'Don't whine, organize!'
by A.V. Krebs
(Monday, June 23, 2003 -- CropChoice guest commentary) -- With each passing day it becomes more apparent that our nation's family farmers are going to have to rapidly remove the shackles of the recent past, face political and economic reality and collectively organize for the future if they are to survive.
The choice is clear and stark !!!
Either family farmers must revive and adhere to their proud agrarian populist tradition or find themselves amongst the growing number of corporate agribusiness's "excess human resources."
As Populist historian Norman Pollack stresses, citizens must now, as they did in the 19th century Populist movement, challenge the strident materialism of our day and "work to achieve a democratized industrial system of humane working conditions and production of human needs." It was the 19th-century populists who sought to build a society, in sum, where individuals fulfilled themselves "not at the expense of others but as social beings, and in so doing attain a higher form of individuality."
Thus, the type of society family farmers and their rural neighbors
should be striving for in the 21st century is one to be judged not at its
apex, but at its base; that the quality of life of the masses should be
the index by which we measure social improvement. Like their agrarian Populist
predecessors, 21st-century populism must undertake to remain a radical
social force within a present day political system that provides little
or no opportunity for the expression of radicalism.
They should not wed themselves to a modern politically expedient populism
characterized by racist and xenophobic attitudes. The 21st-century populists’
critique of existing arrangements must go beyond economic conditions to
embrace individuals’ plight. They must address the dehumanization and loss
of autonomy in a society that rapidly reduces the individual to being dependent
on someone else’s decision, laws, machinery and land.
Integral to this 21st-century approach is the conviction that individuals
can consciously make their future. There is nothing inevitable about misery
or squalor, or the concentration of wealth, or the legitimization of corporate
power; nothing is sacred about the status quo, or about the institutions
that safeguard that status quo.
Laura B. DeLind, a specialist in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan
State University, has argued that the long-standing duplicity on the part
of corporate agribusiness makes family farmers readily susceptible to (and firm believers in) agricultural programs, services, technologies and
research that promote "efficient," business-like farm management and
production.
"In turn, such strategies of commercial `self-improvement' serve an
economic and political system dominated by corporate capital. The family
farm, like the ‘emperor’s new clothes,’ does not exist, at least not in
any analytically or programmatically useful way," Delind continues. "It
is a torturous twisting of reality, under the guise of ‘conventional wisdom,’
and it obscures far more than it reveals."
Efforts in recent years by many new, well-mean allies of family farm
agriculture, who unfortunately are ill-informed regarding the economics
and history of agricultural policy, have been primarily focusing on such
issues as genetic engineered crops, mad cow disease, animal rights, environmental
issues, etc.
This, however, has only tended to muddle public perception when it comes
to the plight of the vanishing numbers of "the modern-day independent,
yeoman family farmers." It has in a very significant way tended to
draw public attention away from the larger question of corporate concentration
and the economic policies and political power relationships that such concentration
exacerbates in agriculture. As DeLind concludes:
"The category family farm must be pried apart. It must be opened up
so that its internal contradictions can be seen, not hidden, and used as
a basis for identifying and comparing the relative class positions of producers.
This would provide a keener awareness of the structure of agriculture (why
and how policies do and do not work and for whom). In addition, any long
term action to reform the system --- to bring about a more equitable distribution
of power and income --- must rest on class-based alliances which cut across
the ‘family farm’ category and which are not coincidental with it."
By renewing their agrarian populist heritage family farmers also have
the opportunity to emulate that progressive revolt that Ralph Nader has
termed "still the country's most fundamental political and economic reform."
Populism, as noted historian Lawrence Goodwin reminds us, was characterized
by an evolving democratic culture in which people could "see themselves"
and therefore aspire to a society conducive to mass human dignity. In stark
contrast to their efforts was the direction they saw being taken by the
corporate state in the existing society."
Populism clearly recognized that condition and thus believed that it
was imperative to bring the corporate state under democratic control. "Agrarian
reformers," Goodwin points out, "attempted to overcome a concentrating
system of finance capitalism that was rooted in Eastern commercial banks
and which radiated outward through trunk-line railroad networks to link
in a number of common purposes much of America's consolidating corporate
community. Their aim was structural reform of the American economic system."
In an effort to bring about such "structural reform of the American
economic system" and save family farm agriculture at the same time, this
editor would like to offer a possible agenda.
1) Rather than confront the consuming public with a myriad of
seemingly disconnected issues that family farmers confront today in growing
and harvesting our food supply, concentrate on the root cause of their
chronic economic depression --- the lack of a fair price for what they
produce.
As has been recounted here before after Jim Hightower, former Texas
Agricultural Commissioner and chair of the Democratic National Committee's
Agricultural Council, held a 1984 series of eight nationwide farm policy
forums. In his final report he concluded:
"When all was said and done, it came down to one word: Price. Other
important issues were discussed at the forums sponsored by the DNCAC during
the past six months, but the overwhelming consensus among participating
farmers was that the other concerns --- overproduction, soil and water
conservation, high interest rates, lack of credit, entry by young farmers,
the depressed farm service industry, and the farm program's high cost,
to name a few --- could and would be solved when farmers received a fair
price for their products."
In this regard family farmers must reach out to their professed allies
who find issues like genetic engineering, animal health, the environment,
etc. so appealing and educate them on agriculture history and the importance
of price and how they are intimately interrelated to those popular issues
these "allies" espouse.
In doing so family farmers, will not only be acting in their own self-interest,
but they will, keeping in mind their goal of generating a truly significant
"democratic culture," hold fast to the truism that Fred Ross Sr., the Saul
Alinksy-founded Community Service Organization organizer, often espoused:
"we educate to organize, not organize to educate!!!"
2)
It serves no good purpose for family farmers on one hand to
denounce corporate concentration and on the other tacitly associate and
promote those same corporate interests. As American economist Thorstein
Veblen noted in his 1923 essay, "The Independent Farmer," "farmers are
surrounded by bankers, railroad magnates and food processors who profit
from their effective collusive control of the market while the foolish
farmer does little more than identify with the very people who are most
adept at exploiting him."
One small example of that "identity crisis" was once noted by the Land
Institute's Wes Jackson when he wryly observed that he wished farmers would
start using their heads for more than simply billboards for corporate agribusiness!!!
Likewise, for another example, it always strikes this editor as ludicrous
seeing outspoken opponents of corporate concentration eating snacks, fast
food, popping soft-drink cans and drinking other "beverage" products while
sitting around discussing how to thwart the power of those very corporations
whose food and drink they are consuming.
Clearly, it is time that family farmers as well as their public interest
food allies recognize that eating has become not only a moral, but also
a political statement.
3) Concurrent with this detaching themselves from the corporate
agribusiness economic teat, it has become apparent that family farmers
must, despite in so doing risk breaking with family tradition, remove themselves
from the political teat that has so poorly served them throughout the 20th
century. In an age when policy no longer dictates politics, but rather
politics directing a policy that masquerades behind "compassionate conservatism."
it behooves farmers to again listen to Veblen.
"Some day he, too, will share in the prosperity of the system, at least
he so believes. The poor farmer turns a deaf ear to the warning that it
is certain that all cannot become rich in this way. All cannot be shavers
--- some must be fleeced."
Unfortunately, we are in an era when there is little choice between
our once two major political parties, thus it is time for family farmers
and their rural neighbors to take a leadership role in forming a new political
alignment and agenda.
Such an initial step could be taken by the drafting of a national populist
platform, similar to the agrarian populists' "Omaha Platform of 1892,"
outlining and declaring "A Declaration of Independence From Corporate Rule."
While grassroots citizen groups continue to educate and organize on
the local and state level such as is being currently undertaken by the
Green Party, populists in the hope of fomenting in the near future a viable
and active national second party, could circulate an aforementioned Declaration
to the various candidates running for political office in upcoming elections
for their endorsement.
By the candidate and/or incumbent affirming those principles annunciated
in the Declaration they would earn the endorsement of a fledgling grassroots
populist movement, much in the same manner that the agrarian populists
were able to garner widespread political support in the national elections
of 1892 and 1896. At the same time it would also serve notice on the governing
plutocracy that their days of self-serving rule were numbered.
Recently, a number of worldwide polls and surveys have revealed that
the United States is not the beloved country many have believed it once
was, but the caveat is always appended that it is our leaders that are
the ones disliked, not the people of our country who have recently earned
world-wide contempt.
It is well to remind ourselves, however, within a democratic republic
it is the people that are the ones responsible for the caliber of the people
that they choose as their leaders. Unfortunately for the past 23 years
the American public, often with the nation's heartland leading the way,
has been guilty of making some terribly unwise choices when it comes to
national leadership.
It has become a political truism that while family farmers acknowledge
the that it is government policy --- not a free and competitive market
--- that dictates a fair price for what they receive every two years they
repeatedly turn around and elect the very same politicians and party which
enact those very same policies. The fact that it is precisely such policies
that not only deprives them of economic and social justice, but also favors
the very corporate power that is destroying their communities and their
lives makes no logical sense.
4)
It is time that the self-ordained "voice of American agriculture"
--- the American Farm Bureau Federation--- be made accountable for its
actions while being exposed before Congress and state legislatures as an
organization more interested in feathering its leadership's nests than
serving its members. When the nation has some 1.9 million farmers and the
AFBF boasts of a membership of over five million --- largely FB insurance
holders --- one has to seriously question such a Federation's true purpose.
5) Likewise, family farmers must put aside the self-destructive
concepts of "regionalism" and "commodityism " for they have been traditionally
used by various associations, counsels and marketing order boards acting
in behalf of their corporate paymasters as a means of dividing the family
farm community and sowing unnecessary rivalries and struggles within while
wasting its precious financial resources.
In the grand scheme of history the 20th and 21st centuries may well
be remembered as a point in the evolution of humanity when those corporations
that trade, process, manufacturer, pack, ship and sell the world's food
successfully removed the culture from agriculture and in the name of "efficiency"
and the industrial "globalization" of the world's food supply reshaped
agri-culture into an agri-business.
Considering those characteristics by which corporate agribusiness has
become identified with and contrasting them with the historical characteristics
of family farm agriculture we can see how corporate agribusiness is the
very antithesis of family farm agriculture and how incompatible the two
systems are in a democratically structured society.
Whereas family farm agriculture has traditionally sought to nurture
and care for the land, corporate agribusiness, exclusive by nature, seeks
to "mine" the land, solely interested in monetizing its natural wealth
and thus measure efficiency by its profits and pointing with pride to its
"bottom line." Family farmers, meanwhile, see efficiency in terms of respecting,
caring and contributing to the overall health and well-being of the land,
the environment, the communities and the nations in which they live.
It is imperative, for the common good, that family farm agri-culture
and the men, women and children who till and work the land survive and
flourish. Initiating a five-point program like the one suggested above
would, in this editor's opinion be a significant step in renewing the value
of family farmers in a society based on the Jeffersonian ideal of democracy.
It would also reawaken those same agrarian populist instincts so necessary
today if our society is to prevent the merchants of greed from depriving
us and the rest of the world of economic justice.
In his book The Myth of the Family Farm: Agribusiness Dominance of
U.S. Agriculture, Ingolf Voegler, a geographer at the University of
Wisconsin at Eau Claire, points out that corporate agribusiness has managed
to create its own self-serving "family farm" myth which it has supported
collaterally by four other myths, namely, the work ethic myth, the free
enterprise myth, the efficiency myth and the equal-opportunity myth.
Belief in such myths has been the basis of the "conventional wisdom" that
has not only exacerbated a wholesale exodus of family farmers from farming,
but has reduced the role of those remaining in our food delivery system
to being chattels, merely raw material providers for a giant profit-driven
food manufacturing system.
It is time family farmers put aside such "conventional wisdom" that
for so long has enslaved them, speak truth to corporate power and begin
to act collectively in their own and in the general public's self interest.
Clearly, the time has come !!!
"Don't Whine, Organize !!! | |
