Dollars & Sense - Farms Today

Seeds and Struggle P A G E 7

Land Grabs, Here and ThereP A G E 1 4

Farmers and Climate Change P A G E 3 2

Keystone XL and Eminent Domain P A G E 4 3

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Plus: The Assault on Retirement

• Social Security Absurdity• The Pension-Busters’ Playbook• Class-Based Pension Math

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FARMS TODAY

< From the Editors

Dollars & Sense magazine explains the workings of the U.S. and international economies and provides left perspectives on current economic affairs. It is edited and produced by a collective of economists, journalists, and activists who are committed to social justice and economic democracy.

the d&s collectiveBetsy Aron, Nancy Banks, Nina Eichacker, Peter Kolozi, Lyden Marcellot, John Miller,

Jawied Nawabi, Kevin O’Connell, Linda Pinkow, Alejandro Reuss,

Dan Schneider, Zoe Sherman, Bryan Snyder, Chris Sturr, Jeanne Winner

editorial committee for this issueKevin O’Connell, Jennifer Fahey (Farm Aid), Alejandro Reuss, Chris Sturr, Jeanne Winner

staffmagazine editors Alejandro Reuss, Chris Sturr

business manager Nancy Banksdevelopment director Linda Pinkow

intern Christopher J. Cooper

work study Autumn Beaudoin

the d&s boardJim Campen, Gerald Friedman, John Miller,

Linda Pinkow, Steven Pressman, Alejandro Reuss, Abby Scher, Chris Sturr

associatesAziza Agia, Randy Albelda, Teresa Amott,

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Ellen Frank, Tami J. Friedman, Sue Helper, Thea Lee, David Levy, Arthur MacEwan, Mieke

Meurs, Marc Miller, Ellen Mutari, Amy Offner, Laura Orlando, Robert Pollin,

Smriti Rao, Adria Scharf, Susan Schacht, Chris Tilly, Ramaa Vasudevan,

Thad Williamson

designlayout David Gerratt, Alejandro Reuss, and

Chris Sturrfront cover Chris Sturr

front cover photo Tascosa Feedyard, Texas, 2013. © Miska Henner (miskhahenner.com/Feedlots).

printing Boyertown Publishing

Dollars & Sense (USPS 120-730) is pub lished bimonthly b y t h e E c o n o m i c A f f a i r s B u r e a u , I n c . , One Milk Street, Boston, MA 02109, a non-profit corporation. ISSN: 0012-5245. 617-447-2177. Fax: 617-447-2179. E-mail: [email protected]. Periodical postage paid at Boston, MA, and additional mailing offices.

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Farms Today

In his comment for this special issue, a collaboration between Dollars & Sense and Farm Aid, Willie Nelson argues that we need a new and broader definition of wealth—from

what can be extracted from producers and nature to what sustains producers, their fami-lies, their communities, and the natural world. “As caretakers of our soil and water,” he writes, “this has been and always should be the essential role of the family farmer.”

The economic future of family farmers in the United States is at the core of Farm Aid’s work. But this fundamental opposition—between extraction and sustenance, between depletion and renewal—spans a much broader spectrum of issues, in the United States and around the globe.

Lukas Ross and Timothy A. Wise tell two parallel stories of “land grabs” today. Wise de-scribes an abortive land grab—financed by Brazilian and Japanese investors—in Mozambique. As he points out, the land grab failed not because the land was not suit-able for agriculture, but because it was—and the people that were already farming it mobilized to fight off the land grabbers. Ross, meanwhile, focuses on the United States, and big financial institutions acquiring large swaths of land.

Sasha Breger Bush turns our attention to the unequal relationship between farmers and the companies that dominate the food industry. Again, we have a dual focus on the United States and developing countries. Breger Bush describes how, in the United States, poultry farmers find themselves under the thumb of giant “integrators” like Perdue, Tyson, and Pilgrim’s Pride. In developing countries where coffee is widely grown, farmers face a similar relationship with coffee processors. In both cases, there is a fundamental relationship of “unequal exchange.”

Writer and photographer David Bacon provides a vivid picture—in words and images—of the conditions and struggles of migrant farm workers in the United States today. Bacon gives an overview of this migrant work force—most of them indigenous people from Mexico, shuttling between the farms of California and Washington State—as a prelude to the poignant first-hand testimony of migrant farmworker and organizer Rosario Ventura. Bacon’s powerful black-and-white photos provide an apt accompaniment.

University of Maine researchers Stephanie Welcomer, Mark Haggerty, and John Jemison take us inside Maine farming, and farmers’ varied reactions to the climate change. Almost all farmers, they note, are making adaptations to deal with new and in-creasingly volatile weather conditions. Few, however, speak directly about global climate change, much less the need for climate policy to avert more severe change in the future. Welcomer, Haggerty, and Jemison suggest that, sooner rather than later, farmers must confront this reality more directly.

This is an unflinching look at the difficult realities confronting farmers and farm work-ers today. However, the picture is far from hopeless.

Wise points to Mozambique farmers’ successful fight-back against the land grabbers. Bacon and Ventura describe migrant farm workers’ organizing. Mark Paul and Emily Stephens describe the growing phenomenon of community supported agriculture, re-establishing a direct relationship between farmers and eaters. Elizabeth Fraser and Anuradha Mittal explain how the world seed market is dominated by a handful of corpo-rations, but also how national governments are pushing back and the global movement against the seed giants is growing. Finally, John Ikerd explains how today’s practices of “industrial agriculture” have failed. Ikerd ends on a hopeful note—how “a new kind of agriculture is emerging to meet the ecological, social, and economic challenges” we face today. Photographer Mishka Henner’s beautiful yet disturbing satellite images of indus-trial feedlots, accompanying this article and on the issue’s cover, capture a contaminated landscape barely recognizable as agriculture.

To be sure, the necessary transformations will not be easy. When we think about agricul-ture—as when we think about any aspect of society—we need to understand that power is real, and that the few are, indeed, very powerful. But the many are not powerless. D&S

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MARCH/APRIL 2015 l DOLLARS & SENSE l 3

T H E R E G U L A R S 4 the short run

6 comment Willie Nelson on the Wealth of the Land

and the Power of the People

7 making sense Seeds of Change | Community

Supported Agriculture

40 in review Christopher Leonard,

The Meat Racket

41 economy in numbers Food Insecurity in Affluent America

43 ask dr. dollar Keystone XL and Eminent Domain

C O N T E N T SNUMBER 317 | MARCH/APRIL 2015

F E A T U R E S

11 The Failure of Modern Industrial Agriculture J O H N I K E R D photos by M I S H K A H E N N E R

14 Land Grabbing Around the World Wall Street’s U.S. Land Grab L U K A S R O S S

The Great Land Giveaway in Mozambique T I M O T H Y A . W I S E

19 These Things Can Change Migrant farmworkers stand up in Washington State. text by D A V I D B A C O N and R O S A R I O V E N T U R A photos by D A V I D B A C O N

24 No Friendship in Trade Farmers face modern-day robber barons, in the United States

and worldwide. S A S H A B R E G E R B U S H

32 Maine Farmers and Climate Change Reactive, or Proactive? S T E P H A N I E W E L C O M E R , M A R K H A G G E R T Y ,

and J O H N J E M I S O N

page 14 page 24

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4 l DOLLARS & SENSE l MARCH/APRIL 2015

Staples in the Job MarketAccording to Business Insider, man-agers at office-supplies giant Staples have threatened to fire employees who work more than 25 hours per week. Staples workers recently start-ed a petition on change.org, asking the company not to “cut part-time hours because of Obamacare.” (The Affordable Care Act imposes a $3,000 penalty on employers who do not provide health insurance for em-ployees working at least 30 hours per week.) The petition also described “General Managers telling part-time employees to ‘leave now or be fired’ in

< The Short RunBy Christopher J. Cooper and Alejandro Reuss

Business Insider, stated: “Staples’ policy regarding part-time associates weekly hours pre-dates the Affordable Care Act by many years. Some managers may have reiterated the existing policy to our associates as part of our ongoing efforts to im-prove the efficiency and competitive-ness of our stores.” Of course, it can be very hard on workers to have their hours cut. So it’s a relief that the air is now cleared. The general public may have thought that the company’s top management was heartless. Now, we know it for a fact. —CC

year, according to the investigative-journalism website First Look (first-look.org). As a result, the NSA has been able to hack the once-protected encryption of the Apple iPhone—un-traced, without the manufacturer, the phone provider, or the user knowing. The only way to use the device and be clear of potential hacking, reports First Look, is to use iMessage, FaceTime, or to make calls over VoIP (voice over internet protocol) channels. Why do we trust our smartphones so completely? Most of us put too much sensitive information into them, including things we would never di-vulge to a living soul. Many of our phone calls and text messages may be the boring stuff of daily life, but what about our internet browsing histories or Google searches? How comfortable would we all feel with our search histories being ex-posed to our friends and families, to say nothing of the NSA? —CC

All About the WorkersApparently, 2015 is all about increas-ing worker morale. According to CNN, Walmart is changing its scheduling system so that employees get two weeks’ notice about the shifts that they have to work. Up to now, workers have had to keep their schedules clear to accommodate last-minute shift changes. In addition, the company is raising its lowest hourly wage from $8 to $9. Then, by next February, pay will go up to $10 per hour. Given that protesters have been de-manding $15/hour, this may not seem all that generous or worker-friendly. Even less so when you realize that, as the Center for Effective Government recently reported, Walmart’s ex-CEO, Mike Duke, makes $1,070 per hour, 24 hours a day, from his retirement pack-age. The four Walmart heirs who own 50% of the company, meanwhile, each “earn” $445,776 per hour from their shares. —CC

The Most Sacred TrustThe National Security Agency (NSA) and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have targeted Gemalto, a company that manufac-tures more than 2 billion SIM cards per

the middle of transactions with cus-tomers.” (Presumably, this happened as their weekly hours approached the 25-hour mark.) Staples corporate responded quickly by denying that the practice had anything to do with Obamacare. The company, in a statement sent to


< The Short Run

All About the Workers, IIApple is also changing its ways when it comes to labor, reports Bloomberg Business. Workers in the factories that produce Apple products have often been required to pay “recruit-ment fees” (to intermediaries who recruit them for jobs in the factories). These fees are not trivial—earlier, Apple had deemed fees over one month’s wages “excessive.” Now, the company has decided that the re-cruitment fees will be paid for by the supplier instead (and, indirectly, by Apple itself, as these costs will be reflected in the company’s contracts with the factories). As Apple senior vice president Jeff Williams described the recruitment fees, “It is in essence bonded servitude.” Yes, how good of them to notice. —CC

RubionomicsNew York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote an article that made Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a possible presidential contender for 2016, proud enough to post a link on his Twitter account. Why wouldn’t he? Brooks touts Rubio as “most in-tellectually creative of the presiden-tial contenders.” Brooks’ column describes the eco-nomic plan that Rubio outlines in his new book, American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone. The plan includes tax breaks for business, such as the abil-ity to immediately deduct every dol-lar they reinvest. (Brooks does note that Rubio puts the “emphasis on the supply side.” Indeed.) Meanwhile, Rubio would flatten the federal in-come tax to two rates—down to 35% at the top and up to 15% at the bottom. (Brooks praises this as “simplify[ing] the tax code.”) While the benefits of such tax breaks would presumably go primarily to businesses and rich individuals, Brooks claims Rubio’s plan shows

“how Republicans might use govern-ment to enhance middle-class pros-pects.” Tax cuts for the rich unleash-ing economic growth that benefits everyone? (Wait… this sounds a lot like trickle down.) What’s the difference between Reaganomics and “Rubionomics?” There isn’t one. We all understand that politicians want economic growth, but to create growth by making rich people richer? That is so 1981. —CC

McJournalismA recent article by New York Times business reporter Stephanie Strom, “McDonald’s Seeks Its Fast Food Soul,” unleashed a mini-storm on Twitter. The article focuses on the challenges facing the McDonald’s and its new CEO Steve Easterbrook, of balancing speed, variety, and quality—under ntense pressure from new competitors in the fast-food racket, like Chipotle. Critics immediately jumped on an obvious hole in the article—the near-total absence of workers or labor conditions from the analysis. As Douglas K. Smith pointed out on the blog Naked Capitalism, Strom failed to deal with a long list of labor issues at McDonald’s that “anyone, including journalists, following McDonald’s knows”: low wages, illegal discrimina-tion, wage theft, company anti-union-ism, and so on. Not to mention the fact that McDonald’s workers have been in the streets demanding living wages. Strom felt compelled, apparently, to shoot back, accusing critics of failing to read to the end of the article. The prob-lem? All that the ending did have about labor was CEO Easterbrook’s declara-tion about fighting “brand disparagers” about the company’s labor image. Is Strom a cynical shill for the likes of McDonald’s? More like someone for whom workers just don’t enter into a story about a corporation’s “soul,” except maybe as an annoying image problem for CEOs to manage. —AR D&S

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B Y W I L L I E N E L S O N

Last year at the annual Farm Aid concert in Raleigh, N.C, I met

Phillip and Dorathy Barker, Black farm-ers who, like many minority farmers, lost much of their farmland as a result of discriminatory lending practices by banks and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Today, Phillip and Dorathy farm the 20 acres they were able to hold on to in Oxford, N.C. They also operate a non-profit organization, Operation Spring Plant, which pro-vides resources and training to minor-ity and limited-resource farmers, in-cluding a program that introduces young people to farming and pro-vides youth leadership training. Phillip said one of his goals is to pro-vide tools for the next generation and to help young people “come back to the farm to understand the wealth of the land.”

“Wealth of the land.” That’s a powerful phrase.

Phillip believes the next generation must see a sustain-able livelihood from the land, but the wealth he refers to can’t be measured only in dol-lars. It is measured in the expe-rience of working on the land, tending the soil, and caring for the animals and crops that grow from it. It’s measured in the ability to be independent, to feed himself and his family. It’s measured in the way he and Dorathy sustain and strengthen their community. It’s measured in being rooted to a place, and passing some-thing valuable to the next generation.

It seems to me that under-standing the real wealth in the land is key to a sustainable fu-ture for all of us.

gauged by the commodities it re-turns to us—in gallons of oil and bushels of corn.

The drive to extract as much value from the land as possible—to maxi-mize production without regard to whether we’re exhausting the soil, to give over our farmland to Wall Street investors, to seize land held by families for generations for corporate profit—bankrupts the land, our food, our na-tion, and our future.

We need to redefine wealth as the ability to make a decent living from the land as well as to sustain it for the next generation. To grow crops for food and fuel while simulta-neously enriching the soil upon which future crops depend. To sup-port a family and a community. To work in partnership with nature to

protect our health and the health of our planet. As care-takers of our soil and water, this has been and always should be the essential role of the family farmer.

Today, fewer than 2% of us live on farms. Clearly, we can’t all be family farmers, but we can all shift our priorities to ensure we’re doing our best to support them and encourage new farmers to get started on the land. Playing music to bring awareness is how I start-ed Farm Aid in 1985, and it’s how I continue to support the people who best know how to care for the land: our family farmers. Each and every one of us has the power to do what we can to support and sustain family farmers.

Our common wealth de-pends on it. D&S

W I L L I E N E L S O N is the founder and president of Farm Aid.

The Wealth of the Land and the Power of the People

< Comment $

Our greatest challenge is in re-visioning how the majority see “wealth.” The wealth of the land can-not be boiled down to the investors’ return on investment. It cannot be

We need to redefine wealth as the ability to

make a decent living from the land as well as to sustain it for the

next generation. To support a family and a community.

To work in partnership with nature.


Seeds of ChangeCorporate Power, Grassroots Resistance, and the Battle Over the Food System

Over a decade ago, Dollars & Sense published the article “Genetic Engineering and the Privatization of Seeds,” by Anuradha Mittal and Peter Rossett, on genetic modification and its impact on the world food system (March/April 2001). In it, the authors asked, “will biotechnology feed the world?” while providing an overview of the landscape of corporate control, widening inequality, private property claims, and growing farmers’ re-sistance around the world. This article acts as a follow-up, highlighting some of the key developments in recent years.

B Y E L I Z A B E T H F R A S E R A N D

A N U R A D H A M I T TA L

For most of history, farmers have had control over their seeds: sav-

ing, sharing, and replanting them with freedom. Developments in the course of the 20th century, however, have greatly eroded this autonomy. Legal changes, ranging from the Plant Variety Protection Act (1970) in the United States to the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), have system-atically eroded farmers’ rights to save seeds for future use. By the end of 2012, Monsanto had sued 410 farmers and 56 small farm businesses in the United States for patent infringement, winning over $23 million in settle-ments. Here, we describe some of the key developments further intensifying corporate control over the food sys-tem. It is not, however, all bleak news. Civil society groups are using every-thing from grassroots protest to open-source licensing to ensure that the en-closure and privatization of seeds comes to an end.

Corporations Have Consolidated Their Control of Seeds and AgrochemicalsIn 2011, just four transnational agribusinesses—Monsanto, Dupont Pioneer, Syngenta, and Vilmorin (Groupe Limagrain)—controlled 58% of the com-mercial seed market. Four—Syngenta, Bayer CropScience, BASF, and Dow AgroSciences—controlled 62% of agro-chemicals worldwide. The top six com-panies controlled 75% of all private plant

breeding research, 60% of commercial seed sales, and 76% of the global agro-chemical market. This consolidation of power has been aided by a large string of mergers and acquisitions, leading the Canada-based Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group) to conclude that “there just aren’t many seed companies left to buy.”

The World Bank, too, has played a role in this increased consolidation. In 2014, a report from the Oakland Institute pro-vided details on the World Bank’s efforts to open African markets to private seed companies. (Full disclosure: The authors of this article both work at the Oakland Institute.) The report, titled “The World Bank’s Bad Business with Seed and Fertilizer in African Agriculture,” paints a stark picture of the possible conse-quences of these actions: removing farmers’ rights to save seeds and imple-menting intellectual property claims over seeds does not improve food secu-rity, but rather undermines farmers’ au-tonomy and further increases profits for the existing seed oligopoly.

Supposed Benefits of Genetically Modified (GM) Seeds Have Not MaterializedTwo arguments often put forward in favor of GM seeds are the need to feed the world’s burgeoning popula-tion and the potential for these new seeds to reduce overall pesticide use. Neither of these claims promulgated by industry have proved true. Globally, we are currently producing more than enough food to adequate-ly feed our population. However, that food isn’t being distributed fairly, and malnutrition remains stagger-ing—805 million people worldwide. As the Canadian Biodiversity Action Network reminds us in its report “Will GM Crops Feed the World?” hunger is not usually a result of low food pro-duction, but rather a result of poverty. This points to a greater need to ad-dress issues of inequality, distribution, and access.

Arguments that genetically modi-fied crops could reduce overall agro-chemical use also remain unfounded, with the rise of herbicide-resistant weeds requiring more and more chemical cocktails for the GM crops to remain productive. A report from Food and Water Watch, “Superweeds: How Biotech Crops Bolster the Pesticide Industry,” notes that herbi-cide use on GM crops in the United States did initially fall in the late 1990s; however, once resistance in GM crops to the herbicide glypho-sate (marketed by Monsanto under the trade name “RoundUp”) devel-oped, total herbicide use skyrocket-ed, leading to greater net herbicide use over time.

< Making Sense

Our global food system continues

to be dominated by agribusiness giants, who use their power to quash

legislation designed to protect consumer and farmer interests. But

resistance is growing.


< Making Sense

Large Agribusinesses Have Spent Millions to Defeat Labelling Ballot MeasuresIn the past few years, large agribusi-nesses have worked to defeat numer-ous U.S. state ballot measures intended to enforce the labelling of GM foods. Of the $46 million spent to defeat an anti-GM labelling campaign in the state of California in 2013, over $8 million came from Monsanto alone. Ballot measures in Washington State (2012), Colorado (2014), and Oregon (2014) met similar fates, with large agribusinesses out-spending pro-labelling campaigns by a wide margin. In Vermont, state legisla-tion to enforce GM labelling was ap-proved in mid-2014 and is scheduled to come into force in early 2016. However, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (supported by corporations including Monsanto, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks) is now suing the state, alleg-ing that the law would violate the U.S. Constitution in various ways. This fur-ther demonstrates the power wielded by large agribusinesses, even in the face of widespread consumer (and leg-islative) pressure.

Activists Are Developing New “Open Source” Options for SeedsOne positive development is the April 2014 launch of the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI), a group “dedicated to maintaining fair and open access to plant genetic resources worldwide.” Jack Kloppenburg, a member of OSSI’s board of directors, has written exten-sively about the potential modification of open-source licensing (which is used widely in software development, and led to the development of Linux, the vastly popular operating system) to seeds and other plant materials.

Kloppenburg advocates a new type of plant licensing that makes plant mate-rials a) widely available, b) modifiable by any actor, and c) distributable provided the same terms of the original license carry forward. These principles mirror those developed by the open-source

technology movement, and it is antici-pated that these licenses will lead to the creation of a “protected commons”—preventing the patenting of this material in the future. While the group is far from challenging the agribusiness seed cartel, initiatives like this are beginning to pro-vide a way to legally protect plant genet-ic material from corporate capture.

Resistance to GM Crops Has IncreasedThe mobilization against the use of GM crops has gained momentum in recent years. In 2013, the global “March Against Monsanto” was estimated to have brought over two million citizens to the streets, across six continents, 52 nations, and 48 states of the United States. After an extended period of protests, anti-GM protesters celebrat-ed a victory in 2014, when the Chilean government withdrew a bill that would have allowed large agribusi-nesses like Monsanto to patent seeds in the country. (With falling demand for GM seeds in South America, Monsanto’s profits fell 34%, according to the company’s most recent quarter-ly report. Whether the falling demand was a result of global resistance, falling corn prices, or both is unclear).

Mexico imposed a ban on genetical-ly modified corn in 2013, days after worldwide protests against Monsanto and the whole genetically modified organism (GMO) industry. This made Mexico a key front in the global battle against corporate giants that bring in GMOs and “genetic pollution”—the transfer of GMO genetic codes into other plants (as by cross-pollination). Last year, a Mexican judge revoked Monsanto’s planting permit, which had allowed the company to sow more than 253,000 hectares of land across seven states. The ruling followed complaints from beekeepers in the state of Yucatán that Monsanto’s planned planting of GM soybeans, made to withstand RoundUp, would decimate the bee population and demolish the honey industry.

China has maintained a strong stance against GM products, leading to lawsuits against seed companies like Syngenta, which released a GM seed variety to farmers before it had been approved in the country. While China has recently begun approving more GM seed and crop varieties, mandatory la-belling laws also look likely to pass.

What Do These Developments Demonstrate? On one hand, our global food system continues to be dominated by agri-business giants, who use their power to quash legislation designed to pro-tect consumer and farmer interests, with little demonstration of the bene-fits of their genetically modified prod-ucts. At the same time, despite the power wielded by corporations, resis-tance is growing. In many cases, agri-business has met this resistance with outspending and overwhelming legal challenges. But in countries like Chile and Mexico, victories have been won, and promising new alternatives like the Open Source Seed Initiative are creating new ways of protecting plant material going forward.

The growing awareness of and mo-bilization against the corporatization of food cannot be denied. Movements around organic standards, Fair Trade, farmers’ markets, and community sup-ported agriculture have made huge gains over the last ten years. The next ten years have to build on these suc-cesses to reclaim seed sovereignty, to challenge the power of agribusinesses over our land and food system, and to increase popular engagement, advo-cating for the health of our planet and our food. D&S

E L I Z A B E T H F R A S E R is an intern scholar at the Oakland Institute. A N U R A D H A M I T TA L is executive director of the Oakland Institute.

S O U R C E S : Sources are available at dollarsandsense.org.


Community Supported AgricultureA Chance to Revitalize Farming? B Y M A R K PA U L A N D E M I LY S T E P H E N S

Have you tried the locavore bahn mi sandwich? How about that fantas-

tic hakurei rabe pasta with organic heir-loom beans and pasture-raised eggs? For years, our community supported agriculture (CSA) farm has been send-ing recipes encouraging us to incorpo-rate our weekly vegetable pick-up, ranging from tomatoes and potatoes to kolrabi and okra, into home-cooked meals and dinner conversations with friends. CSA farms are in fashion, with a near three-fold increase in their num-bers across the nation over the past five years. They’re bucking the trend: during the same time period, the total number of U.S. farms has decreased by over 100,000, with the largest losses seen among small farms. While the growth of community supported agriculture is an exciting development, the revitalization of agriculture should not be equated blindly with small, local, or family farms. Rather, it has to incorporate a breadth of goals to sustain the farmer, the work-er, the eater, and the environment.

First off, what is community sup-ported agriculture? Originally, CSA farms set out to align the interests of community members—seeking fresh, sustainable, local food—with farm-ers—seeking to support themselves by farming on small plots of land and engaging in high-diversity, labor-in-tensive production. Given their avail-able inputs, farmers decided how many families they could provide sus-tenance for during the season, deter-mined the cost of production (includ-ing a living wage for the farmer), and then divided total farm costs among the families who then became “share-holders” of the farm. Shareholders paid for their portion of the farms’ opera-tion prior to the start of the season, providing working capital for the farms

to purchase inputs at the beginning of the growing season—thereby elimi-nating the farms’ dependency on cred-it from financial institutions.

In the original model, how much did the produce cost the shareholder? That’s a tricky question. Shareholders didn’t receive a fixed amount of produce for their payment; rather, they received a weekly share of the harvest. This innova-tive agreement between the farm and the shareholder may have laid the fertile groundwork necessary for revitalizing farming in the United States, but is it leading us in the right direction?

In a capitalist economy, the market is a force to be reckoned with, on par with the droughts, hurricanes, and frosts that often keep farmers up at night. While U.S. farm policy has intentionally led to the expulsion of farmers from agricul-ture, the 1984 Economic Report of the President called the transition to indus-trial agriculture “the most successful example of agricultural development in the world.” But at what cost? Researchers Leo Horrigan, Robert S. Lawrence, and Polly Walker find that industrial agricul-ture is gobbling up fossil fuels, water, and topsoil at rates far beyond the ca-

pacity of our planet to sustain. Furthermore, industrial agriculture has resulted in dangerous levels of biodiver-sity loss, while simultaneously being associated with detrimental effects to human health. A recent article in the journal Science argues that under the current system, “[f ]arm productivity and economic viability are vulnerable to resource scarcities, climate change, and market volatility.” This doesn’t need to be the case.

Alternatives are possible. CSA advo-cates, as part of the local food move-ment, are working to build consumer demand for alternative agricultural sys-tems by creating what New York Times author Randy Kennedy calls “deeper-than-commerce connection[s] between people who make things and people who buy them.” From humble begin-nings, CSA farms have aimed to meet the needs of farmers, consumers, and surrounding communities by incorpo-rating issues such as environmental sus-tainability, workers’ rights, and food justice. This contrasts greatly with the industrial food system, which ignores externalities, focusing solely on produc-ing the most food at the lowest cost.

In theory, CSA farms are positioned to overcome many of the challenges faced by small, diversified farming op-erations that are striving to produce food sustainably and equitably. Through non-traditional agreements with shareholders, the unique needs of these farms can be met:

• Access to land: community rela-tions and a socially and environ-mentally just farming model can help farms acquire land through community land trusts.

• Working capital: shareholder pay-ment in advance of the growing season ensures farms are provid-ed with the necessary capital to purchase inputs.

< Making Sense

Although the phrase “community supported

agriculture” is no longer a guarantee of environmental

stewardship or social equity, one benefit

is that it encourages real relationships and

understanding between farmers and consumers.


< Making Sense

• A living wage: the complete cost of production, including farmers’ labor, is used to determine a fair price for the share.

• Guaranteed market: through the purchase of shares, shareholders provide the farm with a secure market for their produce.

• Risk hedging: shareholders pur-chase a share of the season’s har-vest rather than a fixed amount of food, ensuring that the farmer is compensated at a fixed level re-gardless of shocks such as extreme weather events or crop failure.

Additionally, the needs of consum-ers, or shareholders, are met through a weekly supply of fresh, local produce and the opportunity to know and sup-port their farmer. Finally, community supported agriculture can improve the well-being of a community through the preservation of open space, sup-port of a healthy environment, and provision of living-wage jobs.

While this brief outline provides an idealist vision of CSA farms, how are things really working?

Upon conducting interviews and a survey with CSA farmers in western Massachusetts, it is clear that the model is struggling to fulfill its original goals. While for many, the original ideals are still there, farmers seem to be stuck at a crossroads. They simply can’t sell their shares for enough money to fulfill the

fundamental CSA goal of providing a living wage to farmers. Encouragingly, a previous study found CSA shares were not only cheaper than buying organical-ly grown produce at regional chains, but also cheaper than buying conventionally grown produce at any store. Despite the cost-effectiveness of a CSA share, per-haps overall spending on produce has an upper limit that farmers are encoun-tering. Many of the farmers explained that they couldn’t raise prices any more, as there is fierce competition between CSA farms to both maintain and grow their customer base. Additionally, farm-ers were frustrated that their CSA shares were not accessible to low-income con-sumers, placing farmers and the entire local food movement in a moral bind.

Yet the movement continues to grow. Farmers, particularly young people and women—who have historically been underrepresented among farmers—continue to flock to community support-ed agriculture. As the number of CSA farms increases, the ideas encompassed by community supported agriculture have become more pliable. A recent NPR report, entitled “What Is Community Supported Agriculture? The Answer Keeps Changing,” brings to light just how varied the concept can be, resulting in the dilution of its original meaning and a decrease in its potential to revitalize agri-culture. As with the organic movement, CSA farms are undergoing a form of con-ventionalization. For many farms, com-munity supported agriculture is little more than a marketing ploy. While farms engaged exclusively in community sup-ported agriculture are protected from market pressures, today many CSA farms are hybrids, selling some produce through their CSA but also relying on a traditional capitalist market. These CSA farms seem to be the most removed from the original values such as risk shar-ing, community relations, and sustain-ability. Clearly, not all CSA farms are the same, but for consumers aren’t labels like “CSA” supposed to simplify their daily purchases? As one CSA farmer put it, “people feel if it is a local farm then it has

got all this integrity. But there are local farms around here that use GMO crops and are spraying the crap out of their fields. It’s just not the same thing.”

Although the phrase “community supported agriculture” is no longer a guarantee of environmental stewardship or social equity, one benefit is that it en-courages real relationships and under-standing between farmers and consum-ers. Accountability is built into the system; both farmers and consumers feel a sense of responsibility for the oth-er’s well-being. While shareholders can’t make assumptions about the values supported by their farm, they have an opportunity to directly ask the expert, their farmer. Through the elimination of distance, CSA bypasses the need for con-sistent labeling, providing the consumer with the opportunity to understand far more about how their food is grown than any label can convey. There are no easy solutions for the revitalization of agriculture, but these conversations, should people choose to have them, are a step in the right direction. D&S

M A R K PA U L is a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. E L I Z A B E T H S T E P H E N S studies global women’s health and international development at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

S O U R C E S : USDA, “2012 Census of Agriculture” (agcensus.usda.gov); Committee for Economic Development, “An Adaptive Program for Agriculture,” 1962; J. P. Cooley and D. A. Lass, “Consumer benefits from community supported agriculture membership,” Review of Agricultural Economics (1998); Local Harvest: Real Food, Real Farmers, Real Community (localharvest.org); L. Horrigan, et al., “How sustainable agriculture can address the environmental and human health harms of industrial agriculture,” Environmental Health Perspectives (2002); D. Lass, et al., “Community supported agriculture entering the 21st century: Results from the 2001 national survey,” Department of Resource Economics, University of Massachusetts (2003); J. Reganold, et al., “Transforming US agriculture,” Science (2003); M. Ritchie and K. Ristau, “US farm policy,” World Policy Journal (1986); Randy Kennedy, “ ‘Buy Local’ Gets Creative,” New York Times, Aug. 4, 2013; Ted Burnham, “What Is Community Supported Agriculture? The Answer Keeps Changing,” NPR, March 29, 2012 (npr.org).

“EXCESS RESOURCES”In a 1962 report entitled An Adaptive Program for Agriculture, the Committee for Economic Development—an influential business-led think tank—declared that “we are recommending here ... to induce excess resources (pri-marily people) to move rapid-ly out of agriculture.”


THE FAILURE OF MODERN INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTUREBy John Ikerd

A

mericans are being subjected to an ongoing multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign designed to “increase confidence and trust in today’s agriculture.” Food Dialogues, just one

example of this broader trend, is a campaign sponsored by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance—an industry organization whose funders and board members include Monsanto, DuPont, and John Deere. The campaign fea-tures the “faces of farming and ranching”—articulate, attractive young farmers, obviously chosen to put the best possible face on the increasingly ugly business of industrial agriculture, which dominates our food- production system.

Genetically engineered crops, inhumane treatment of farm animals, and routine feeding of antibiotics to con-fined animals—among many other problems—have eroded public trust in American agriculture. In response, the defenders of so-called modern agriculture have employed top public relations firms to try to clean up their tarnished public image. Their campaigns emphasize such issues as water quality, food safety, animal welfare, and “food prices and choices.”

Mounting public concerns in each of these areas are supported by a growing body of scientific evidence. For example, a 1998 EPA study found 35,000 miles of streams in 22 states polluted with biological wastes from concentrated animal feeding operations. The number of “impaired waters” in Iowa has tripled since the late 1980s, as industrial farming systems, such as factory farms, have replaced traditional family farms.

On food safety, a recent U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study reviewed dozens of studies linking routine feeding of antibiotics in concentrated livestock operations to people being infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, such as MRSA. “Use of anti-biotics in food-producing animals allows antibiotic- resistant bacteria to thrive,” they concluded. “Resistant bacteria can be transmitted from food-producing ani-mals to humans through the food supply.”

The big agricultural corporations claim that they are committed to the humane treatment of animals—

while advocating legislation to criminalize unauthorized photog-raphy in concentrated animal feed-ing operations. Numerous scien-tific studies over the past 50 years have documented inhumane treat-ment in these “animal factories.”

Centerfire Feedyard, Ulysses, Kansas, 2013.

Credit: © Mishka Henner (miskhahenner.com/Feedlots).

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I N D U S T R I A L A G R I C U L T U R E

The mistreatment is not only a result of inevitable overcrowding in confinement operations, but also results from routine management practices, trans-portation, and even from the genetic selection of animals for maximum productivity.

The Food Dialogues campaign claims to advo-cate consumer choice by supporting all types of farming. However, its language strongly suggests that industrial agriculture is essential to keeping food affordable. It considers organic agriculture and other sustainable faming alternatives to be no more than “niche markets.” In reality, the only clear “benefit” of industrial agriculture is that it requires fewer farmers. There is no indication that industrial agriculture has produced more food than could have been produced with more sustainable methods, only that it has employed far fewer farm-ers. Any production-cost advantage has been more than offset by higher margins, including profits, elsewhere within the corporate food supply chain. Over the past 20 years, an era of intensive agricul-tural industrialization, U.S. retail food prices have risen faster than overall inflation rates.

Perhaps most important, industrial agriculture has failed in its most fundamental purpose: provid-ing food security. The percentage of “food insecure” people in the United States is greater today than during the 1960s—early in the current phase of agricultural industrialization. (See Gerald Friedman, “Food Insecurity in Affluent America,” pp. 41-42) Furthermore, the industrial food system is linked to a new kind of food insecurity: unhealthy foods. A recent global report by 500 scientists from 50 coun-tries suggested that “obesity is [now] a bigger health crisis than hunger.” There is growing evidence that America’s diet-related health problems are not lim-ited to poor consumer food choices or processed “junk foods” but begin with a lack of essential nutri-ents in food crops produced on industrial farms.

It’s high time for fundamental change in Ameri-can agriculture. The growing litany of farm/food problems today cannot be solved by redesigning the USDA “food pyramid,” placing warning labels on junk foods, or imposing more stringent regula-tions on farmers. Today’s problems are deep and systemic. They are inherent in the worldview from which industrial agriculture emerged and upon which its evolution depends.

In economic terms, industrialization allows cap-ital and technology to be substituted for workers and managers. In other words, it allows raw mate-rials or natural resources to be transformed into more valuable products while employing fewer, lower-skilled workers—in both labor and manage-ment positions. In a world with an abundance of natural resources and a scarcity of workers, indus-trialization seemed a logical strategy for economic development. With increases in populations and depletion of natural resources, the economic ben-efits of industrialization have declined while the negative consequences of unemployment and envi-ronmental degradation have grown.

For agriculture, the benefits of industrialization have been fewer and the costs have been greater. The reality of agriculture is in conflict with the worldview that supports industrialization. Industri-alization is rooted in a mechanistic worldview: the industrial world works like a big, complex machine that can be manipulated by humans to extract nat-ural resources and use them to meet our needs and wants. In reality, the world is an extremely complex living ecosystem, of which we humans are a part. Our well-being ultimately depends on working and living in harmony with nature rather than

The reality of agriculture is in conflict with

the worldview that supports industrialization.

We are currently seeing the disastrous

consequences of treating living ecosystems

as if they were inanimate mechanisms.

Agricultural industrialization has had a devas-tating effect on the quality of rural life. Industrial agriculture has replaced independent family farm-ers with a far smaller number of farm workers, most of whom are paid poorly. In 1960, farmers were still more than 8% of the U.S. workforce. They are less than 1% today. Rural communities have suffered both economically and socially from this loss of traditional farm families. More than 50 years of research demonstrates that communi-ties supported by small to mid-size family farms are better places to live, both economically and socially, than are communities dependent on large farming enterprises.


conquering nature. We are currently seeing the disastrous consequences of treating living ecosys-tems as if they were inanimate mechanisms.

Thankfully, a new kind of agriculture is emerg-ing to meet these ecological, social, and economic challenges. The new farmers may call their farms “organic,” “ecological,” “biological,” “holistic,” or “biodynamic.” Their farming methods may be called “agroecology,” “nature farming,” or “permacul-ture.” They all fit under the conceptual umbrella of sustainable agriculture. They are committed to meeting the food needs of all in the present with-out diminishing opportunities for those who will live in the future.

The strength of this movement is most visible in the growth of the organic-foods market, although some types of “organic farms,” especially those mimicking industrial agriculture, may not be sus-tainable. Sales of organic foods grew by more than 20% per year during the 1990s and early 2000s, before leveling off at around 10%–12% annual growth following the recession of 2008. Organic foods now amount to around $35 billion in annual sales, something less than 5% of total food sales.

The local food movement, as exemplified by farm-ers markets and “community supported agricul-ture,” has replaced organics as the most dynamic sector of the food market, although it is only about half as large in sales. (See Mark Paul and Emily Ste-

›› Tascosa Feedyard, Texas, 2013. Credit: © Miska Henner (miskhahenner.com/Feedlots).

phens, “Community Supported Agriculture: A Chance to Revitalize Farming?” pp. 9–10.)

Some question whether organic or other sustain-able farms can meet the food needs of a growing global population. A comprehensive review in the journal Nature compared organic and conventional crop yields in “developed” countries, concluding: “Under certain conditions—that is, with good man-agement practices, particular crop types and growing conditions—organic systems can . . . nearly match con-ventional yields.” The challenge in the United States and the so-called developed world is to create a food system that will meet the basic food needs of all with-out degrading its natural and human resources. Eco-logical and social sustainability, not just yields, is the logical motivation for organic agriculture in the so-called developed world. Globally, industrial agricul-ture is not needed to “feed the world.” Small, diversi-fied farms already provide food for least 70% of the world’s population and could double or triple yields without resorting to industrial production methods.

Everywhere we look, we can see the failure of the grand experiment of industrial agriculture. It’s time for fundamental change. D&S

J O H N I K E R D is professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia and author of several books, including The Essentials of Economic Sustainability (Kumarian Press, 2012).

S O U R C E S : Available at dollarsandsense.org.



The Land Matrix project, which tracks large-scale land acquisitions, defines a foreign land grab as a transfer of 200 hectares (500 acres) or more, via lease or sale, to a foreign entity intending to put the land to a new use. The project has compiled a database of such acqui-sitions since 2000, the vast majority of them since the food-price spikes of 2007–2008. The picture of land grabbing that emerged in 2008 was of land or water-poor countries, panicked about their future food security, using sovereign wealth funds to snap up land to produce food for their do-mestic markets. China came in for particular scrutiny based on a series of highly publicized planned acquisitions. Most never material-ized, and today’s profile of grabbed land, from the Land Matrix project, looks quite different: The majority of land grabs target lands in Africa. Six of the top ten target countries are South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, the Republic of the

LAND-GRABBING AROUND THE WORLD

WALL STREET’S U.S. LAND GRAB

B Y L U K A S R O S S

If you were told that the world was going to become a drier, hungrier place, the first words to

come into your head probably wouldn’t be “invest-ment opportunity.” Then again, you probably aren’t one of the financial-sector giants piling into the global farmland market, gambling that as pop-ulations rise and climate change worsens, the own-ers of prime farmland will be rewarded handsomely for their investments.

Across the developing world, millions of acres have already changed hands. Diving in are buyers as diverse as private corporations, state-owned entities, and national elites. After deals cooked up between outside investors and governments, local communities are often left hungry so that cash crops can be grown for export. The Land Matrix database includes 500 million acres “approved or

under negotiation worldwide” between 2000 and 2011, an area “eight times the size of the United Kingdom” and easily the biggest global land grab since the heyday of European colonialism.

But the rush isn’t just happening in faraway places, greased along by corrupt business practices. Driven by the same factors and even executed by some of the same investors, a rush for U.S. land is underway as well—and the consequences for everything from environmental sustainability to food security could be immense.

The Canadian insurance company Manulife, the Swiss bank UBS, and the pension fund TIAA-CREF are only some of the most visible names vying for a bigger stake in U.S. farmland. According to a recent estimate in the industry newspaper Pensions and Investments, institution-al investors like these already own as much as $8–10 billion worth of U.S. farmland—with at

Credit: © Oakland Institute, from the

report Down on the Farm—Wall

Street: America’s New Farmer

(oaklandinstitute.org/down-on-

the-farm).

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B Y T I M O T H Y A . W I S E

Iintroduced myself to Luis Sitoe, economic ad-viser to Mozambique’s minister of agriculture,

and explained that I’d spent the last two weeks in his country researching the ProSAVANA project, decried as the largest land grab in Africa. This ambitious Brazil-Japan-Mozambique development project was slated to turn 35 million hectares (over 85 million acres) of Mozambique’s supposedly unoccupied savannah lands into industrial-scale soybean farms modeled on—and with capital from—Brazil’s savannah lands in its own southern Cerrado region.

Mr. Sitoe smirked. “Did you see ProSAVANA?” I hadn’t, in fact. “So far there is no investment in Pro-Savana,” he said, with surprising satisfaction consid-ering that the project’s most ardent supporter had been his boss, agriculture minister José Pacheco.

Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. But Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Brazil, and Ukraine are also in the top ten. The investors are not mostly sovereign wealth funds from land-poor countries but investors from rich countries. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries—which include the United States, most of western Europe, and most other high-income countries—account for more than half of the deals. The top land grabber—by far—isn’t China but the United States, with 6.5 million hectares under contract, more than twice the level of the second-ranked investor country (Malaysia). China is eleventh on the list. Food crops represent only about one-quarter of all acquired land. Biofuel crops or “flex crops” such as sugar—for either sweet-ener or ethanol—account for nearly as much acquired land, as do forestry projects. In Africa, only 13% of agricultural land-grab projects are for food. Perhaps most importantly, the land tar-geted is not unoccupied. For land on which there are data about former use, the major-ity was in agriculture—with the majority of that being cultivated by small-scale farmers. —Timothy A. Wise

THE GREAT LAND GIVEAWAY

IN MOZAMBIQUE

A firestorm of controversy had dogged the project since its “Master Plan” had been unceremoni-ously leaked in 2013. Farmers were actively resist-ing efforts by foreign investors and the government to take away their land. And Brazilian investment was almost nowhere to be found.

Had the land-grab boom gone bust? Was ProSAVANA’s stuttering start a sign that African farmland had lost its luster? No, but it turns out to be easier to get a government to give away a farm-er’s land than it is to actually farm it.

Reality Asserts ItselfData from the Land Matrix project suggest that economic realities have begun to assert themselves. Commodity prices are down, speculative capital has returned to rebounding stock markets, low oil prices have cut the profit margins on biofuels. Oil and gas discoveries in some developing countries,

João works in his maize field in Mozambique.

Credit: Bread for the World/Kate Raisz (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic).

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L A N D G R A B S

least another $5 billion “allocated for future investment.”

Two of the biggest factors that began to drive Wall Street into U.S. farmland emerged in 2007 and 2008. The first was a global spike in food pric-es, which sent the number of hungry people in the world to over one billion, and made it clear to in-vestors that there was money to be made from commodity crops. (See Ben Collins, “Hot Com-modities, Stuffed Markets, and Empty Bellies,” D&S, July/August 2008.) The second was the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. Plummeting global fi-nancial markets led many investors to the perceived stability of “real assets” like infrastructure, timber, and precious metals—with farmland emerging as one of the safest places to stash capital while the economy recovered.

Some analysts also point to macro-level trends such as a growing, meat-hungry global middle class and government support for biofuels. Still others are shockingly candid about climate change as a business opportunity. The argument is that, as ex-treme weather puts added pressure on existing land, the owners of well-placed, well-irrigated farm

properties will be able to cash in while the world burns. Jeremy Grantham of GMO Capital basical-ly said as much in a 2011 letter to investors: “Good land, in short supply, will rise in price, to the ben-efit of land owners.”

In the United States, however, another factor is in play: demographics. As the current generation retires, more than half of all U.S. farmland is going to change hands. This is a 400 million acre oppor-tunity that has many in the financial sector openly salivating. The aging U.S. farmer population, coupled with too few in the younger generation to replace them, translates into a golden opportunity for buyers to expand and consolidate their holdings.

This is troubling news, if only because Wall Street has yet to prove it can farm or care for the land responsibly.

As an absentee investor, its instinct is to treat farms as lines on a balance sheet and leave the ac-tual business of agriculture to hired managers. This can lead to problems. One case involves an apple orchard in Washington owned by the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System and managed by the Han-cock Agricultural Investment Group, a subsidiary of Canada’s biggest insurer. The details came to light as part of a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf

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meanwhile, have taken the wind out of the sails of domestic alternative energy projects which were fueling some land-grabbing.

As a result, the pace of large-scale land acquisi-tions has slowed, many projects have failed, and those underway often operate on a fraction of the land handed over to them.

National governments—perhaps the most will-ing negotiating partners in this often-ugly pro-cess—have ceded the rights to large tracts of land to foreign investors. As of mid-September 2014, Land Matrix had recorded 956 transnational land deals completed globally since 2000, with another 187 un-der negotiation. The completed agreements, most of which have taken place since 2007, cover 61 million hectares (about 150 million acres), with about half of that land under formal contract. Interestingly, of the 37 million hectares under contract, only 4.1 mil-lion (just 11%) are confirmed to be in production.

The much lower acreage contracted for produc-tion reflects how hard it can be to turn vague inten-tions, and government concessions into concrete

business plans. Hardest of all is putting those plans into operation, which involves dealing with weak regional markets, poor infrastructure, and—most importantly—resistance from local residents cur-rently using the land.

By all accounts, ProSAVANA stalled before it could even register as a productive project in the Land Matrix database. Mozambique is fifth among all target countries in the project’s ranking by amount of land given away (behind Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, South Sudan, and the Demo-cratic Republic of the Congo), with 99 concluded projects covering 2.2 million hectares. Three- quarters of that is for forestry projects. Of the agri-culture projects, one finds just a few comparatively small soybean projects in the Nacala Corridor, ProSAVANA’s target region.

Tucked in the database, one finds a grand “in-tended but not concluded” 700,000-hectare proj-ect that lists Brazilians as the investors and the Bra-zilian, Japanese, and Mozambican governments as partners. ProSAVANA. What happened to the 35

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It turns out to be easier to get a

government to give away a farmer’s land

than it is to actually farm it.

of farm workers. According to court documents, the property was leased to one manager and then sub-leased to another. The latter then reportedly lied to workers about wages and working condi-tions and hired a foreman who carried a gun on the job and fired it to intimidate workers.

If guaranteeing fair or even lawful labor stan-dards as an absentee investor is hard, so is imple-menting sustainable practices. Eager to capitalize on short-term gains, these investors have some-times sought bonus sources of revenue. One exam-ple is a farm owned by the Alaska state pension sys-tem that was leased for oil and gas drilling in Weld County, Colo., arguably one of the most heavily fracked regions of the country.

Another concern is the rush to plant water- intensive crops like almonds and pistachios in Cal-ifornia’s Central Valley, where institutional inves-tors are among the biggest players on the scene. Lax to non-existent rules for sinking new wells, coupled with a booming global market for nuts, are combining to make the perennially water-strapped state even drier.

So as the financial sector hunkers down to buy an even bigger stake in U.S. farmland, it is worth asking a few questions about the future of food and

farming. How do we train a new generation of farmers to take the torch from the old one? How do we create new financing structures that secure stable tenure for them? How do we make sure that there are markets for local and sustainably produced foods for everyone, and not only the wealthy?

Admittedly, much of this work has already be-gun. Groups like Food Commons are experiment-ing with ways to create regional food systems, pair-ing farmers with sources of credit and cooperatively run food processing facilities, while groups like California FarmLink match aspiring farmers with the retiring generation.

No one denies that this is going to be a long journey. We don’t have all the solutions yet. Even contemplating alternatives puts us at odds with the corporate agriculture interests who gain the most from the unsustainable way most of us are eating now.

But the discussion has to start somewhere, espe-cially if the alternative is surrendering our agricul-tural heritage to Wall Street. D&S

L U K A S R O S S is a fellow at the Oakland Institute and the author of Down on the Farm—Wall Street: America’s New Farmer (Oakland Institute, 2014).

million hectares? That was the press release, the sales pitch to Brazilian investors. Only a fraction of that land is even suitable for agriculture; much is forested or degraded. Or occupied.

Fundamentally Flawed Frankly, I was surprised to find ProSAVANA to be such a bust. This wasn’t some fly-by-night venture capitalist looking to grow a biofuel crop he’d never produced for a market that barely existed. That’s what I saw in Tanzania, and such failed biofuel land grabs litter the African landscape.

ProSAVANA at least knew its investors: Brazil’s agribusiness giants. The planners knew their tech-nology: soybeans adapted to the tropical condi-tions of Brazil’s Cerrado. And they knew their mar-ket: Japan’s and China’s hog farms and their insatiable appetite for feed, generally made with soybeans. That was already more than a lot of these grand schemes had going for them.

But ProSAVANA foundered because its premise was fundamentally flawed. The Grand Idea was

that the soil and climate in the Nacala Corridor were similar to those found in the Cerrado, so Bra-zilian technology could be easily adapted to tame an uninhabited region inhospitable to agriculture.

It turns out that the two regions differ dramati-cally. The Cerrado had poor soils, which is why it had few farmers. Technology was available, howev-er, to address soil quality. The Nacala Corridor, by contrast, has good soils, which is precisely why the region is the most densely populated part of rural Mozambique. If there are good lands, you can pretty well bet people have discovered them and are farming them. ››



Democracy and ResistanceMozambique has one other thing Brazil didn’t have when it tamed the Cerrado: a democratic govern-ment forged in an independence movement rooted in peasant farmers’ struggle for land rights. At the time of Brazil’s soybean expansion in the mid-1980s, a military dictatorship could impose its Cerrado project. Mozambique has one of the stronger land laws in Africa, which prevents private ownership of land and grants use rights to farmers who have been farming land for ten years or more—whether they have a formal title or not. Even if the government is now siding with foreign investors, it has laws through which an increasingly restive citizenry can hold it accountable.

What may end up dooming ProSAVANA is farmers’ growing awareness of the threat to their land, and their capacity to resist. Spearheaded by União Nacional de Camponeses (UNAC), Mo-zambique’s national farmers’ union, the campaign to stop the project formed quickly, fueled by a Mo-zambican tour of the Cerrado organized with Bra-zilian farmer groups. The images of unending ex-panses of soybeans, without a small farmer in sight, and the tales of environmental destruction spread quickly through Mozambique.

Last year, the campaign adopted a firm “No to ProSAVANA” stance until farmers and local communities are consulted on development plans for the region.

Local resistance to specific land deals may have had an even greater impact. That certainly scared off some of the largest Brazilian investors, who complained not only that they couldn’t own the land outright, but that it took a negotiation with the national government and then further negotia-tions with local governments just to get a lease. Even then, that lease was for land that was any-thing but unoccupied. Most packed up their giant combines and went home.

No End to Land GrabbingI asked Mr. Sitoe in the Ministry of Agriculture if the lesson of ProSAVANA was that agricultur-al development needed to be based on Mozam-bique’s three million small-scale food producers. He smirked again. No, he assured me, the gov-ernment is committed to foreign investment, with its capital and technology, as the path to agricultural development.

He pulled out a two-inch-thick project pro-posal for a 200,000-hectare foreign-funded scheme for irrigated agriculture along the Lurio River, on the northern edge of the Nacala Cor-ridor. Was this part of ProSAVANA? No, he reas-sured me with another smile. That brand was clearly tarnished.

Had farmers and communities in the region been consulted about the Lurio River project? “Absolutely not,” said Vicente Adriano of UNAC. In the words of the Mozambican independence movement, La Luta Continua—the struggle continues. D&S

T I M O T H Y A . W I S E is director of the Research and Policy Program at the Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University. He also leads the Institute’s Globalization and Sustainable Develop-ment Program.

S O U R C E S : Land Coalition, Land Matrix Newsletter, January 2014, October 2014 (landcoalition.org); Justiça Ambiental! et al., “Leaked ProSAVANA Master Plan confirms worst fears,” April 30, 2013 (grain.org); Timothy A. Wise, “Picking up the pieces from a failed land grab project in Tanzania,” Global Post, June 27, 2014; União Nacional de Camponeses, “No to ProSAVANA! Launch of national campaign,” June 2, 2014 (unac.org.mz).

L A N D G R A B S

Mozambique has a democratic government

forged in an independence movement rooted

in peasant farmers’ struggle for land rights.

What may end up dooming ProSAVANA is

farmers’ growing awareness of the threat

to their land, and their capacity to resist.

Within months of the release of the Master Plan, a tri-national campaign in Japan, Brazil, and Mozambique formed. An open letter to the heads of government of the three countries caused a stir, particularly in Japan where the country’s interna-tional development agency was accused of violat-ing the long-standing separation of development assistance from commercial interests.

MO

ZAM

BIQ

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CO

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ED


THESETHINGS

CANCHANGE

Photos by David Bacon

Text by David Bacon & Rosario Ventura

In 2013, Rosario Ventura and her husband Isidro Silva were strikers at Sakuma Brothers Farms in Burlington, Wash. In the course of three months in 2013, over 250 workers

walked out of the fields several times, as their anger grew over their wages and the conditions in the labor camp where they lived.

Every year, the company hires between 700 and 800 people to pick strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries. During World War II, the Sakumas were interned by the U.S. government because of their Japanese ancestry, and would have lost their land, as many Japanese farmers did, had it not been held in trust for them by another local rancher until the war ended. Today, the business has grown far beyond its immigrant roots, and is one of the largest berry growers in Washington, where berries are big business, with annual sales of $6.1 million, and big corporate customers like Häagen Dazs ice cream.

P H O T O : To the barricades! Strikers put up a barrier on the road into the labor camp.


M I G R A N T W O R K E R S

Sakuma Farms owns a retail outlet, a freezer and processing plant, and a chain of nurseries in California that grow rootstock.

By contrast, Sakuma workers have very few resources. Some are local workers, but over half are migrants from California, like Ventura and her family. Both the local workers and the California migrants are immigrants, coming from indigenous towns in Oaxaca and southern Mexico where peo-ple speak languages like Mixteco and Triqui. While all farm workers in the United States are poorly paid, these new indigenous arrivals are at the bot-tom. One recent study in California found that tens of thousands of indigenous farm workers received less than minimum wage.

In 2013, Ventura and other angry workers formed an independent union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia—Families United for Justice. In fit-ful negotiations with the company, they discovered that Sakuma Farms had been certified to bring in 160 H-2A guest workers. The H-2A program was established in 1986, to allow U.S. agricultural employers to hire workers in other countries and bring them to the United States. In this program, the company first must certify that it has tried to hire workers locally. If it can’t find workers at the wage set by the state employment department, and the department agrees that the company has offered the jobs, the grower can then hire workers from outside the country. The U.S. government provides visas that allow guest workers to work only for that employer, and only for a set period of time, less than a year. Afterwards, they must return to their home country. If they’re fired or lose their job before the contract is over, they must leave right away. Growers must apply for the program

each year. On hearing about the application, the striking workers felt that the company was trying to find a new workforce to replace them.

When I questioned someone from the company about why it needed guest workers, he said they couldn’t find enough workers to pick their berries. But the farm was also unwilling to raise wages to attract more pickers. “If we [do], it unscales it for the other farmers,” said owner Ryan Sakuma in an interview. “We’re just robbing from the total [num-ber of workers available]. And we couldn’t attract them without raising the price hugely to price other growers out. That would just create a price war.” He pegged his farm’s wages to the H-2A pro-gram: “Everyone at the company will get the H-2A wage for this work.”

“The H-2A program limits what’s possible for all workers,” says Rosalinda Guillén, director of Community2Community, an organization that helped the strikers. Community2Community, based in Bellingham, Wash., advocates for farm worker rights, especially those of women, in a sus-tainable food system. After the strikes, Sakuma Farms applied for H-2A work visas for 438 work-ers, saying that the strikers weren’t available to work because they had all been fired. Under worker and community pressure, the U.S. Department of Labor (USDoL) did not approve Sakuma’s applica-tion. Sakuma has still not recognized the union, and many workers feel their jobs are still in danger.

A decade ago there were hardly any H-2A work-ers in Washington State. In 2013, the USDoL cer-tified applications for 6,251 workers, double the number in 2011. And the irony, of course, is that one group of immigrant workers, recruited as guest workers, is being pitted against another group—the migrants who have been coming to work at the company for many years.

As she sat in her home in Madera, Calif., Rosario Ventura described the personal history that led her to migrate yearly from California to Washington, and then become a striker.

See page 22 for Rosario Ventura’s story. ››D A V I D B A C O N is a journalist and photographer covering labor, immigration, and the impact of the global economy on workers. He is author of several books, including Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migra-tion and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2009).

The irony of the expansion of the H-2A

Program in Washington State is that one group

of immigrant workers, recruited as guest

workers, is being pitted against another

group—the migrants who have been coming

to work at the company for many years.


Who checks the weights?

Rosalinda Guillén talks with three young women, who demanded that the company allow them to do the work of weighing and checking the berries picked by workers. Before the strike, workers often accused the company’s checkers—mostly local white people, not Mexicans—of cheating them on the weight.


Hard camp conditions.

Filemón Pineda, his wife Francisca Mendoza, and their children lived in a cabin in the labor camp at Sakuma Farms during the picking season.


”

where it’s cooler. Then when it gets cold there and the work runs out, we come back to Madera. We go every season. When we go to Washington we have to rent someplace in Madera to store our belongings, like our clothes. Then when we return we have to search for a new home again. It is a hassle. This year we left the house where we’d been living with my brother instead, because he didn’t go to Washington. We all live here—Isidro, my four children, my brothers and sisters, and their children. The family pays two thousand a month for the whole house, and Isidro and I pay three hundred as our share. When we’re in Washington we have to save for the winter sea-son, because there’s no work until April. I don’t work in Madera because I can’t find childcare. The trip to Washington is expen-sive—about $250 in gas and food. If we don’t have enough mon-ey, we have to ask for a loan. That’s what we normally do, since by then we’ve used up what we saved from the previous year. There is a food bank in Washington, which helps when we get there. With the strikes last year in Washington we were out of work for almost two months. We didn’t save anything, so it was very hard for us afterwards. We didn’t have enough to pay the bills, and we couldn’t find work. The strikes started when the company fired Federico [a coworker]. We wanted Sakuma to raise the [piece rate] price, and the company refused. They told us if we want to work, work. Then they accused Federico of starting a protest. They went to his cabin, to kick him out of the camp. That’s when we stopped work, to get his job back. We were also upset about the conditions in the labor camp. The mattress they gave us was torn and dirty, and the wire was coming out and poked us. We’re accustomed to sleeping with the children, but the bed was so small we couldn’t even fit on it. There were cockroaches and rats. The roof leaked when it rained. They just put bags in the holes and it still leaked. All my children’s clothes were wet. They told us they would change things, and the county inspector would come check the cabin. But the company man in charge of the camp told me: “If the inspector comes, don’t show him your bed. Don’t say anything or you will have a lot of problems.” So when the inspector came the company man followed him and didn’t let me say anything. They always try to make us afraid to speak up. If you ask for another five cents they fire you. They threatened to remove us from the camp because of the strikes, and said they’d fire us. They are always threatening us. They fired Ramón also [the leader of the strike and union] because he talked back to them. But thank God he had the courage to talk. I think there will be strikes again this coming year, if the company doesn’t come to its senses, and as long as we have support. We can’t leave things like this. There is too much abuse. We are making them rich and making ourselves poor. It’s not fair. I think these things can change if we all keep at it. We won’t let them keep on going like this. We have to change them. It is im-portant that they raise wages, treat us right, and help the farm-workers. All the mistreatment, threats, everything—it isn’t fair. I want to work, to have money, to be in a better place. I want a little house and to stay in one place with my kids. That’s all I’m hop-ing for. I’d like to see my children reach high school and maybe college. If they don’t, I want to go back to Mexico, if I can save money. My kids can go to school there too. I want them to con-tinue studying. I don’t want my children to work for Sakuma. D&S

ROSARIO VENTURA: IN HER OWN WORDS

“Icame from Oaxaca in 2001, from San Martín Itunyoso. It is a Triqui town [where the indigenous language Trinqui is spoken], and that’s what I grew up speaking. My mother and father were farmers, and worked on the land that belongs to

the town. It was just enough to grow what we ate, but sometimes there was nothing to eat, and no money to buy food. There wasn’t much work in Oaxaca, so my parents would go to Sinaloa [in northern Mexico]. I began to go with them when I was young, I don’t remember how old I was. It costs a lot of money to go to school and my parents had no way to get it. In Mexico you have to buy a uniform for every grade. You have to buy the pencils, notebooks, things the children need. My brothers went to school, though. I was the only one that didn’t go, because I was a girl. When I told my dad I wanted to come to the U.S., he tried to convince me not to leave. When you leave, it is forever—that is what he said, because we never return. You won’t even call, he said. And it did turn out that way. Now I don’t talk with him because I know if I do, it will bring him sadness. He’ll ask, when are you coming back? What can I say? I would like to return to live with him, since he is alone. But I can’t get the money to go back. There is no money, there is noth-ing to eat, in San Martín Itunyoso. I thought that I would save up something here and return. But it is hard here too. It’s the same situation here in the U.S. We work to try to get ahead, but we never do. We’re always earning just enough to buy food and pay rent. Everything gets used up. It is easy to leave the U.S., but difficult to come back and cross the border. When I came, it cost two thousand dollars to cross, walking day and night in Arizona. We had to carry our own water and food. Out there in the desert it is life and death if you do not have any. It took a week and a half of pure walking. We would rest a couple of hours and get up to walk again. Those who bring children suffer the most because they have to carry water and food for them, and sometimes carry the children themselves. Thank God we all crossed and were OK. But now that I’m here I’m always afraid because I don’t have papers. I can never relax or be at ease. When I crossed the border I came alone, and then found my brothers, who were already here in Madera. They took me to Washington State to work at Sakuma Farms. I met Isidro when I was working, and we got married in 2003. He speaks Mixteco and I speak Triqui, but that did not matter to us. In those times I hardly spoke Spanish, but now I know a little more. When I came here, they were pruning the plants. That is very hard work because you get cut and the branches hit your face. When I was in Oaxaca, thinking of coming, I was expecting a different type of work. But this is all there is. People who know how to read and write or have papers can get easier jobs. The rest of us work in the fields. At Sakuma Farms the company was always hard on us. They would tell us, “you came to pick, and you have to make weight.” If you don’t make weight they won’t let you work for a few days. If you still can’t make weight, they pull you out of the field and fire you. But when you’re working, and you take what you’ve picked to be weighed, they always cheat you of two or three pounds. I’ve always lived in the labor camp during the picking season. We decided to continue living in Madera, and never moved to Washington permanently. When it gets really hot in the San Joaquin Valley in the summer we go to Washington,

MARCH/APRIL 2015 l DOLLARS & SENSE l 2322 l DOLLARS & SENSE l MARCH/APRIL 2015

MARCH/APRIL 2015 l DOLLARS & SENSE l 23”

The next generation.

On the fence at the gate into the labor camp, the children of some of the strikers do what they’ve seen their parents and friends doing. They grab a sign, stand on the fence, and begin to chant and shout, ¿Qué queremos? ¡Justicia! ¿Cuándo? ¡Ahora!


Back to work, for now.

The strike actually consisted of a number of separate work stoppages, and each time, when it seemed like the company would resolve the main complaints, workers would return to the fields to pick. On this morning, strikers walk into a blueberry field at sunrise, ready to start work.


NO FRIENDSHIP IN TRADEFARMERS FACE MODERN-DAY ROBBER BARONS, IN THE UNITED STATES AND WORLDWIDE

B Y S A S H A B R E G E R B U S H

Presiding over monopolies in shipping and railroads, U.S. robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt once said that “there is no friend-

ship in trade.” During the 19th century, railroad magnates like Vanderbilt used their concentrated power to increase the price of freight, creating financial hardships for farmers who needed to ship their produce. Likewise, bankers like J.P. Morgan squeezed farmers, who were reliant on credit to get

Biographer T.J. Stiles notes that a “blood- chilling ruthlessness infused all [of Vanderbilt’s] actions.” He continues, “Although Vanderbilt habitually dressed in the simple black-and-white outfit of a Protestant clergyman, his only religion was economic power.” This religion of economic power is alive and well in today’s global food sys-tem and farmers trade with the new robber barons of the global food system at their peril.

The small farmers and laborers who grow and process most of the world’s food—who provide one of the few things we cannot live without—are themselves often hungry and poor. That is the sim-ple, central paradox of the global food system.

Much of the explanation for this state of affairs focuses on processes of “unequal exchange.” Unequal exchange results from trading relation-ships between parties with unequal levels of power, between powerful monopolies on the one hand and people who struggle in more competi-tive markets on the other. Unequal exchange is a mechanism for exploitation in the food system; that is, it siphons wealth away from farmers and workers and enriches multinational food and finance corporations.

Power, Inequality, and Unequal Exchange Beginning in the 16th century, colonization, industrialization, and globalization have worked

The small farmers and laborers who grow and

process most of the world’s food—who provide

one of the few things we cannot live without—

are themselves often hungry and poor.

through the growing season, with high interest rates. By the latter part of the century, farmers “found the prices for their produce going down, and the prices of transportation and loans going up,” wrote historian Howard Zinn, “because the individual farmer could not control the price of his grain, while the monopolist railroad and the monopolist banker could charge what they liked.” The market dynamics set in motion by the robber barons ushered in decades of conflict between farmers and the railroad magnates, motivating populist movements and calls for government reg-ulation of monopolies.


to undermine locally self-sufficient systems of food production, gradually replacing them with a system of global food interdependence. In this new system, food production, processing, distri-bution, and consumption are divided up among lots of different people and communities per-forming different food-related tasks, often in dif-ferent parts of the world. In other words, there is now a “global division of labor” in food, and the people within this division of labor (who, these days, represent most of the global population) are dependent upon one another for the food they need to survive.

This new system is hierarchically ordered, with large multinational food and agriculture corpora-tions controlling many aspects of production, pro-cessing, distribution, and consumption. Multi-national corporations’ (MNCs) dominance over the global food system owes in large part to their market power. “Market power” refers to a firm’s ability to influence the terms of trade—such as prices, but also quality and production standards—in a given market.

Today’s food monopolies have consolidated their power thanks both to changes in national and international laws and regulations and to the poli-cies of international institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF), among oth-ers. Of course, the capital- and technology-inten-sive nature of food processing, distribution, and retail these days—a key part of the process of food industrialization—also results in high barriers to entry in these markets. These barriers reduce com-petition for companies in the food industry.

The global food system is riddled with monop-olistic markets, markets in which, on one side, stand only one or a few multinational corporate juggernauts, while on the other side there are many

MONOPOLIES, MONOPSONIES, OLIGOPOLIES, OLIGOPSONIESA Note on Terminology

In a perfectly competitive marketplace, no single participant can influence prices because there are so many buyers and

sellers, each of which represents only a very small portion of the total marketplace. By contrast, a “monopoly” is a type of uncompetitive market in which there is only one seller. The clas-sic textbook example is the post-WWII diamond monopoly held by the DeBeers company. A “monopsony” is a type of un-competitive market in which there is only one buyer. The clas-sic example is a labor market in a one-factory town; the rela-tionship Walmart has with many of its suppliers is another good example. An “oligopoly” is an uncompetitive market with only a few sellers (like the U.S. markets for airline tickets), while an “oligopsony” is an uncompetitive market with only a few buyers (like the U.S. market for published books which is domi-nated by Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the global market for unroasted coffee beans). As a shorthand, I refer to all of types of uncompetitive markets as “monopolies,” and those compa-nies that enjoy market power as “monopolists.” Some econom-ics textbooks technically define an “oligopoly” as a market in which the 50% of the market is controlled by four or fewer firms, while others employ the looser definition noted above.

HELD UP: THE LIFE OF A POULTRY FARMERB Y C R A I G W AT T S

In December 1991, I signed a contract to raise chickens for one to the country’s largest integrators. I was three years out of business school, where I had been introduced to the term “economic holdup.” Little did I know that when I

signed that contract I would begin to live this concept each and every day. The term refers to a situation where two parties (in my case a farmer and an integrator) may be able to work most efficiently by cooperating, but refrain from doing so due to concerns that they may give the other party increased bar-gaining power, and thereby reduce their own profits. In my contract with my integrator, I have no bargaining power. To get started, I borrowed approximately $200,000 to construct two poultry houses, following the specifications required by the integrator. Initially, all went well and in 1994 I borrowed another $200,000 to build two more houses. At that time, I was also forced to borrow an additional $40,000 to bring my older houses up to the specs of the

››

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new houses. The industry term is “up-grades.” Upgrades can be additional equipment and/or changes to the structures themselves, as required by the integrator. In the initial recruitment pitch, the integrator presented a rosy picture: that the poultry houses would provide a steady and primary income. They said I’d have the chicken houses paid off in ten years. None of these claims have proven to be true. I see it time and again: farmers are constantly forced to upgrade their facilities, with no rhyme or reason or any cost- benefit documentation, just more and more debt. The snag is that if you don’t up-grade, the company will terminate your contract. The holdup problem rears its head. Debt eliminates any

bargaining power for the farmer. When the first upgrades were pushed on my operation, I was $400,000 in debt with one choice: lose my contract or make the upgrades and take on more debt. In the fall of 2004, I actually paid my farm off. I had no mortgage payment for two years. But relief was short-lived: in 2006, the company began a major push for upgrades. Rumor was they were giving their service techs bonuses based on how much a farmer spent for upgrades. I had to borrow another $100,000. Twenty-two years after I began as a contract poultry producer, my income is less than it was 15 years ago. Adjust that for inflation and you quickly realize if your poultry operation is treading water, then you’re one of the lucky ones. Meanwhile, consumers are paying more at the grocery store and the industry is enjoying windfall profits.

C R A I G WAT T S is a chicken producer for Perdue in Fairmont, N.C.

U N E Q U A L E X C H A N G E

people jockeying for position. Inequalities in mar-ket power are magnified by geographical inequali-ties (e.g., between the global North and the global South), gender inequalities, racial inequalities, and inequalities in standards of living.

The U.S. Poultry EconomyThe U.S. poultry chain, depicted opposite, is a good example. In the United States, three compa-nies—Tyson, Perdue, and Pilgrim’s Pride—control more than 50% of the market in broiler chickens. These large, industrial poultry companies are called “integrators,” a reference to the “vertically integrated” poultry chain where big companies

own and control almost every stage of the poultry production process. One recent commentator notes: “In fundamental ways, the meat business has returned to the state where it was 100 years ago, a time when just four companies controlled the market with a shared monopoly.”

Poultry producers working in Arkansas, Missis-sippi, Georgia, or Kentucky compete with one an-other like dogs for scraps from the integrator’s table, and thus end up with low incomes, low standards of living, and large debts. Poultry producers are largely “contract growers,” meaning that they pro-duce at the behest of the integrators and must accept whatever price the integrators offer for their chickens. In fact, the chickens themselves are actu-ally owned by the integrator, with the “integrated


Primary Breeder Company

BreederFarm

GrowoutHouse

HatchingEggs

Hatchery

BroilerChicks

Breeder Chicks

Feed Mill

Mixed FeedRation

Rendering Plant

Byproducts

Market-ReadyBroilers

ProcessingPlantByproducts

Distributor

Retail Grocery

Food Service Institution

Export

FurtherProcessing

Allied industry of the poultry industry

Facilities owned by vertically integrated poultry firm

Facilities owned by contract growers or integrator

K E Y

Integrator: Vertically integrated agribusiness that owns most of the enterprises and operations involved in poultry production in the United States, and controls the other enterprises it does not own.Breeder farm: Fertilized eggs are produced by integrators or affiliated contractors.Hatchery: Fertilized eggs mature into baby chicks in a hatchery owned by the integrator.Growout House: Poultry producers contracted by the integrator raise chicks into market-ready broilers.Processing Plant: Chickens are slaughtered at a facility owned by the integrator and processed into chicken parts like breasts and thighs. Further Processing: Bits and pieces of broilers are packaged and otherwise transformed by the integrators into processed foods like chicken nuggets and chicken pot pies.Rendering Plant: Perishable chicken byproducts from the processing plants are “rendered” into other substances and products, like soap, toothpaste, pharmaceuticals, pet food, and livestock feed.

T E R M S

S O U R C E

Reproduction of the chicken commodity chain adapted from a National Chicken Council diagram (2015; nationalchickencouncil.org/industryissues/vertical-integration).

Unequal Exchange in the Poultry Industry

Corn, Soybean Meal, Other Feed

Ingredients

The large “integrators” in the U.S. chicken economy are the companies that own or control virtually every stage of the production process, from feed mills and breeder farms to slaughter and processing. The only operation involved in poultry production in the United States that is not owned directly by the integrator is the “growout” stage, where chicken producers transform chicks into market-ready broilers. The integrators nonetheless exert enormous control over the poultry producers who own and operate the growout houses. Poultry producers are “contract growers,” meaning that they produce chickens under contract for only one integrator. Poultry producers get their chicks from the integrators on one side and hand over market-ready broilers to the integrators on the other. Integrators dictate prices to poultry producers as well as the technologies that must be used in production. In other words, farmers operating in a competitive market environment are “squeezed” on either side by these large, monopolistic, industrial chicken companies.


out growers” (poultry producers) owning only the expensive chicken houses that chicks are raised in. The chicken houses are often purchased from the integrators on credit, burdening producers with large debts. Poultry producers also risk injury on the job, income losses associated with dead birds, antibiotic resistance and allergy (stemming from their regular contact with the antibiotics used to treat sick birds), among other serious risks. While the most risky and costly stage of the process—growing out the birds—is left to poultry produc-ers, the integrators enjoy absolute control, massive profits and minimal competition in virtually every other stage of production. The integrators even operate under a “gentlemen’s agreement” of sorts, with each integrator agreeing not to employ the growers contracted by the others, limiting competi-tion among integrators and constraining poultry producers even further.

was around $11,800. … The number of compa-nies buying livestock from farmers has declined, and the surviving companies have grown bigger by acquiring the smaller firms. For growers, that often means doing business with only one firm. …”

The inequalities and injustices apparent in the poultry chain are replicated within the corporate hierarchy of integrators like Tyson: there is a dan-gerous division of labor between those who must compete to survive and those who do not need to do so. Highly paid executives, who are engaged in management work and are secure in their posi-tions, lord over low-paid, interchangeable employ-ees who work with their hands capturing chickens one-by-one at night in the chicken houses or per-forming dangerous work in slaughterhouses. Most of these managers are white men, while many of the workers that actually capture and slaughter the chickens are people of color, often with insecure immigration status. The Food Empowerment Proj-ect notes that workers in meat processing are mostly people of color from low-income commu-nities. Historically populated by African Ameri-cans, this workforce has recently witnessed an influx of Latin American workers, with some 38% of workers in meat processing today hailing from outside of the United States.

The Global Coffee EconomyThe power dynamics, inequalities and unequal exchanges apparent in the U.S. poultry chain are replicated in a variety of global food production systems. Take, for example, the diagram opposite of the global coffee economy, a chain connecting different parts of the global division of coffee labor to one another, taking us downstream from the green coffees harvested in the field by farmers, through various traders and processors, to the cups of roasted coffee consumed by final consumers.

The diagram illustrates how the global coffee economy operates and the severe inequalities that characterize it. International traders and roasters operate in a very uncompetitive market setting—they are monopolists. The six largest coffee trading companies control over 50% of the marketplace at the trading step along the coffee chain (Neumann Kaffee Gruppe from Germany and ED&F Man based in London are the largest international trad-ers). The roasting stage of coffee production is even more concentrated, with only two companies (Nestle and Phillip Morris) controlling almost 50% of the


The trading relationship in the industry—

between monopolistic integrators on the one

hand and poultry producers facing high

competition, serious risk and large production

costs on the other—is a stark example of

unequal exchange and has concrete

implications for the well-being of producers.

This trading relationship—between monopolis-tic integrators on the one hand and poultry pro-ducers facing high competition, serious risk, and large production costs on the other—is a stark example of unequal exchange and has concrete implications for the well-being of producers.

In an interview with the American Prospect mag-azine, Mike Weaver, who heads up a West Virginia poultry producer association, describes the tenuous financial position of producers in the United States. Weaver notes that “chicken farmers in his area are settling for almost an entire cent less per pound of meat than they did in 1975—when the median household income [in the United States]


Distribution of Income in the Global Coffee Economy (% of Income)

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

1971 - 1980 1981-82 -1988-89

1989-90 -1994-95

Per

cent

age

of r

etai

l pri

ce Value added inconsuming countries

Transport costs andweight loss

Value added inproducing countries

Paid to growers

Source: John M. Talbot, “Where Does Your Coffee Dollar Go? The Division of Income and Surplus along the Coffee Commodity Chain,” Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 32, No. 1 (1997), Tables 1 and 2.

Note: Data for 1971–1980 are for calendar years. Data for 1981–82 to 1988–89 and for 1989–90 to 1994–95 are for “coffee years” (Oct. 1–Sept. 30). Percentages of total retail price (reported by Talbot (1997)) for calendar years (1971–1980) or coffee years (1981–82 to 1988–89 and 1989–90 to 1994–95) were used to calculate means for intervals shown. Figures calculated did not add exactly to 100.0% due to rounding (in all cases between 99.9% and 100%). Bar graphs show each income category as percentage of sum of four income categories.

FARMERS EXPORTERS INT’L. TRADERS

FINAL CONSUMER

The Global Coffee EconomyGLOBAL SOUTH GLOBAL NORTH

The global coffee economy is marked by severe inequalities in wealth and power. Coffee farmers along with small-scale traders and processors, operate in a competitive market environment. Located primarily in the global South, they sell their coffees onward, down the supply chain, to international traders and roasters. The traders and roasters operate in a relatively uncompetitive market environment and are located primarily in the global North. These inequalities in market power result in lower standards of living for coffee farmers and other marginalized actors in producing countries. Consumers (most of whom are from the global North) also have little negotiating power, when it comes to purchasing coffee from big retailers (supermarkets and corporate café chains like Starbucks). By contrast, the northern monopolies in trading, roasting, and retail earn high profits associated with their disproportionate market power. Monopolists thus push prices for growers down and prices for consumers up, capturing the super-profits generated in between.

COMPETITIVE UNCOMPETITIVE

PETTY TRADERS &

HURLERSROASTERS

SUPER- MARKETS & CAFES

market. Market power gives these modern-day robber barons influence over prices and other terms of trade, allowing them to place downward pressure on prices they pay to farmers, and upward pressure on the prices they charge to consumers.

This inequality in market power introduces inequalities in incomes and standards of living between different actors in the coffee economy. Unsurprisingly, farmers operating in the shadow of the big traders and roasters have relatively low incomes and standards of living. By contrast, own-ers, managers, and some workers at the big coffee monopolies enjoy relatively high incomes and standards of living. There are also race and gender dimensions to consider: coffee farmers are dispro-portionately women of color, while owners and managers in the big coffee monopolies are gener-ally white men. There is also a strong North-South dimension to this power inequality—coffee farm-ers from Latin America, Africa, and Asia compete fiercely with one another, their incomes under-mined by the pricing power of monopolies head-quartered in Europe and the United States.

Twenty-five million coffee farming families from Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South

Asia, and Southeast Asia compete globally with one another to sell coffee to a handful of interna-tional coffee trading companies. Similar to the sit-uation of poultry producers, there are in practice usually only one or two potential buyers for a farm- ››


er’s coffee crop. Lacking the transport and infor-mation resources to effectively market their crops, many coffee farmers sell to whoever comes to the farm gate. Unsurprisingly, things do not usually go well for our coffee farmers.

The graph (p. 29) illustrates the distribution of income in the global coffee economy. Only a small percentage of total income is retained by those—growers, small-scale traders who transport coffee from the farm gate, and petty processors who transform dried coffee cherries into green beans in producing countries—who operate in competitive markets. Most of the income is appropriated in consuming countries, mainly by the coffee monop-olists in trading and roasting, but also by large retailers (e.g., supermarkets and corporate café

chains like Starbucks). The position of coffee grow-ers deteriorated between the 1970s and 1990s. Expanded global trade in coffee since the late 1980s, with “free trade” increasing the market leverage of multinational traders and roasters over coffee farmers and final consumers, has led to decreasing relative income of growers.

Promoting Justice and Equity in the Global Food System

As the coffee and chicken examples suggest, unequal exchange is commonplace between farm-ers and producers on the one hand, and multina-tional, monopolistic middlemen (food traders, processors, and supermarkets) on the other. While larger corporate coffee farms may have some lever-age in negotiating prices with these big middle-men, smaller and peasant farms have virtually no negotiating power. If a coffee farmer does not want to sell to the Neumann Kaffee Gruppe (NKG) at the price NKG offers, then NKG will simply move on until it finds a farmer who will. Similarly, if a poultry producer does not want to sell to Tyson at the company’s offered price, the producer risks being cut out of the chain all together. Tyson will just move on to the next farm. In both cases, the market power of the monopolists also allows them to set conditions such as product quality and the specific technologies used in the production pro-cess. The same basic relationship holds for cattle ranchers and cocoa farmers selling to Cargill, pork producers selling to Smithfield (now owned by the China-headquartered WH Group), soy farmers selling to Archer Daniels Midland, vegetable pro-ducers selling to Walmart and Tesco, and orange producers selling to Coca-Cola Co. (to make Fanta Orange and Minute Maid juices), among many other global examples. Unequal exchange helps to explain inequalities in wealth and power in the global food system, and how trade relationships work to facilitate exploita-tion—the unjust redistribution of wealth from people with less to people with more market pow-er, from poor to rich, from black and brown to white, from women to men, from the global South to the global North. In answer to the question posed at the outset—how is it that the people who produce our food are themselves so often poor and hungry?—I answer simply: Because they engage in unequal exchange with powerful food monopolies, and there is no friendship in this trade.

THE FARMER AND THE SUPPLIER

Unequal exchange is also common for farmers looking to purchase supplies for their businesses. In conventional

farming systems, farmers and livestock growers regularly pur-chase seeds, young animals, feed, pesticides, or fertilizers from large multinational corporations like Tyson, Monsanto, and Cargill. In this unequal exchange, multinational giants charge farmers small fortunes for the supplies they need. The farmers receive overpriced goods that often fail to work as advertised. In the case of expensive genetically modi-fied seeds, farmers often end up with lower-than-promised yields and rising costs for fertilizers, pesticides, and water. Fertilizers and pesticides, for their part, erode the long-term health of the soil and increase irrigation requirements. Worse still, as farmers rack up these huge input costs, the prices that international traders offer them for their crop often fails to cov-er the rising costs of production. Farmers are thus “squeezed” between two monopolies, with unequal exchange ensuring that farmers pay too much for their inputs and receive too little for their crop. This trading mechanism thus works to rob espe-cially small and peasant farmers of wealth and redistributes it to the monopolies. The outcome for farmers is bleak and frequently results in rising debt. In India, the debts that result from this financial squeeze have led more than 200,000 peasant farmers to commit suicide, according to author Vandana Shiva. Agricultural laborers in rural areas also often suffer in this context, as temporary workers are laid off by small farmers experiencing hardship.



A variety of policies, programs, and alternatives could help to make the global food system more equitable and fair. These include, but are certainly not limited to, anti-trust enforcement, public com-modity price management, and producer union-ization. In 1890, the U.S. Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, a piece of legislation aimed at breaking up some of the large monopolies that dominated the U.S. economy at the time. Among the targets of the new anti-trust enforcers were the big meatpackers. The Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in Swift & Co. v. United States found the Chicago “meat trust” to be engaging in price-fixing for meat and shipping rates. The case set the stage for more stringent government regulation of monopolies. Since the early 1980s, starting with the Reagan administration, anti-trust enforcement in the U.S. has waned. According to Barry Lynn, the author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capi-talism and the Economics of Destruction, this is part-ly due to increasingly pro-big business ideologies and political interests of public officials, like Rea-gan. Yet, the Sherman Act remains on the books and could be revived as a tool to break up the new meat trusts in the U.S. food system.

Historically, governments have also intervened in food markets to set and stabilize prices. While the system was not perfect, the International Cof-fee Agreement that regulated global coffee trading from 1962 to 1989 did indeed help many coffee farmers obtain better prices for their crops. A system of import and export quotas at the international level was complemented by public institutions at the national level that were responsible for purchas-ing coffee from producers at fixed prices and then exporting the coffee into the global market accord-ing to the quota arrangement. While the system was a mechanism for exploiting farmers in some cases (as in Uganda in the 1970s), in other cases (like in Mexico) public commodity price manage-ment helped farmers earn more money and stabi-lize their incomes. With the eruption of the global food crisis in 2006–7, global interest in such institu-tions has been revived, perhaps creating a political opening for new public price management programs.

As with most economic cases in which individu-als are overpowered by large companies—be they integrators, coffee roasters, or employers—organi-zation and unionization can help them increase their market leverage and bargaining power. In Co-lombia, some three quarters of the country’s coffee

farmers are organized under the umbrella of a sin-gle union. The union advocates for farmers in vari-ous political forums, and negotiates coffee prices with exporters and traders, often securing higher prices for farmers than they could obtain on their own. Support for such organizations, as well as re-lated farmer cooperatives and producer associations, could help to empower and organize producers.

Unequal exchange is commonplace between

farmers and producers on the one hand,

and multinational, monopolistic middlemen

(food traders, processors, and supermarkets)

on the other.

Such policies and programs are not mutually exclusive. Further, anti-trust enforcement, public price management, and producer unionization could be complemented by a wide variety of other mechanisms for promoting justice and equity in the global food system. For example, programs that support national and local food self- sufficiency, crop and income diversification, and organic farming techniques can potentially re-duce producer reliance on global monopolists for income, financing and production inputs, among many other benefits. D&S

S A S H A B R E G E R B U S H is a lecturer at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and author of Derivatives and Development: A Political Economy of Global Finance, Farming, and Poverty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

S O U R C E S : Oscar Farfan, “Understanding and Escaping Com-modity Dependency: A Global Value Chain Perspective,” World Bank, 2005; Food Empowerment Project, “Slaughterhouse Workers,” Food Empowerment Project, 2015 (foodispower.org); Michael Kazin, “Ruth-less in Manhattan,” New York Times, May 7, 2009; Christopher Leonard, “How the Meat Industry Keeps Chicken Prices High,” March 3, 2014 (slate.com); Barry Lynn, “Killing the Competition: How the New Mo-nopolies are Destroying Open Markets,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2012; National Chicken Council, “Vertical Integration,” 2015 (national-chickencouncil.org); Stefano Ponte, “The Latte Revolution,” World Development, 2002; Monica Potts, “The Serfs of Arkansas,” The Ameri-can Prospect, March 5, 2011; Vandana Shiva, “From Seeds of Suicide to Seeds of Hope,” Huffington Post, May 29, 2009; Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (Harper, 2005).


Since the dawn of agriculture, the things farmers need from nature, like water and sunlight, have varied only within a relatively

narrow, predictable range. This has changed in the last few decades. Now, climate change is affecting all farmers, increasing the risks they face and forc-ing them to adapt. The latest Assessment Report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) underlines the scope and breadth of the problem: “Human influence on the climate system is clear .... The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen.” Climate change affects all farmers regardless of their loca-tion; their farming approach, conventional or alternative; their farm size, crop, or income. No farmer is exempt.

Climate change reshuffles the landscape that we count on to grow food. The shifts are accelerating and unpredictable, and farmers are on the front lines. How are they responding? Do they recognize changes in weather patterns? Do they attribute these shifts to climate change? Are they adapting

MAINE FARMERS AND CLIMATE CHANGE

REACTIVE OR PROACTIVE?

By Stephanie Welcomer, Mark Haggerty & John Jemison

their own agricultural practices in response? And are they advocating for policy to reduce green-house gas emissions—adopting a proactive stance, as opposed to a purely reactive one?

Our work suggests that farmers have a compli-cated relationship to climate change, recognizing its symptoms but not necessarily its causes. Yet, if farmers were to recognize the causes, they would be much more effective in adapting to climate change. Without this recognition, they will miss the chance to adjust their practices to protect land and water resources, and to reduce their own contributions to climate change. Agriculture’s challenge is that it—like other sectors—has to change fundamentally to head off far more severe climate changes, which would require much more costly adaptations, or for which no adaptation is possible.

Maine’s New Climate RealityAccording to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) 2012 census, Maine has about 1.45 million acres of farmland, and agriculture is estimated to generate over $750 million in annual sales. Maine

Laudholm Farm, Wells, Maine.

Credit: Dak06, Wikimedia Commons

(public domain).

››


farmers grow a wide variety of crops, including pota-toes, beans, tomatoes, grains, livestock, apples, and blueberries, as well as aquaculture products (farmed fish and shellfish). Producers include conventional and alternative growers, and farm sizes range from less than one acre to over 3,000. Although there are many commonalities between agriculture in Maine and the remainder of the nation there are some important differ-ences. Maine appears to be countering a national trend of declining numbers of farmers. Between 2007 and 2012, the state’s number of farmers aged less than 35 increased by over 60%, from 336 to 551. Additionally, according to the New England Farmers Union, Maine has a higher per-centage of farmers making direct sales. The state ranks fifth in percentage of farmers selling directly to the public, and third in percentage participat-ing in community supported agriculture (CSA). (See Mark Paul and Emily Stephens, “Commu-nity Supported Agriculture: A Chance to Revital-ize Farming?” pp. 9-10) And Maine has a high and growing percentage of female farmers, with women accounting for 29% of “principal farm operators” (compared to 14% nationwide). Maine farms are also smaller, on average, 178 acres com-pared to the national average of 434. The wide diversity in Maine’s agriculture sector make the state an ideal “laboratory” for observing farmers’ responses to climate change. According to the 2014 National Climate Assessment by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, Maine will experience rising temperatures, changing precipita-tion patterns, and increasing extreme weather events. Indeed, temperatures in the northeast United States are already increasing, by an average of half a degree per decade for the last 40 years, with bigger increases, over one degree per decade, for average winter temperatures. Scientists project increases in average temperatures between of 3°F and 10°F over the next century, along with increases in the total amount of precipitation, more rain (though less snow), and greater variability in pre-cipitation. Already, the Northeast “has experienced a greater recent increase in extreme precipitation,” according to the National Climate Assessment, “than any other region in the United States.” For farmers, rising temperatures do mean that the number of frost-free days increase and grow-ing seasons expand. That might sound advanta-geous. But there are also big downsides: Pest

varieties change, with the incursion of warm-weather tolerant insects. Soil run-off is more likely with more intense storms. Also, weather becomes harder to predict. For example, for the small northern Maine town of Caribou, the first half of July 2013 was one of the driest on record—with just 3/100 inch of rain. In the second half of the month, Caribou got enough rain—over 7 inches—to make the month the second wettest July in the town’s history.

How Do Farmers See It?Maine’s farmers are facing unprecedented chal-lenges stemming from climate change, centered on the two key ingredients in agriculture—water and soil. Too much water can wash soil away, while too little limits crop production and dries the soil out. According to the University of Maine report Maine’s Climate Future, the “high-intensity rainfall events” that are expected to accompany climate change are “less effective at replenishing soil water supplies and more likely to erode soil.” Meanwhile, higher average temperatures mean that, for a given level of precipitation, less water will actually be available to crops, due to higher rates of moisture loss from the ground and from the plants themselves. As part of the 2011 “Assessing Maine’s Agri-culture Future” study, we interviewed around 200 Maine farmers about changes in the climate and their expectations for the future of farming. We asked representatives and opinion leaders from a wide sampling of the state’s farming sec-tors about their reasons for farming, their con-cerns, and their hopes for the future, as well as

“ASSESSING MAINE’S AGRICULTURE FUTURE”: ABOUT THE STUDY

The people interviewed included:• A total of 199 Maine farmers and agricultural advisors• Commodities farmers (apple, beef, blueberry, dairy, potato,

and large vegetable producers)• Small diversified farmers (farmers’ market producers,

organic farmers and gardeners, small vegetable producers)• Tribal farmers (Micmac Nation)• Agricultural consultants (extension-agency and industry

crop advisors)

››


changes in weather patterns and their related adaptations.

During the interviews, most farmers did not acknowledge that climate change was happening, only that weather was unpredictable. In the words of one farmer:

Well, talk about climate change. You have an early spring; you usually have an early fall. You have a late spring; the fall carries on three weeks, maybe sometimes even a fourth week. And, I’ve seen that happen time and time again, and that’s, you know, that climate is changing all the time.

Another farmer said:

I think we’ve been fighting weather forever and we always will. And there’s never been two seasons alike and it’s how you manage that weather.

These farmers appear to argue that changing weather is nothing new, and that finding ways to manage the effects of the uncontrollable weather has always been inherent to agriculture. Still another farmer combines the recognition that

adaptations are necessary with skepticism that there is actual human-caused climate change, or that it is a bad thing:

Yeah, I’ve read that and seen that. As far as what do we do? I order an extra pallet of plastic so I can put up more silage if it’s a real rainy year. If it’s a dry year, we make dry hay. It’s all we can do. You ain’t gonna change the weather.

Then he continues:

If they say that the climate is changing due to —what’s the big word?—“global warming.” If this is global warming, I love every minute of it.

This view suggests that at least some farmers see benefits to climate change. The additional carbon dioxide, indeed, positively impacts plant growth. The longer growing seasons and higher tempera-tures make additional crops and varieties viable.

Yet most farmers express concern about how to manage changing and increasingly volatile weather patterns.

In the “Assessing Maine’s Agricultural Future” study, we found that farmers are using an array of adaptation strategies. Farmers are planting crops

C L I M A T E C H A N G E

CLIMATE CHANGE: WHAT IS IT? WHAT CAUSES IT? WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT? B Y A L E J A N D R O R E U S S

We expect the weather to change from day to day. One day it’s sunny; the next, rainy. The temperature one summer day might be 80°F; the next day, 95°. We also expect weather to change with the change in seasons.

The average temperature in July in the northern hemisphere, for example, is much higher than the average tem-perature in January. Climate change is different. Changes in day-to-day weather conditions, so long as these still vary around the same averages for that particular place at that time of year, year after year, do not indicate climate change. Nor do particular weather conditions in a particular place—like unseasonable cold or unusual snowfall—tell us much about climate change, one way or another. Rather, climate change is the long-run shift in underlying weather patterns (including temperature, precipitation, etc.).

Average surface temperatures have been trending up over the last century. This doesn’t mean that, every single year, average temperatures are necessarily higher than the year before, still less that we will never see unusually cold weather. The upward drift in temperatures is confirmed by the fact that we’re setting record highs more often, and record lows less often, now compared to the past. Also, we can observe receding surface ice, including the polar ice caps and other major ice

sheets. The polar ice caps cover more area during the winter than during the summer. However, they do not cover as large an area at any given time of year as they used to. The Greenland ice sheet, too, has exhibited higher-than-normal summer melting in recent years.

What are the key indications that

the climate is actu-ally changing?

P R I M E R


Farmers are using an array of adaptation

strategies: planting crops earlier to take

advantage of the shorter frost season,

planting new crops, and even using

genetically modified organisms.

earlier, to take advantage of the shorter frost sea-son, planting new crops, and even using geneti-cally modified organisms to adapt to the new growing season. They are building structures to buffer crops from head-on exposure to the out-side environment.

One farmer says:

We’re definitely going in the direction of doing more and more different things, building more hoop houses and greenhouses to have more control of the growing environment.

As farmers discussed adaptation, they often acknowledged that weather was inextricably linked to soil structure, and to the lack of or over-abun-dance of water. They are turning to constructed ponds, irrigation, and new drainage systems to maintain crop and soil health. As one apple grower puts it:

Anything we can do to move Mother Nature out of the picture benefits us in the end.

Not surprisingly, controlling the environment is a key part of dealing with climate change’s related outcomes. One agriculture consultant explains:

I think whether people are doing it on a conscious level or it’s just something that they have to deal with., The farmers I am working with are looking to have more control over different parts of their operations. They are definitely being impacted by it, whether or not they say, “Yes, this is climate change.”

A Sustainable Future?Farmers interviewed in this study seem to be mak-ing adaptations to address day-to-day challenges they see in the field—drawing on techniques fa-miliar to them, attempting to adapt their methods at the margins rather than at the deep structure. These adaptations prioritize maintaining short-

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, trap energy from the sun, letting it get to the planet’s surface but not letting it just reflect off back into outer space—much as the glass walls and roof of a greenhouse let heat in and trap it inside. Without the greenhouse gases in our atmo-sphere, the earth would be much colder.

There have certainly been large-scale climate changes over time, before human behavior could possibly have had a meaningful impact on the climate. Over the last couple of centuries, however, human activities—especially the burn-ing of fossil fuels for heat, electricity, and transportation—have dramatically increased the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. What we are concerned about today is anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen, trapping the carbon. This is known as carbon sequestration. Over millions of years, the organic material from long-dead plants and animals have been turned into chemicals called hydrocarbons—found in coal, petroleum, and natural gas. When we burn these fuels, we join the carbon with oxygen, and produce carbon dioxide. In other words, in a very short time we are undoing millions of years’ worth of carbon sequestration. Human emissions of greenhouse gases not only have a direct effect in increasing surface temperatures, but can also set off other processes that accelerate climate change. Rising temperatures, for example, result in higher atmospheric concentrations of water vapor, which can also act as a greenhouse gas. The melting of surface ice, meanwhile, means that the earth reflects less energy back into outer space. These are known as positive feedback loops—not because they are desirable, but because they amplify the climate change that is already under way. Human economic activity, in addition, contributes to climate change not just through greenhouse gas emissions, but also through actions, like deforestation, that reduce carbon sequestration. (Deforestation actually results in both emissions and reduced sequestration.) ››

What are the causes of climate

change?

››


term profitability and are not linked to a call for policies that could address the root causes of climate change. When asked about government policies or initiatives that they would like to see, none of the farmers argued for policies aimed at climate miti-gation or supporting farmers’ climate adaptations.

Yet farmers were not reluctant to advocate pol-icy changes generally. They expressed a strong de-sire for policy to recalibrate agricultural regula-tions, and to influence other peoples’ behavior. They argued for regulatory changes—reducing the regulatory burden and tailoring regulations ac-cording to farm size. They advocated for policy to create a cultural shift regarding food and the food system. They argued that the public is largely un-

aware of where its food comes from, and focuses on food prices rather than looking at the real costs to communities and farmers.

They expressed a desire for policy that helps Maine farmers market and brand their products, and that opens new markets for their goods. They urged a significant overhaul of the food processing and transportation infrastructure, advocating for more local and regional processing centers for meat and other foods; “food hubs” for distribution and direct marketing; and more efficient transportation, including large trucks (for long and mid-distance routes) and light rail. (Currently, farmers use their own vehicles to haul their crops, often crossing scores and even hundreds of miles, within the state.) Additionally, farmers stressed the importance of re-search efforts from the USDA and Maine Extension to explore new effective farming methods.

Overall, farmers emphasized public support to boost demand for their crops and lower processing and distribution costs—each of which aims to support the farming industry economically, but without addressing climate change. Environmen-tal sustainability, including on climate, is scarcely on farmers’ policy radar.

Though few farmers are thinking about policies to address climate change, clues to farmers’ future practical approaches surfaced as they discussed their hopes for farming in 2025. Commodity-based farmers—large-scale, single-crop producers—tend-ed to see farming in 2025 as based on ties to large


Higher surface temperatures may seem desirable for various reasons—warmer weather can be more pleasant, it can lead to longer growing seasons for agriculture, and so on. However, there are major reasons for concern about climate change. Even small increases in temperature can disrupt ecosystems and human activities that rely

on them. In agriculture, for example, it may make a particular locale inhospitable to the kinds of crops that farmers are accustomed to planting, or result in changing pest populations, requiring a change in methods of pest control. Rising ocean temperatures and melting of surface ice leads to a rise in sea level, which will lead to flooding of coastal areas. The flatter a coastal area, the more of the land’s surface will flood, for any given rise in sea level. Already, it appears inevitable that some small island nations will be completely submerged within a short span. Countries like Bangladesh, with a long coastline and very flat terrain, are especially vulnerable to rising sea lev-els. A one-meter rise could flood one-fifth of the country’s territory, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Another negative effect could be increased frequency of extreme weather events. While it’s not possible to say that any particular storm is caused by climate change, climate scientists are concerned that climate change will make severe storms more frequent. For example, increased ocean temperatures could mean more energy to feed cyclones, resulting in more Category 5 hurricanes.

Why is climate change cause for

concern?

P R I M E R

When asked about government policies or

initiatives that they would like to see, none of

the farmers argued for policies aimed at climate

mitigation or supporting farmers’ climate

adaptations. Yet farmers were not reluctant

to advocate policy changes generally.


corporate systems. The two largest groups of com-modity producers in Maine, potato and blueberry growers, imagined a future characterized by fewer and larger farms, more food exported to non-Maine markets, and more genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In contrast, farmers in most of the other sectors imagined a more local and diversified food system, characterized by diversified farms, a mix of small and large farms, more farmers, increased inter-est in local foods, and more direct markets.

Because the farmers differ on the role of indus-trial technology, especially reliance on capital- intensive methods and synthetic (fossil-fuel based) fertilizers, their adaptation strategies diverge. More industrial approaches, such as petroleum-based fertilizers and GMO crops, will make farmers more vulnerable to the suppliers of these products, gen-erally a few giant companies dominating entire in-dustries. The smaller diversified farmers, in con-trast, tend to advocate a farmer-controlled model that can adapt to the changes in soil and water as-sociated with climate change. With their focus on building up the soil by non-synthetic means and on using human, animal, and alternative energy in place of petroleum-based inputs, these farmers will have more local control over their strategies.

Says one small diversified farmer:

You know, all the long-term ecological studies that are comparing conventional soil management with organic [or] for lack of a better word,

Responses to climate change fall into two broad categories—climate adaptation and climate mitiga-tion. Climate adaptation means changing our behavior to deal with climate change. For example, we might build seawalls and other coastal flood-control systems. These don’t prevent climate change, but can prevent the coastal flooding that would otherwise come with it. Farmers might

change the kinds of crops they grow to cope with changes in average temperatures, or might apply different kinds of pesticides to cope with changes in the local pest population. Climate mitigation means taking action that prevents climate change, whether by reducing greenhouse gas emissions or increasing carbon sequestration. We can reduce emissions in three main ways—by reducing our total production of goods and services, by reducing the amount of energy we use per unit of production (increased energy efficiency), or by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we emit per unit of energy (reduced carbon intensity). For example, we could increase the energy efficiency of industrial production (as businesses find ways to do when energy prices are high), shift toward less carbon- intensive energy sources for electrical-power generation (for example, away from coal and towards wind and solar energy), re-duce our use of petroleum for transportation (shifting toward more fuel-efficient vehicles or alternative modes of transporta-tion), or reduce our energy use in heating and air conditioning our buildings (building better-insulated structures, or retrofitting existing buildings). People can also increase the rate of carbon sequestration, for example, by promoting reforestation.

What are some possible responses to climate change?

››

ecological, really show that ecological soil manage-ment is really much less vulnerable to climate variability and unpredictability …. So I think that’s really the best hedge that all of us can have.

For the most part, farmers support practices and policies re-embedding the farm into the surrounding social communities. They are enthusiastic about farm-to-institution policies (linking farms directly to food programs in schools, colleges, prisons, and hos-pitals), about policies that allow the use of the Wom-en, Infants, and Children program (WIC) and Sup-plemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits at farmers’ markets, about teaching commu-nity members how farming works and where food comes from. On the social and economic relation-ships in the food system, they are developing a clear policy agenda. On climate change, however, the un-derstanding and policy advocacy are barely visible.

System ChangeSystems theorists, who study how organizations and systems change, offer some insight into farm-ers’ minimal recognition of climate change, and their lack of advocacy for climate-mitigation poli-cy. Management scholar Connie Gersick describes systems—such as the farming sector—as being in equilibrium until fundamental factors change. One key factor can be “environmental changes that threaten the system’s ability to obtain resources.” As the system’s actors are faced with persistent, sys- ››


temic problems, they experience mounting dis-comfort. Once key actors recognize that the system has become dysfunctional, they begin to search for new information about the sources of the problems and possible new steps. Newcomers enter the sys-tem and are enlisted or inspired to search for solu-tions. The entrenched understandings, relation-ships, and power dynamics of the system, finally, can be dismantled. Revolutionary change can hap-pen and a new system can be created.

Climate scientists from all over the world are doing their best to raise the alarm that climate change is happening, that it will change our natu-ral systems irrevocably, and that these changes are accelerating. Author Rebecca Solnit calls this a “slow-motion calamity.” “Climate change is every-thing, a story and a calamity bigger than any other,” she writes. “It’s the whole planet for the whole fore-seeable future, the entire atmosphere, all the

oceans, the poles; it’s weather and crop failure and famine and tropical diseases heading north and desertification and the uncertain fate of a great majority of species on earth.”

A few of the farmers we interviewed do recog-nize the threat that climate change already poses. A blueberry grower commented:

I think that the weather patterns are changing … and I do believe global warming is going to have a very severe impact on the blueberry industry; even with irrigation because the heat in August has become so intense that they [blueberries] liter-ally will cook in hours in the field. So I do think that that environmental aspect of global warming is something we’re going to be dealing with in 20 or 30 years.

Another farmer stated:

Back to back, with these weather changes you saw probably our toughest year [in history] two years ago, the best growing year last year, and when you start getting a hundred year storms every four years, you begin to wonder, you know, that per-haps there is something to this sort of thing.

An apple grower said:

The problem with weather and growing food is that … there’s a very narrow window of stability there. I mean, we get outside that window very far and everything falls apart. And so yeah, I mean it’s a real serious concern.


What we know now is that some climate change is already happening, and some future changes to our climate are now unavoidable, so we will have to make some adaptations. It is not too late, how-ever, to commit to serious climate mitigation, which may be the only way to prevent even more se-vere climate change. In fact, it is crucial that we do as much as we can as soon as we can. We should be

worried that we’re steering towards a “climate cliff,” unleashing irreversible effects to which we really have no good way to adapt—for example, dramatically rising sea levels, frequent extreme storms, or severe disruptions to agriculture. Some people scoff at the possibility that we puny human beings can really do much damage to the earth. Whatever we do, the earth will go on. Whether it goes on in a way that is hospitable to the planet’s inhabitants, how-ever, is another matter. Both rich and poor cluster near the world’s coastlines. As sea levels rise and extreme storms become more common, the rich will retreat to higher ground—at some cost, but at little risk of losing everything. The world’s poor lack the resources to move easily. The rich will manage, whatever the disruptions to agriculture, to get plenty to eat. Small farmers in the developing world, in contrast, will bear the brunt of climate disruptions. The rich, of course, consume more than the poor and so benefit the most from activities that give rise to climate change. Meanwhile, they have the greatest capacity to adapt, so they have the least stake in mitigation. In other words, “business as usual” on climate change embodies the worst aspects of our unequal world.

What kind of future can we

anticipate?

Farmers acting on individual interests,

without policies incorporating common climate-

related goals, may adapt to climate changes

in ways that worsen the problem.

P R I M E R


Farmers, on the front lines of climate change, respond within their financial and knowledge con-straints. Financial constraints dictate the ability to install greenhouses, wind power, irrigation, drains, etc. Knowledge constraints include limited access to the latest research on farming practices and cli-mate adaptation, or on the relationship between micro-level season-to-season weather and macro-level climate change. That prevents the develop-ment of a long-term policy to address ever- increasing climate changes.

It is not that farmers are generally short-sighted, categorically resisting policies that deliver long-term benefits at the expense of short-term profits. Farmers support long-sighted policies like public spending for farmland availability and regulations that ensure food quality for consumers. But few have arrived at a consciousness of climate change like the farmers quoted above. Without a major shift in thought to acknowledge climate change, the farming community continues to suffer from an advocacy gap, putting mid- and long-term farm viability at risk.

The lack of a systematic approach to agriculture and climate change also risks exacerbating the prob-lem. Agriculture is not just a passive victim of others’ actions; it is a significant contributor of greenhouse gases. Globally, deforestation for farmland, conven-tional tillage, and the use of petroleum-based fertil-izers, for example, are major sources of carbon diox-ide emissions, while other agricultural practices are to blame for large methane and nitrous oxide emis-sions. All told, “agriculture is itself responsible for an estimated one third of climate change,” according to the Climate Institute.

Farmers acting on individual interests, without policies incorporating common climate-related goals, may adapt to climate changes in ways that worsen the problem. They may till more, reducing carbon sequestration, and may turn to crops that increase greenhouse gas emissions. For instance, the northern U.S. grasslands are being converted to corn for ethanol production, even though this puts the soil at risk and releases more carbon into the atmosphere. An article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that “grass-land conversion to corn/soy … across a significant portion of the U.S. Western Corn Belt are compa-rable to deforestation rates in Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia.” Not only can farmers benefit from acknowledging, studying, and responding to cli-

mate change, they can also reduce the negative impacts of agriculture on broader social and natu-ral systems. For instance, converting a percentage of Midwestern corn production for ethanol into grass-based pasture systems could be a first step in carbon-emissions reduction.

As Rebecca Solnit points out, addressing cli-mate change involves not only reworking the way we do things but also changing our understand-ings—our stories—about the weather, the soil and water, and our food, as well as our responsi-bilities to each other, future generations, and the earth’s ecology. Responding to a failing system involves remaking existing relationships and for-mulating new narratives. By ignoring the reality of climate change and simply reacting, farmers are denying their own contribution to the prob-lem. They are also ignoring the key role they have to play in solving it. D&S

S T E P H A N I E W E L C O M E R is an associate professor of management at the University of Maine.M A R K H A G G E R T Y is an associate professor in the Honors College at the University of Maine and a member of its Sustainable Food Systems Research Collaborative. J O H N M . J E M I S O N , J R . , is an extension professor of soil and water quality at the University of Maine.

S O U R C E S : David Abel, “In Maine, Scientists See Signs of Climate Change,” Boston Globe, Sept. 21, 2014 (bostonglobe.com); Michael Jahi Chappell and Liliana A. LaValle, “Food Security and Biodiversity: Can We Have Both?” Agriculture and Human Values, 2011; Climate Institute (climate.org); Abigail Curtis, “USDA farming census: Maine has more young farmers, more land in farms 2014,” Bangor Daily News, Feb. 23, 2014 (bangordailynews.com); P.C. Frumhoff, et al., Confronting Climate Change in the U.S. Northeast: Science, Impacts, and Solutions, Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment (NECIA), Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), 2007; Connie J. G. Gersick, “Revolutionary change theories: A multilevel exploration of the punctuated equilibrium paradigm,” Academy of Management Review, 1991; T. Griffin, et al., eds., Maine’s Climate Future: An Initial Assessment, University of Maine, 2009 (climat-echange.umaine.edu); Rajendra K. Pachauri, et al., eds., Intergovern-mental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report: Summary for Policy Makers; Jerry M. Melillo, et al., eds., High-lights of Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment, U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2014; National Weather Service, July 2013 Climate Summary Caribou, Maine: Northern and eastern Maine Monthly Climate Narrative. (weather.gov); New England Farmers’ Union, 2015, (newenglandfarmersunion.org); Rebecca Solnit, “Are We Missing the Big Picture on Climate Change?” New York Times Magazine, Dec. 2, 2014 (nytimes.com); USDA – NASS (2012), 2012 Census of Agriculture (agcensus.usda.gov); Christo-pher K. Wright and Michael C. Wimberley, “Recent Land Use Change in the Western Corn Belt Threatens Grasslands and Wetlands,” Proceed-ings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013.


Fowl Play

The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business, by Christopher Leonard. Simon & Schuster, 2014.

B Y S T E V E N P R E S S M A N

I n his 1952 book American Capitalism, John Kenneth Galbraith conjectured

that labor unions and large suppliers would arise to counter the market power of oligopolistic companies. Later, he realized that “countervailing power” might not arise and govern-ment action was necessary to curtail the economic power of large firms.

The Meat Racket by journalist Christopher Leonard shows why Galbraith was forced to change his mind. It is partly a history of Tyson Foods and partly a splendid account of Tyson’s impact on poultry farmers and the meat-producing industry.

After the Great Depression, Tyson developed a strategy of vertical inte-gration, systematically buying firms up and down the chicken “supply chain”—poultry breeders, slaughter-houses, food-processing plants, and trucking lines. This enabled Tyson to grow and prosper while many of its competitors went bankrupt during difficult economic times.

Economies of scale and high start-up costs made it difficult for new firms to enter the industry. By the mid-1990s, Tyson controlled one-quarter of the U.S. poultry market, supplying gro-

cery stores, fast food establishments, and other restaurants.

As hog and cattle production copied Tyson, and as Tyson expanded into these sectors, they became “chick-enized.” Low chicken prices, which re-duced demand and prices for other ani-mal protein, led to vertical integration in these industries as a way to maintain profits. Tyson and a few other firms soon came to determine how meat was processed, how animals were raised and fed, and how farmers were paid.

One key to Tyson’s success was un-loading the risky, unprofitable side of chicken production (raising chicks to adult, slaughter-ready birds) to con-tracted farmers lacking market power. When demand slowed, farmers’ in-comes fell. If the chicks they were giv-en died, for any reason, the farmers absorbed most of the loss.

Farmer pay depends on a tourna-ment developed by Tyson; those fat-tening their chicks most, while using the least feed, get paid the most. Those doing worse get paid less. With pay based on relative performance, one farmer gains at the expense of others. Any farmer not constantly modernizing his or her facilities (which would benefit Tyson) won’t be in busi-ness for long. Farm modernization, in turn, has been aided by government-backed loans—an indirect subsidy to the large firms.

The tournament system also keeps contract farmers in line. Tyson selects the set of farmers competing in each tournament and can affect the results by picking up chickens from any farmer a bit early, before they reach peak weight.

After The Meat Racket was pub-lished, many agricultural economists attacked it, arguing that the tourna-ment system increased efficiency. In one sense this claim is correct; it has given us cheap chicken. But this comes with many costs. Chickens are not raised humanely, consumers remain

uninformed about what is fed to the animals they consume, and tax-payers (even those not consuming low-cost chicken) foot the bill when government-backed loans go bad.

More important, contract farmers suffer in order to provide consumers with cheap food and Tyson sharehold-ers with large profits. They are forced to work long, hard hours with no con-trol over their own businesses. They get no vacation or sick days, and have no pension plans. As individual con-tractors, they lack protection from U.S. labor laws. And they bear the risk of changing demand and of other farm-ers’ efficiency upgrades.

The Meat Racket shines brightest when depicting the human toll on con-tract farmers. Many moving passages reminded me of Steinbeck’s depiction of migrant farm workers in The Grapes of Wrath and Zola’s description of strug-gling French coal miners in Germinal. Leonard makes a powerful case that we need to help these farmers whose lives resemble those of medieval serfs.

Early on, Leonard wonders where our Teddy Roosevelt is—someone will-ing to take on large “trusts.” He ends on an optimistic note, praising producer co-ops and locally grown food. Surprisingly, he does not (following Galbraith) call for unionizing contract farmers to counter the power of Tyson.

Despite his optimism, Leonard re-alizes that established institutions are hard to change and that Tyson has created a new business model for ag-riculture. This model describes many other industries—cable TV, airlines, pharmaceuticals, etc. In all these cas-es, oligopolistic snakes have devel-oped enormous economic power over workers, consumers, suppliers, and the government. D&S

S T E V E N P R E S S M A N is a professor of economics and finance at Monmouth University and author of Fifty Major Economists (Routledge, 2013).

< In Review


B Y G E R A L D F R I E D M A N

The United States is wealthy enough that everyone could have enough to eat. Nonetheless, millions of Americans go hungry each day, subsist on an unhealthy diet because they cannot afford healthier foods, or would go hungry except for social assis-

tance, notably the Food Stamp program, now known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). Rising average income has done little to reduce the problem of food insecurity, and cutbacks in effective social welfare programs have added to the problems of hunger and malnutrition. SNAP and other safety-net programs are far too small to end hunger in America. D&S

G E R A L D F R I E D M A N is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Food Insecurity in Affluent America

< Economy in Numbers

Millions of Americans cannot afford adequate nutrition. Nearly 50 million Americans are in “food insecure” households, which lack access to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. Food insecurity is most common in households under the federal poverty line. Insecurity is also more common in households with many children. While the urban poor dominate our images of hunger, rural residents actually have a slightly higher rate of food insecurity. (Data on food insecurity are based on an annual survey by the Current Population Survey. U.S. Department of Agriculture studies based on these data distinguish between low food security households (“reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet”) and very low food security households (“disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake”).)

Figure 2: Economic Growth and Food InsecurityEconomic growth does not solve the problem of food insecurity. Food insecurity has increased since the 1990s despite rising average income. A small decline in food insecurity during the boom of the late 1990s was largely reversed even before the Great Recession. Insecurity then soared with the economic crisis, beginning in 2007. High unemployment rates and stagnant or falling wages for working Americans have left millions hungry; cutbacks in social welfare programs have added to the burden of poverty. A dramatic increase in the size of the SNAP program, however, has helped prevent the problem from growing worse since 2009.

S O U R C E S : United States Department of Agriculture, Household Food Security in the United States (ers.usda.gov); Bureau of Economic Analysis (bea.gov); Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) (research.stlouisfed.org); Hilary W. Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Douglas Almond, “Long Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net,” National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER), November 2012.

Figure 1: Poverty and Food Insecurity, 2013

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Children and their care-givers account for the majority of people in food-insecure households. Of the 49 million people in food-insecure households, nearly 16 million are children. Another 16 million are their caregivers, including 4 million single mothers. The remaining 17 million people in food-insecure households—adults in households without children—include not only many who are unemployed or working sporadically, but also many full-time workers whose wages are too low for them to afford adequate food.

Figure 4: Food Deprivation in Very Low Food Security Households, 2013

Figure 5: Differences in Adult Outcomes, Children Who Received SNAP Compared to Those Who Did Not

SNAP (Food Stamps) increases food security and has lasting beneficial effects. While 26% of food-insecure households report using food pantries and 3% use soup kitchens, the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest source of food assistance. Even SNAP’s $70 billion is only enough to provide $125 in food assistance per person per month, barely $1.30 per meal. SNAP reduces the incidence of food insecurity, but it still leaves 49 million people in food-insecure households. Despite these limitations, SNAP has both immediate and lasting benefits. Households that receive SNAP benefits eat better and have better health than similar households that do not. When aid is provided to households with young children, these benefits persist throughout the lifetimes of recipients. Those who receive assistance are healthier as adults and are more likely to finish high school, compared to those who do not.

Figure 3: People in Food-Insecure Households, 2013

Food-insecure people go hungry, eat badly, and try to save food for their children. Food insecurity means anxiety, stress, sacrifice, and real hunger for millions of Americans. Almost all “very low food security households”—including more than 17 million people—run out of food sometimes, even though they rely on low-cost foods, skimp on portion size, or skip meals. Adults in these households sacrifice so their children can eat. Almost all reported skipping meals, and over a quarter skipped eating for a whole day. Despite these sacrifices, children in over half the households at least sometimes did not get enough to eat. In over 400,000 very low food security households, at least one child did not eat at all for at least one day in the previous month, because the household did not have food.

Note: From sample of individuals born 1956-1981 into “disadvantaged families” (household head had less than a high-school education).

Children15.8 million

(32%)

Adults in

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no children17.3 million

(35%)

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< Ask Dr. Dollar

Eminent Domain and the Keystone XL Pipeline

B Y A R T H U R M A C E W A N

In 2012, TransCanada, the company building the Keystone XL pipeline,

was given the power of “eminent do-main” by the Nebraska state govern-ment in law LB1161. This law also transferred authority over the pipe-lines from the Nebraska Public Service Commission to the governor.

Eminent domain is commonly de-fined as the right of government to take private property for public use. “For public use” generally means for a road, for a school, or for some other government activity. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution recognizes the government’s right to take private property. The government must provide “just compensation,” but it can take the property even if the owner doesn’t want to sell. Generally, eminent domain is exercised by the government itself, but eminent do-main authority can be turned over to a private entity.

There is room for dispute over how much compensation is “just.” But there is a bigger issue that arises in the pipeline situation: What does “public use” mean? Can a private company, such as TransCanada, take land by claiming that Keystone XL will be a “public use”?

In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled by a five-to-four decision in the case of Kelo v. City of New London (Conn.) that the city and a private corporation could exercise eminent domain for “economic development,” taking a 90-acre parcel of land in the Fort Trumbull section of the city. Families whose homes were taken sued, but the court ruled that a taking for “economic de-velopment” was a taking for “public use.” In effect, the ruling allowed a pri-vate corporation to seize property of

This economic development concept of the law is used to justify giving emi-nent domain power to TransCanada. It is, however, also a concept which, as Horwitz has pointed out, gives priority to a certain conception of economic “effi-ciency” over other social goals—such as equality, or, in the current context, the preservation of the environment.

The fundamental issue of what con-stitutes a “public use” lies behind the efforts to challenge TransCanada’s ex-ercise of eminent domain. Yet the deci-sions of the courts so far have hinged on technicalities. The opponents of Keystone XL argue that LB1161 vio-lates the state constitution by taking authority away from the Public Service Commission.

In January, 2015, the Nebraska Supreme Court denied the Keystone opponents’ claim that LB1161 violated the state’s constitution. (Four judges favored the opponents, but in this court a super majority, five out of sev-en, is required to rule a state law un-constitutional.) But then, in February, in a major victory for the opponents, another state judge put a hold on TransCanada’s exercise of eminent do-main while the case works its way through higher courts.

Ultimately, the issue is likely to go to the U.S. Supreme Court. Regardless of the Court’s action, however, the op-position to Keystone XL is much bigger than court decisions. Like the Turnbull section of New London, the proposed path of the pipeline may lie vacant regardless of eminent domain. D&S

A R T H U R M A C E W A N is professor emeritus of economics at UMass-Boston and a Dollars & Sense Associate.

$?

Dear Dr. Dollar:What right does TransCanada have to take away farmers’ land—their private

property—to build its Keystone XL Pipeline? —Anonymous, via email

people (homeowners) to pursue activ-ity that would generate economic de-velopment—and provide a profit to private developers.

The Court’s decision against the homeowners had a long historical foundation. The Court majority wrote that “over a century of our case law interpreting [the Fifth Amendment] dictates” that the homeowners be de-nied “the relief that they seek.” As it turned out, though the private devel-opers won in the courts, the project went bust. Today, the Fort Turnbull area lies empty—none of the office buildings, luxury apartments, and a new marina, which were supposed to bring economic development, exist.

The case law affirming that eco-nomic development serves a “public use” emerged from disputes over the use of water power in early 19th- century New England. For example, if person A builds a mill on a stream, can person B build another mill just down the stream from person A’s mill, which would raise the water level and de-stroy A’s water power? Both A and B built on their own property. So whose property rights prevail? Over the early decades of the 19th century, the courts came to decide questions like these by asking which side in the dis-pute would make the greater contribu-tion to economic development. Thus, according to the legal historian Morton Horwitz, there emerged an economic development concept of the law, in which judges held a great deal of authority in economic disputes. Not surprisingly, the outcomes in disputes over the use of water power often fa-vored the large cotton mills, which were becoming so important to the U.S. economy at that time, over smaller mills using the water power for various purposes.

Questions about the economy? Ask Dr. Dollar!

Submit questions by email ([email protected]) or U.S. mail

(c/o Dollars & Sense, One Milk Street, Boston, MA 02109).

LEFT FORUM 2015

The 2015 Left Forum will take place in a period of excitement and challenge. In Greece and Spain the Left has either taken power or is on the verge of it. At home, police violence is now being contested by a popular upsurge of protest and resistance. And facing a solid reactionary front, president Obama has finally shown signs that the administration, however hesitantly, is responding to deep mass disaffection.

From the recent Syriza victory in the Greek elections and movements against austerity throughout Europe to the spread of horizontal-democratic politics around the world, and from the nationwide activism arising out of Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movements, to the growing momentum to end the Cuban embargo, recent events and left politics in the current year are shaping up to be pivotal.

Come analyze, discuss, debate, build, ally, and strategize at Left Forum, 2015.

CONFERENCE THEME:

no justice, no peace: confronting the crises of capitalism and democracy

Left Forum 2015 May 29–31

John Jay College of Criminal JusticeThe City University of New York

524 W. 59th Street, NYC

Each year, the Left Forum conference brings together thousands of organizers, intellectuals and the public from across the globe to share ideas for understanding and transforming the world.

Join D&S readers at this year’s Left Forum!To register go to leftforum.org or 212-817-2002

Documents

Dollars & Sense - Farms Today