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Tag: food policy
The Wall Street Plowboys

The Wall Street Plowboys

John Steinbeck’s novel Grapes of Wrath. Woody Guthrie’s ballad “Deportee.” Edward R. Murrow’s documentary Harvest of Shame. Every decade or so, the public is shocked by yet another discovery that migrant farmworkers are being horribly abused by the wealthy masters of the corporate food system. And here we go again.

Last November, the New York Times reported that the workers who grow and harvest the cornucopia of fruit and veggies in the rich fields of California’s Salinas Valley live in a constant crisis of poverty, malnutrition, and homelessness. Toiling in “America’s salad bowl,” they literally cannot afford to eat the fresh, nutritious edibles they produce.

The Valley is a gold mine of groceries, generating billions of dollars in sales that have enriched landowners and corporate executives and turned Salinas Valley into farm country with Silicon Valley prices. Unable to afford good food, the workers eat poorly — 85 percent are overweight or obese, and nearly six out of 10 have been diagnosed with diabetes (while many more, uninsured and unable to afford testing, go undiagnosed). Especially appalling, about a third of elementary school children in the Salinas City district are homeless. They sleep with their families in tents, abandoned buildings, tool sheds, chicken coops, or on the ground, next to the rows of crops they tend.

Allowing such abject poverty in our fields of abundance is more than shameful — it’s an oozing sore on our national soul, made even more immoral by the fact that our society throws 40 percent of our food into the garbage. But outrageous treatment of farmworkers is not limited to Salinas — you can likely find it down some rural road near you. When we find it, let’s act on it. Yes, donate money and time to food banks, but it’s even more important for us to join with farmworkers in local, state, and national political actions to STOP this gross, un-American inequity.

Adding to the inequality that has affected so many farm workers is the fact that Wall Street has our nation’s farmland.

Our nation’s farms conjure up Americana, the old homeplace, and our rich, rural culture.

Less bucolic, however, is the assortment of financial trusts and hedge fund hucksters that are buying up these farms and converting them into fast-buck investment packages for super-rich global speculators. One of these Wall Street investment scheme is called Farmland Partners, Inc. It’s run by a couple of slicks trained in mergers and acquisitions as executives at the investment powerhouse, Merrill Lynch. Rather than sodbusters, Farmland Partners are tax busters, using a legalistic plow called Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) to get enormous tax breaks to subsidize their scheme. With this special subsidy, the Partners have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars from investors to buy up farms and ranches — they now own 295 agricultural properties covering 144,000 acres in 16 states including California’s Salinas Valley.

Of course, the Wall Street plowboys don’t soil their own soft hands by actually farming, they’ve figured out how to “work” the land without touching it — and how to harvest a sweet profit. The syndicate hires tenant farmers to do the sweaty work of plowing, planting, and nurturing the crops. This tenant system produces a double-line cash flow for the faraway owners — Farmland Partners charges the tenants rent for tilling the corporate soil, then the Partners harvest a sweet share of any profits from the sale of crops the tenants produce. “It’s like gold,” says the founder of one such scheme, “but better, because there’s cash flow.”

Meanwhile, the young farmers America desperately needs — those who actually want to, you know, farm — are having a hard time finding affordable land to get started. These new generation farmers can easily be out-bid for good land by Wall Street speculators who have the cash flow from tenants and the subsidy from taxpayers to underwrite their financial contrivance.

To prevent the money schemers from literally walling off young farmers, and to fight this insidious Wall Street takeover of agriculture, connect with www.YoungFarmers.org.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

IMAGE: Vegetables are seen at a farmers market in Los Angeles, California, United States May 10, 2015. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

It’s Time To Put Food Policy Back On The Table

It’s Time To Put Food Policy Back On The Table

During the farm crisis of the 1980s, an Iowa farmer asked if I knew the difference between a family farmer and a pigeon. When I said no, he delighted in explaining: “A pigeon can still make a deposit on a new John Deere.”

That’s funny — except, it really wasn’t. Worse, the bitter reality of the tractor joke is still true: The farm crisis has not gone away, though hundreds of thousands of farm families have. The economic devastation in farm country continues unabated as agribusiness profiteers, Wall Street speculators, urban sprawlers, and corrupted political elites squeeze the life out of farmers and rural America.

Remember last year’s presidential debates? Trump and Clinton talked about the needs of hard-hit working-class families, veterans and coal miners among others. But, hellloooo, where were farmers? Indeed, where was the multitude of producers who toil on the lands and waters of this country to bring food to our tables? All went unmentioned, even though economic and emotional depression is spreading through their communities, thanks to bankruptcy-level prices paid by corporate middlemen. In the past three years, farm income has declined steadily, plummeting 12 percent in just the last year. But these crucial-but-endangered food producers were totally disappeared by the political cognoscenti.

Actually, the farmer has long been forgotten in America’s presidential discussion. In a New York Times op-ed, Professor A. Hope Jahren reported on the discovery she made when reading through transcripts of past debates: “Farm policy hasn’t come up even once in a presidential debate for the past 16 years.”

That’s Bush-Kerry, Obama-McCain, Obama-Romney, and Trump-Clinton! Not one of them mentioned the people who produce our food. Jahren notes that the monetary value of farm production alone is nearly eight times greater than coal mining, a declining industry whose voters Clinton and Trump avidly courted.

This disregard for farmers and food policy is not only irresponsible, but also politically inexplicable when you consider that food is far more than economics to people. Purchasing food has become a political act that takes into account cultural, ethical, environmental, and community values. This was confirmed last March in a national survey published by Consumer Reports showing that huge percentages of shoppers consider production issues important:

  • Supporting local farmers: 91 percent
  • Reducing exposure to pesticides in food: 89 percent
  • Protecting the environment from chemicals: 88 percent
  • Providing better living conditions for farm animals: 84 percent

Unfortunately, no matter what We the People want, most of the political class willingly surrenders farmers, and food itself, to industrial agribusiness. That would be that … except for one thing: You! Far from surrendering to the “inevitability” of a corporatized food future, the great majority of Americans continue to push forward with the alternative future of a local, sustainable, humane — and tasty — food system that benefits all.

The ongoing battle for our food future pits the agri-industrial model of huge-scale, corporate-run operations against the agri-cultural model of sustainable, community-based family farming. The big money is with the global goliaths of corporate ag, but the grip the giants once had on the marketplace has been slipping as consumers and farmers (especially younger producers) are making clear that they prefer non-industrial food. One measure of this is the contrasting fortunes of biotech vs. organic production.

The promised “miracle” of genetically altered crops, introduced in 1994 by Monsanto, turns out to have been ephemeral. The prices of corporate-altered seeds have skyrocketed, yields from those seeds have not met expectations, planting GMO crops has forced farmers to buy more pesticides, and consumers overwhelmingly oppose GMO Frankenfoods. Thus, fewer farmers are using the biotech industry’s product: US farmers cut their plantings of GMO crops by 5.4 million acres in 2015, and sales of GMO seeds fell by $400 million.

Not only does consumer demand for organically produced food keep going up, but such major producers as General Mills and Kellogg are switching to greater use of organic ingredients. As of last June, the number of America’s certified organic farms was 14,979 (up by more than 6 percent from a year earlier), and sales of organic products zoomed up by 11 percent to $43.3 billion in 2015, about four times more than the growth in conventional food sales. This rise would have gone even higher, but the demand for organic is now outstripping the supply! Consumers clearly want to buy more, thus creating good opportunities for new organic farmers — and a bright future for agri-culture.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

IMAGE: REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko