Farmers Seek Defenses Against the Giants of AgribusinessAround the world, farm income is plummeting, pushing farmers off the land and into destitution. At the very same time, soaring food prices are putting tens of millions onto starvation diets.
Welcome to the bizarre world of capitalist agriculture, where the drive to boost profits of giant transnational corporations is imperiling the production of our means of survival.
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The last two decades of cutbacks, layoffs, and concession contracts, which wage workers know as "neo-liberalism," hit farmers with extra severity. In that time, 25% of Canada's farms disappeared.
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The average farm in Canada represented an investment of $1.3 million in 2006 — more per worker than in any other industry. Yet the average farmer's "net market income" from this massive investment was only $13,000. And more than two-thirds must be set aside to provide for depreciation of buildings and equipment.
The NFU calculates that Ontario farmers` real return on their investment dropped to zero in 1991, and has declined since to "negative $15,000 per farm" in 2006.
Meanwhile, farm debt has more than doubled over the last two decades. With income levels so low, such debts can usually be repaid only be selling the farm.
Farmers try to compensate by taking off-farm jobs. Small and mid-sized Ontario farms get 90% of their income that way. Even farms with the highest sales get more than a quarter of their total revenue from off-farm jobs.
Given the disastrous economic conditions, few young people are stepping forward to replace Canada's aging farm work force. In twenty years, the number of farmers under 35 years old is down 62%.
Corporate profiteering
The sickness in Canada's farms is rooted in the way the proceeds of agriculture are divided between farmers and workers, on the one hand, and capitalist corporations on the other.
In Canada's hog industry, between 1988 and 2002, and despite inflation, farm-gate prices (including inflation) fell 5% from 1988 to 2007. Packinghouse workers' wages rose a bit, but much less than inflation. Yet the price of pork to consumers went up 39%.
In 2005, the NFU noted that wheat farmers were getting five cents from each loaf of bread, the same amount as thirty years earlier. The income of supermarket workers has been under sharp attack. But the share of each loaf that goes to corporate millers, bakers, and grocers rose from 38 cents to $1.35.
In 2004, which the NFU says was the second-worst year for farming in history, the corporations living off the farmers had their most profitable year ever. The corporations are appropriating every penny of the profits of farming — indeed, more than 100%, since farmers are unable to cover their costs from farm-product sales.
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Farmers have long sought to achieve market power in the same way as workers — by joining together in order to impose a higher price for their product.
Workers do this through unions, which establish "market power" by bargaining collectively to set wage levels.
Farmers have sought to establish agencies — under their own or government management — that exercise control over the marketing of farm produce. The NFU points to the merits of existing plans of this type, such as the Canadian Wheat Board or Ontario's egg and milk marketing boards.
In recent years, such "supply management" plans have come under government attack, and some have been shut down. New marketing agreements of this type are banned by the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA clears the decks for agribusinesses to combine worldwide in giant transnational monopolies, while preventing the world's atomized and oppressed farmers from uniting in self-defense.
Imagine a law banning collective bargaining by unions, and you'll have some idea of the effect NAFTA has on farmers.
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The Farmers Union proposes an array of measures to help working farmers resist corporate profiteering. Among them:
• Encourage supply management and take initiatives to implement it internationally.
• Establish price supports to guarantee that farmers receive their cost of production.
• Break the monopoly of corporate suppliers of seed, fertilizer, and other farm inputs by funding creation of farmer-owned co-ops.
• Ban corporate farming as well as corporate contracts that dictate where farmers buy inputs and sell their product.
• Provide young people who want to farm with access to the land through community land trusts and land banks; ease the mountain of debt that now prevents sons and daughters from taking over the family farm.
None of this needs to increase the cost of food to consumers, the NFU points out. Farmers receive so little of the food dollar that the cost of increasing their share can be absorbed by corporate processors and retailers without price increases.
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The rise of "food tourism" reflects concerns felt by a growing number of consumers about the impact of corporate methods on food supply:
• Locally grown food is prized by many consumers as fresher, tastier, and healthier; many seek direct contact with the farmer.
• Air-freighting food around the world when it can be grown locally generates damaging and unnecessary carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.
• Agribusiness imposes industrial farming methods that are unhealthy and unsustainable.
• Environmental degradation and the diversion of food to fuel are placing the security of world food supplies in jeopardy, as has been eloquently explained by Fidel Castro and other leaders of the Global South.
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The local-food effort is helping to provide farmers with an influential potential ally — the ecological movement. Farmers deserve determined support from the labour movement as well. Working people have a lot to gain from the availability of local-food at grocery stores and from ecologically sound and sustainable agriculture.
It is also a question of solidarity. Working people who are employed need to stand together with farmers, fishers, truckers, and other independent producers who are exploited by the same corporations and face the same enemy.
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posted 21 January 2008 04:43 PM
