On a Bedrock of Greed

AS THE 1990 farm bill takes shape, family farmers are again being buffeted by the winds of colliding political fronts. In the collision between the hot rhetoric of the Bush administration ("free market, free trade, environmental terrorist") and the cooler goals of a renewed conservation movement ("sustainable agriculture, clean water and land"), economic justice for farmers can be swept away like straw in the prevailing wind.

The widespread assumption that the new farm bill will be driven by environmental concerns--primarily around the use of farm chemicals--is one that has enabled all sides in the debate to ignore the grim realities of continuing economic deterioration in the American countryside. The 1985 farm bill, resulting in the loss of more than 484,000 farms between 1985 and 1988 alone, is said to be "working" and in need of only "minor adjustments."

But the so-called economic recovery in farming, heralded by politicians and the media, is built largely on massive government transfer payments, higher crop prices due to the 1988 drought, and spiraling increases in off-farm income by farm families forced to get additional jobs in order to survive. By the end of 1988, 47 percent of all farms were in a "marginal position" and an additional 6.8 percent were in a "vulnerable position as viable business operations," according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

In this context the ensuing debate about the environmental impacts of production agriculture is not misplaced, but misdirected. The problem of chemical dependency in farming is a function of a political economy gone awry--built on a bedrock of greed and exploitation of people and land. Contemporary environmental problems in agriculture--as with all other sectors of the economy--cannot be confronted apart from economic analysis and economic justice.

In the early 1950s, New Deal farm programs based on fair prices paid to farmers, supply management to prevent overproduction, and strong soil conservation programs to restore land ravaged by Depression-era farming began to change. Technological advances of the postwar period began to drive increased crop production. Coupled with the emerging "free market" economic and political clout of the international grain exporters and chemical companies, the United States entered a new era of chemically driven over-production of crops.

As the grain exporters and corporate farm-and-food giants had intended, overproduc-tion drove commodity prices down and farmers were compelled to make up for lower prices with even more production. If wheat drops two dollars a bushel, a farmer will grow more of it in order to make up in volume what was lost in value.

Thus, the vicious overproduction cycle began. Epitomized by the "fencerow-to-fencerow" production policies of the 1970s, the cycle persisted into the '80s, with grain exporters and chemical companies making billions off the backs of producers and the destruction of the land while the farmers went broke. In 1986, one of the worst years of the farm crisis, Cargill--the world's largest private corporation and the biggest grain trader--made its highest pre-tax profits since 1974 while more than 100,000 farms were lost. Vast accumulation of grain profits has also enabled Cargill to become one of the "big three" (along with ConAgra and IBP) in the U. S. meat-packing industry at the expense of farmers, workers, and rural communities alike.

THE BILLS ARE COMING DUE for three decades of farm and food policies that have externalized the human and environmental costs of production agriculture rooted in economic concentration and chemical fixation. Those bills will not be paid through low commodity prices paid to farmers. Only fair and stable commodity prices will ensure the long-range success of any farm policy that promotes "sustainable agriculture" (farming that is both environmentally and economically sound). Indeed, the latter will not be achieved without first assuring the former so farmers can make the economic transition to reduced chemical use.

Toward that end the Family Farm Act proposed by the National Family Farm Coalition (made up of more than 40 farm and rural organizations) would set farm commodity prices based on the cost of production, plus a reasonable profit and return on equity, while eliminating costly taxpayer subsidies to farmers through deficiency payments. Farmers themselves would man-age commodity supplies through a bushel-based marketing quota targeted to small and medium-sized family farmers.

The coalition's proposal would also establish a Farmer Commodity Reserve to help farmers make the economic transition to sustainable agriculture and buffer losses from natural disasters. Grain would be drawn from the reserve by farmers who enter the sustainable agriculture program, enabling them to make up for production losses during the transition period to less chemical use. Similarly, a "conservation cropping plan" would require equitable adjustments in acreage limitations and land set-asides to compensate for possible reduced yields for fanners moving to sustainable practices.

The Family Farm Act also addresses another major problem related to structural overproduction and chemical use: that of lenders' demands for strong cash flow (maximum production) to pay loans. Under the act, barriers to sustainable farming practices in federal, lending programs would be eliminated, and cost-sharing with qualified producers in sustainable farming programs would be made available.

The National Family Farm Coalition will also be advocating this year for the Minorities Fanners Rights Act, which would provide minority farmers greater access to credit and other USDA programs; target sales of government inventory land and loans for minority purchase of that land; and bolster minority training and education programs of USDA and land-grant institutions.

THE DECADE AHEAD IS going to be a difficult one for farm and rural people if the policies of the 1985 farm bill continue. The Food and Agriculture Policy Institute has indicated that by 1996 the drop in farm income could hit levels exceeding 40 percent, causing another wave of dislocation. Unless we organize to prevent it, the strains of economic stratification that locked in a two-tier structure of agriculture in the 1980s will be exacerbated in the '90s. Concentration of control over capital and land resources will be intensified; economic and political power will continue to accrue in the hands of a moneyed elite; food production and distribution, along with the fabric of life in rural America, will be a more constant function of distant corporate decision making; and the U.S. food production, processing, and distribution system will continue to be controlled by fewer and fewer economic interests.

In the face of this massive structural shift in economic and political power, the church is called to engage the struggle for "justice, peace, and the integrity of creation" with farm and rural people. This global commitment of people of faith must be reflected in the struggle for a just farm bill and in all issues where rural and urban people organize for economically viable and sustaining farm, food, and land policies.

David Ostendorf, a United Church of Christ minister, was director of Prairie Fire Rural Action, a rural education, organizing, and training organization based in Des Moines, Iowa, when this article appeared.