Farmers Need Fair Prices and Competitive Markets

[nosmokes]

original-progressive populist

CALAMITY HOWLER/A.V. Krebs

Farmers Need Fair Prices and Competitive Markets

We could arguably solve "free trade," genetic engineering, soil conservation, expensive inputs, food for ethanol and other current vexing farm issues and still agriculture would be plagued with its two primary problems -- a fair price for what farmers produce and the increasing lack of competitive markets.

First, as markup time approaches for the 2007 farm bill it is important to understand that agriculture's chronic crisis of below cost-of-production prices is not of recent origin, but dates back to the very beginnings of the nation.

Daryll E. Ray, director of the University of Tennessee's Agricultural Policy Analysis Center and holder the Blasingame Chair of Excellence in Agricultural Policy, Institute of Agriculture at the University of Tennessee and author of Rethinking US Agricultural Policy: Changing Course to Secure Farmer Likelihoods Worldwide, offers a succinct and detailed analysis of that history.

"The list begins with the oft-repeated line that farm programs were started in the 1930s because rural incomes were a fraction of urban incomes at that time. And as far as the story goes, it is true that farm income in the 1930s was below the national average. Without a knowledge of agricultural history it would be very easy to conclude that the 1930s farm income problem was simply associated with the Great Depression.

"The low farm incomes of the 1930s did not begin with the Crash of 1929," he continues. "By the time the Great Depression hit, US farmers had been experiencing for decades their own periodic periods of depression."

In the past 20 years we have seen a more intense and concerted effort by the "free traders" to insure that farm income has stayed low by paying in many cases below cost-of-production prices to farmers all in the name of attempting to boost US exports, Dr. Ray stresses.

Along with this effort has come a shift from a universally diversified agriculture to an almost universally specialized agriculture. In America's heartland the spike in crop exports, as we have seen, came beginning with the Great American Grain Robbery of 1972 and continued well into the 1980s before the rush to export began to abate.

Compounded by Earl Butz's urging of planting fence post to fence post, thousands of farmers ignored the axiom that not only has the ability to overproduce always been a fundamental characteristic of agriculture, but because surpluses were simply past history the problem they now faced was to adequately produce for an increasing export demand.
~snip~
.
.
.
complete article here

[SpiralHawk]

1. Save the farmers, the planet, and your family: Join a CSA

http://www.chiron-communications.com/farms.html


"Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) offers a way for every human being to be directly involved in the care and healing of the earth, while also ensuring a supply of clean, healthy food for their families and their neighbors."

snip...

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Rex]

3. How long can an institution stay in a chronic crisis? How many years?

Before it dies? Why can't we just agree on simple needs and fix price demands? At one time we feed the rest of the world, where are we now? Can we prevent history from repeating itself? What is the human track record on that I wonder?