Blog PostsDouble the Size of the Food, Farm and Hunger Reform Movement Today
By Brad Wilson at Feb 24, 2009 |
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“Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. “
Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail
There are a lot of complex questions in movement building. There are plenty of reasons for discouragement and despair. There’s much to argue about regarding what should be done and how.
Please, let’s take a brief pause from all of that and double the size of the Food, Farm and Hunger reform movement today. It’s really very simple. Half of the movement got caught up in some mainstream media myths and ended up advocating on the wrong side of the core issue of the 2007-2008 farm bill, the Commodity Title. Let’s get them on board with a few basic facts (and exposure of a few basic mainstream media fallacies).
Hey, it’s the easiest mobilization you’ll ever see. We already have twice as many movement activists. They’re already advocating. In fact, 50,000+ show up to vote for a new Secretary of Agriculture. 50,000+ protest against Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture. Thousands vote for White House Farmer. (Hey, the farm bill got passed last summer, they're chomping at the bit to to find a place to fight for farm bill justice now anyway!)
It’s just that half of them are inadvertently siding with agribusiness. They don’t mean to. They share our core values. They just got taken in by a false paradigm, actually a paradigm that’s simpler than reality, and then went to work on behalf of the agribusiness output complex (the Cargills, ADMs, Tysons, Kelloggs, Smithfields, Walmarts of groceries) and the agribusiness input complex (the Monsantos, Duponts, John Deeres).
I’ve posted on this so many times, I’m tired. So just go to these other posts I made today for online (links) documentation of the basic facts, and the names of some key leaders on each side. (It mentions some of the big sign-on lists on the wrong side, so you can see more organizations there.
Here it is (scroll down and open the comments section and go to my name for the basic documentation:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/02/24-2
Get more here at my blog, for example my documentation against the main myths from this “agribusiness” side of our own justice movement.
Ok, tell these groups to boycott any sign-on that doesn’t address the key concerns (price floors and ceilings, supply management and reserves). Refuse to fund any of these groups until they leave the agribusiness side and rejoin the justice side.
Ok, the farm bill got passed. But it’s much worse than the last one for farmers! We could well have an emergency farm bill well before the five years are up. Remember, we had four emergency farm bills between 1996 and 2002! So do it now.
All it takes for this to happen is for this article to go viral...viral...viral...viral.
Enough already!
By Wilson, Brad at Feb 25, 2009 05:01 AM
I plead guilty, of hypocrisy. I've accused plenty of others of poor organizing methods. Here I am trying to have an influence out into the air, in general, not targeted toward a specific "who" who actually makes the key decisions. (See my "Organizers Checklist" and other pieces here.)
Here I certainly haven't "prepared" well, from the standpoint of the actual decision ("what") of an appropriate who, as I repeatedly call on others to do (ie. my recent "On Becoming Roger Fisher").
Etc.
Next, I've written above: "I've posted on this so many times, I'm tired." Well, yes, ineffective methods are tiring! But that's my own fault. I have no business venting about it here.
Then I fail, out of tiredness, to complete the assignment, to put key arguments into the piece. So here are a few:
1. Farm grains and other main commodities lack price responsiveness on both supply (ie. Iowa farmers don't leave their fertile land fallow when prices are low, they plant it all every year, high or low) and demand (you don't eat five meals just because it's cheap, or eat only one if it's more expensive, [except if you can't afford not to starve]) sides. So prices are usually below the cost of production, ie. over the past 130+ years (with periodic exceptions). But then along comes the New Deal and Henry Wallace, and, without any subsidies, the government intervenes to help US agriculture run like a successful business, preventing price crashes on the bottom side and preventing spikes on the top side, with room for the market to adjust itself within these limits, within a range in the middle. (http://agpolicy.org/weekcol/248.html; http://agpolicy.org/weekcol/325.html; http://www.agobservatory.com/library.cfm?refID=30416)
2. Ok That was 1930s-1952. Meanwhile agribusiness grain buyers fought to get the stuff at below cost. Finally they won some changes under Eisenhower. Then they lowered the bottom, the price floor mechanisms, 1953-1995, gradually lower and lower as a de facto subsidy to agribusiness. At one point agribusiness got other businesses to sign on to the idea that running farmers off the land would drive down wage levels in the cities. The Committee for Economic Development in "An Adaptive Program for Agriculture," called for lowering New Deal price floors in order to force 1/3 of the farm labor force off the farm within five years. (http://www.iatp.org/iatp/publications.cfm?accountID=258&refID=48644) Basically they won politically. So we moved toward further dumping on LDC farmers, exporting at a loss just to provide below cost grains to agribusiness buyers. Tufts University, Timothy Wise (cf Elanor Starmer) has done the best recent work on these gains, $2.5 billion (1997-2005) (hidden, it comes from the market, not from the government) each for Tyson and Smithfield to take value added livestock production away from diversified grain farmers with help from below cost feeds. (http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/rp/CompanyFeedSvgsFeb07.pdf)
3. Who fought vigorously against these outrages, this start of dumping on LDCs (which are 70%+ rural) starting in the 1950s? The left? Urban progressives? At the forefront was the National Farmers Organization (Mad as Hell by Willis Rowell). They lost politically (not a big enough movement, not run well enough to bring urban justice folks on board). But it was a start of the movement we have today.
4. Against this massive political heat, they came up with a way to give even more to agribusiness, and while clobbering farmers over the head even more visciously, to hand out compensatory "safety nets" (as they've taught urban food activists and others to call them today). Starting in 1961, continued with a flair by Nixon Butz, compensatory subsidies were more than doubled by Reagan Block. (European CAP has had the same low world prices, and eventually, compensatory subsidies.) But get this, price floors were lowered more than the amount of the compensatory subsidies. Subsidy "safety nets" clobbered farmers with lower and lower total incomes (market plus subsidies). (I've crunched the numbers on the 85 farm bill [perhaps I'll get something posted] and Daryll Ray has numbers for 1996. In both cases, subsidies increased downward, compensating for even larger drops in farm prices. Ray, briefly, with link to footnoted document: http://agpolicy.org/weekcol/162.html.)
5. Along come EWG and the farm subsidy database. Great to expose this mess? Well, it led half of the movement for justice to claim that the compensatory subsidies were the problem, not the lack of New Deal nonsubsidy price floors (& etc.). Subsidies were largely based on the fact that the larger the farm, the larger the losses (except for some economies of size). But it looked hugely unjust. As in this article, no mention is typically made of the fact that subsidies have rarely even compensated farmers for the losses of dropping and eliminating price floors and supply management. (False paradigm: compare my "Farm Bill and Food Crisis Myths" and my documentation there, to these footnoted documents that spread the myths:
[1*] ch. 1, commodity title in: http://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-reports/hunger-report-2007-download.html;
[2*] http://www.farmland.org/documents/AFT_Agenda2007_May06.pdf;
[3*]http://www.churchworldservice.org/PDFs/Resources/SowingJustice.pdf;
[4*]http://www.oxfamamerica.org/newsandpublications/publications/briefing_papers/fairness-in-the-fields)
6. Then we have half the movement bickering about who gets subsidies (the linked article in my post above). Agribusiness relishes this, and laughs all the way to the bank. "Divide and conquer! Stupendous success! THEIR movement is on OUR side! Ha, ha ha ha!" So look at the many progressive organizations that mentioned none of this in their footnoted documents prior to the 2007-2008 farm bill (Church World Service[3*], RESULTS, Oxfam[4*], National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, Food and Farm Policy Project, Bread for the World [see above 1*] and their Left-Right Coalition, American Farmland Trust[2*], Environmental Working Group. Nowhere do these groups say: make agribusiness pay the subsidies, (fair market prices) so WE in the USA don't pay subsidies on THEIR exports and domestic use.
Join: NFFC (http://www.nffc.net/)
IATP (http://www.agobservatory.org/issue_farmbill.cfm);
Food and Water Watch (http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/pubs/reports/farm-bill),
La Via Campesina (http://www.viacampesina.org/main_en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=47&Itemid=27),
Grassroots International (http://www.grassrootsonline.org/publications/fact-sheets-reports/food-sovereignty-explained-simple-language-new-booklet),
Rural Coalition (see Food 'n Justice Campaign's Testimony on the Commodity Program at: http://www.ruralco.org/Library/listContent.cfm).
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