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The Merchants of Greed 2

A Federal Commission on Agricultural Workers estimates that there are 2.5 million farm workers in the U.S., up from 1.8 million in 1960. About 800,000 of those current workers lack adequate shelter, according to the Housing Assistance Council, a Washington-based consulting group that studies rural housing.

Because the nation’s agricultural work force in recent years has changed so dramatically it now makes it more difficult for the government to improve the workers' living conditions, whether by providing housing itself or pressuring growers to improve the housing they provide. Many of the immigrant workers leave their families behind, coming with the goal of returning home as much of their earnings as possible.

Because it is possible for them to earn up to ten times what they can at home, these workers are willing to tolerate living conditions and wages that few American workers would accept. Such an economic imperative is so powerful that it has assured a plentiful supply of migrants even as real farm wages have fallen by more than ten percent in the last 20 years.

In 1999 the median hourly wage for U.S. farm workers was $6.05 with a median annual wage of $12,150, well below the current poverty level.

Likewise, many of the workers that can be found in the fields and orchards of the nation are children.

In 1998 the Associated Press, in a perceptive and riveting five-part series, "Children For Hire," examined child labor in these United States. The AP in an effort to learn just how many under-age children were currently in the nation's workplaces asked Rutgers University labor consultant Douglas Kruse to analyze monthly census surveys and other workplace and population data collected by the federal government.

The study, which then U.S. Labor Secretary Alexis Herman called more compressive than anything her department had produced, found that 290,200 children were employed unlawfully in 1996, that among them 59,000 were under the age of 14, that 123,000 of those children worked in agriculture from California to the Midwest to Delaware, of that number 61,000 of the 14-17 year olds lived apart from their parents.

In addition it is estimated that uncounted thousands more are under age 14.

One finding contained within the AP investigation of "Children For Hire" that squarely puts the question of child labor, particularly in the fields, into sharp focus is that fact that employers saved $155 million in wages in 1996 alone by hiring underage children instead of legal workers.

"If adults were paid a living wage, we wouldn't have child labor," Ann Millard, a Michigan State University anthropologist who studies migrant labor conditions rightfully states. One might also add that if family farmers, particularly those under contract to large food processors, were paid a fair price for what they produce, agriculture would not have the historical problems that it has had when it comes to paying its field labor.

Indeed, a 2000 General Accounting Office report shows that there is "no national agricultural labor shortage at this time," despite efforts by a number of  farm industry associations, including the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), to expand the number of temporary work visas for the so-called guest workers by arguing that some regions face labor shortages, which are likely to increase as immigration officials step up efforts to bar and return illegal aliens. Guest workers typically work for two or three months on jobs ranging from sheep herding to apple picking.

Farm labor advocates have rejected such requests pointing out that increasing the number of such guest workers will undercut the wages of field laborers nationwide and weaken efforts to unionize them.

As Dolores Huerta, secretary-treasurer of the United Farm Workers, charges, "there's definitely a surplus of farm workers." In a telephone interview with the New York Times Stephen Greenhouse she added, "that explains why there has been a drop in farm-worker wages over the last 10 to 15 years. They have dropped wages substantially because they always know there's a large pool of workers they can get."

As evidence that there is no shortage of farm labor, the GAO has said that of the nation's 20 largest agricultural counties it surveyed in the summer of 1997, 11 had unemployment rates more than twice the national average of five percent, and 15 had jobless rates two percentage points higher than the national rate. GAO also noted that after accounting for inflation, the average hourly wage of farm workers fell by 17% from 1989 to 1995. That, the Congress's investigative agency said, pointed to a labor surplus, rather than a shortage.

Make no mistake about what we are talking about when we discuss children working in the "fields of infamy." We are not talking about the children of most farm families, who are vitally concerned about their children's health and welfare and who act accordingly. Rather, we are talking about those corporate agribusinesses and frequently the business and labor contractors in their employ who see children not as human beings but as simply, docile, cost-cutting production inputs --- extremely beneficial to their own bottom lines.

Not only are farm workers often exploited by their grower employers, but also by the farm labor contractor. Farm labor contractors, or "crew leaders," as they are known on the East Coast and in the Midwest, are usually persons who recruit workers for a grower and then subsequently often "care for" while at the same time "shake down" the workers, not unlike the manner in which pimps handle their prostitutes.

Recognizing the abuses of farm labor contractors the federal government has sought to regulate their behavior for over the past 35 years, beginning with the passage of the Farm Labor Contract Registration Act of 1963. But because it was seldom enforced it has had only a minimal effect on the lives of farm workers. An amended act in 1974 sought to broaden its coverage and enforcement capabilities.

It was not until in the 1980's, however, after negotiations between farm workers and farmers that one of the few consensus farm labor bills in history was enacted in 1983. The Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act switched emphasis from registering farm labor contractors to protecting migrant and seasonal farm workers.

While progressively stricter regulation in recent years was expected to diminish contractor activity it has been expanding, despite enforcement efforts indicating that more than half of all contractors investigated are violating at least one provision of the 1983 act. Despite criminal fines of up to $10,000 and three-year prison terms and civil fines of $1000 per undocumented worker, estimates indicate that many contract crews are 30% to 60% illegal alien workers.

It was an angry Cesar Chavez, founder and long-time president of the United Farm Workers (UFW) who once declared: “I would rather that there be no union at all than to recognize the rotten contractor system.”

Besides reducing labor costs there is also the question of reducing raw material costs as a means of maintaining corporate profitability. It is often said that the U.S. has a “cheap food policy;”  that we spend less per capita for food than any country in the world.

In fact, however, what we have in reality is a cheap raw materials policy. In devising such a policy, corporate agribusiness has successfully managed to sell the idea to farmers that through technological change they can cut back on their input costs and become “efficient managers,” when in fact in the end the cost of the new technology ultimately drives them further and further into debt.

Yet this mania --- that through technological innovation family farmers are going to not only survive, but prosper --- continues to dominate agricultural policy discussions as witnessed in a speech that U.S.Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan gave to a March, 1999 Independent Bankers Association convention in San Francisco, California.

“I cannot stress too much the overwhelming importance of technical change as a primary force that will likely be reshaping farm supply conditions --- as it has been doing for a long time. As a consequence of each producer's striving to become more efficient and thereby to contain costs, successive waves of innovation have swept through the farm sector over the decades. Crop producers, in stages, have implemented increased mechanization, heavier uses of fertilizers, new higher-yielding varieties of seeds, low-tillage methods of production that have enabled producers to economize on energy inputs, and heavier reliance on chemicals and pesticides to reduce crop losses.”

Greenspan, in his talk to some 2000 small town and rural bankers, also heralded the ability of U.S. agricultural producers “to economize on energy inputs,” yet between 1987 and 1997 the cost to farmers of seeds, fertilizer and agricultural chemicals alone increased 86%. Thus, while farmers received $123 billion for their animal and crop products they paid out $185.1 billion in production expenses.

Greenspan, outlined to the bankers some of the “still further technological advances  that appear to be coming on line in farming or are waiting closely in the wings,” e.g., wider use of combinations of electronic sensors, computers, and communications equipment and biotechnology. He stressed that “the general direction of change is clearly toward more precision and control of farm production processes. Over time, those changes surely will lead to a further lowering of real production costs as well.

“For the most part, the successive waves of technical innovation have tended to give farmers who are able to reduce costs the most a leg up in expanding their operations. These low-cost farmers are the ones best positioned to acquire additional acreage or finance the investments that can foster still further reductions in unit costs. Over time, farms thereby become fewer in number but are larger and, in most cases, more efficient, with strengthened ties to nonfarm businesses that supply inputs that are essential to improved technologies.

“The new technologies,” he adds, “seem destined to integrate farming operations still more tightly into our complex modern economy. This increased integration does not necessarily impinge on family farming as a way of life, but it does alter the image of the independent farmer that remains so deeply rooted in the American psyche, even as the percentage of our labor force that is engaged in farming has fallen from more than 35% a century ago to a little less than 2-1/2% today.”

While Greenspan concedes that “farm cost containment depends not only on technical efficiency but also on the prices of inputs, which farmers do not control,” he also acknowledges that “the range of financial circumstances across individual farming operations is considerable, and although producers in general appear to have remained profitable, some producers, plagued by higher costs or adverse weather, are having to make financial adjustments.

“The severity of those adjustments,” he concludes, “are compounded for producers who are more heavily dependent on debt. In some cases, farmers and farm lenders are reworking”  financial arrangements  “to help producers get through what presumably is a transitory -- though by no means abbreviated -- period of softness in the demand for farm products. Even when export demand improves, some producers may find it a struggle to stay competitive with farmers whose real costs per unit of output are being pushed ever lower by technical advance and innovation.”

While Greenspan talks about “efficiency” in food production, people living in the U.S. and in the industrialized North of the world (for the most part and unlike the majority of the Third World’s population) have come to regard food as an infinite, rather than a finite resource, caring little how it makes its way from the ground to their tables. The process by which their food becomes available to them, the fact that nearly 95% of it is now manufactured by giant transnational corporations, that the quantitative and qualitative price they pay for such food is rarely revealed, the fact that the family farm/peasant system of agriculture which has traditionally provided our abundant cornucopia of  food is rapidly disappearing from the world’s landscape appears to be of no major concern to them.

Yet it is they who are the ones who continue to pay the “external costs” for an inefficient corporate agribusiness so it can continue to function and sustain itself by taking advantage of a variety of hidden public subsidies.

Much, as we have said, is made in the North of the “decreasing” cost per capita of food, but the fact that such food is being paid for --- expensively paid for elsewhere --- is seldom factored into this cost equation. Because today's methods of industrialized farming has become so exploitative in nature and practice while camouflaged in the rhetoric of “efficiency,” its negative consequences in the form of externalized costs have often become totally hidden or extremely difficult to document.

On one hand we see all types of pollution, impacts to health, flooding and drainage problems, accumulation of animal waste, salinated soils, eroded soils, compacted and hardened soils, drained aquifers, rivers that no longer flow, and loss of ecological diversity.

For example, Rattan Lal, an Ohio State soil scientist, in 2000  warned that the quantity and quality of the world's soil will not meet future food demands if the population keeps growing at its current rate and soil conditions are not improved. A specialist in soil degradation and carbon sequestration (keeping carbon in place in the soil),  Lal argues that two key 21st century concerns --- a limited global food supply due to the increase in world population and the increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases ---are linked to soil quality, especially its carbon. Atmospheric carbon dioxide, he pointed out  is rising at a rate of 3.3 billion metric tons per year. In addition to fuel combustion, the rise is caused by soil cultivation, biomass burning and deforestation.

Even more gaseous emissions-including methane and nitrous oxide-are caused by declines in soil quality from erosion and nutrient imbalance, Lal says. Before the 1970s, more carbon went into the atmosphere due to soil and agricultural activity than from fuel combustion. Now, agricultural activities are responsible for about 25% of global emissions.

Likwise, as the physical environmenmt suffers, we see the economic environment suffer with the demise of rural communities, lost businesses requiring those few people still living in what were once self-sufficient towns and villages having to travel long distances simply to shop, go to school, earn a living or attend church.

Those who have been forced from the land, likewise, find themselves migrating into large metropolitan areas where they either must compete for jobs with an already even more exploited ethnic and racial minority populace, often in the low-paying service sector, or forced to live on public handouts. Clearly, both the environment and the people who live in that environment ultimately must pay a price for such capitalization by corporate agribusiness, if not in their food bill, then in their tax bill, or more importantly their and their children’s future well-being.

Wisconsin’s Prairie Dock Farm’s Greg David points out that many of the examples of corporate agribusiness’s externalized costs are the result of so-called labor saving devices, technologies, chemicals or drugs.  As an example, chemical poisons may save labor, but they also pollute aquifers, and cause not only health problems for the people who work with them on a daily basis, but can also seriously affect the health of the people who consume the crops upon which they have been applied.

“We have also set up a condition,” David notes, “whereby the farmer has just lost a portion of control of his operation. When he started using chemicals, he bought into the addiction to cheap food ideals, and put in place a broker for part of his livelihood. In the meantime he won't get any richer producing at the highest capacity, because he will also have the highest overhead. Any excess capital from producing at high capacity goes to pay for the increased overhead. It is like a safety line lent out to farmers, that he becomes entangled in and is slowly strangled. It also acts as a mechanism for someone else to make profit off his work.  He has also traded pollution and health costs for labor, but never pays the costs of chemical use.”

A recent study by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), based on satellite maps, reveals that much of the world's farmland is in such poor condition that farmers will have to find better ways than currently to grow crops or else their production won't keep pace with the growing population. Only about 16%  of the world's farmland is free of fertility problems, or "constraints," such as chemical contamination, acidity, salinity or poor drainage.

"The basic story is that agriculture is being pretty successful at keeping the world in food. It's been somewhat less successful in nurturing the natural resources that underpin that production capacity," said Stanley Wood, the report's lead author.

At the same time that the IFPRI study was being made public, Lester Brown of the World watch Institute was noting that “until now, the paving over of cropland has occurred largely in industrial countries, home to four fifths of the world's 520 million automobiles . . . For every five cars added to the U.S. fleet, an area the size of a football field is covered with asphalt. More

often than not, cropland is paved simply because the flat, well-drained soils that are well suited for farming are also ideal for building roads. Once paved, land is not easily reclaimed.”

As environmentalist Rupert Cutler notes, "Asphalt is the land's last crop." The United States, Brown adds, with its 214 million motor vehicles, has paved 3.9 million miles of roads, enough to circle the earth at the equator 157 times . . . In developing countries, however, where auto- mobile fleets are still small and where cropland is in short supply, the pav-ing is just getting underway. More and more of the 11 million cars added annually to the world's vehicle fleet of 520 million are found in the developing world.

“This means that the war between cars and crops is being waged over wheat fields and rice paddies in countries where hunger is common. The outcome of this conflict in China and India, two countries that together contain 38% of the world's people, will affect food security everywhere,” he concludes.

Yet, no cost is being accessed for the externalities today as corporate agribusiness becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of the merchants of greed who have come to profit the greatest from agriculture. Such costs are being born by the environment and in turn, by the public, to whom these shared resources belong.

Clearly, if family farming agriculture is to survive,  if our environment is to remain livable it is fundamental that we need a full-cost accounting of each and every one of these externalities because as David reminds us “ these costs are real, and do not just go away.  They become liabilities that some one will end up dealing with. Somehow, these costs need to be billed to the transgressor, and only then, will we have True Cost Accounting  of the unseen costs of production.  We need true cost accounting to avoid the terrible consequences that will eventually beleaguer our children.”

Former Wisconsin U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson said it this way, "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.  All economic activity is dependent upon that environment with it's underlying resource base.  When the environment is finally forced to file under Chapter 11 because it's resource base has been polluted, degraded, dissipated,  irretrievably compromised, then, the economy goes down into bankruptcy with it because the economy is just a subset within the ecological system."

In advocating the gospel that replacing labor with what Greenspan calls “ technical advance and innovation” corporate agribusiness has traditionally defined efficiency in strict economic terms, paying little heed, if not simply ignoring the fact, that efficiency in agriculture needs to be measured in social and environmental as well as in economical terms. In recent years we have also seen corporate agribusiness, as Greenspan notes, attempt to convince family farmers that accepting such expensive technology is essential if they are to share in the profits supposedly to be made in the export trade markets.

For nearly 40 years the American public and family farm agriculture have been bombarded with such trade propaganda, ranging from the plant “fence-post-to-fence post” rhetoric of the Nixon Administration’s Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz to the empty promises of Secretary Dan Glickman (and as Greenspan suggests), that the means by which family farm agriculture can become profitable and survive is through international trade, that “free trade” has now become the accepted panacea for all of the U.S.’s agricultural ills.

Yet, as Herman Schumacher, a cattle producer, cattle feeder,livestock auction operator and auctioneer from Herried, South Dakota, points out,  the USDA is continually promoting the concept that the global population, especially Asia, is growing and its people must be fed. But can this market, he asks, now afford to pay profitably for our agricultural exports? That simple question exposes the one fact that most of agriculture’s “conventional wisdom” today consistently chooses to either overlook or ignore, i.e., people do not buy food, money buys food ; consequently food is naturally going to go where the money is to be made.

As Schmacher stresses, “without profitable export sales, the 1996 `Freedom to Farm’ bill or any other farm bill which encourages maximum production will guarantee the U.S. producers’ demise. Washington policy of `produce and hope it sells’ has already caused the near bankrupting of American agriculture.

In February, 1999 testimony submitted by American Corn Growers Association (ACGA) board member Dan McGuire to the House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture hearings in Grand Island, Nebraska, using USDA’s own figures, McGuire asserts that one of the major flawed assumptions of agriculture trade is that farmers rely on the export market for most of their sales.

The reality, however, as he points out is that, with the exception of those few producers that make some specialty crop, identity-preserved export sales, farmers do not export their grain or oil seeds at all!  Farmers sell nearly 100% of their grain and oil seeds into the domestic market.  They deliver and sell those commodities to local or regional commercial grain elevators or processors. 

Those elevators or processors act as “gathering agents” for the multi- national exporters who actually do the exporting of the grain and agri-cultural products from the United States and those of this nation’s foreign competitors! Grain farmers don’t trade grain, grain traders trade grain!!!

“Thus,” McGuire argued, “it is the domestic market price that farmers receive and it is for that reason that  farm program price support loan rates need to be raised in order to provide farmers a fair price for what they produce.”

The combined total tonnage of corn, soybeans, wheat, grain sorghum, barley, oats and rice, McGuire noted, that was exported by the U.S. in Marketing Year (MY) 1996/97 and MY 1997/98, as a percent of production, only averaged 25%.  When soybean oil, soybean meal, beef and veal, pork, lamb-mutton and goat, and poultry meat are added, the total tonnage exported as a percent of production stills remains at 25%.  Multinational exporting companies only exported 19.4% of U.S. corn production in MY 1996/97 and only 16.3% in MY 1997/98.

“Why should Congress or U.S. farmers allow exporters to set the corn price when our market is entirely the domestic U.S. market?” McGuire asked the Committee.

Schmacher agrees: “The Congress and other political leaders have made some wrong assumptions. First, we don’t need to feed the world. The world needs to be fed. But the U.S. and other global trade policies actually inhibit  the development of vital diversified wealth creating an efficient food systems within, particularly, the developing countries. “This paternal policy creates unrest, not world peace, forcing these countries to accept our imports when they either have or should have  the capacity to provide for themselves. Secondly, is there really a demand for U.S. production? (emphasis added

“Countries like the U.S.,” Schmacher concludes, “that are surrounded from input to output by the multinational corporate traders are forced to produce at below break even  prices. With incomes below the poverty line and without options of off-farm income, these farm families, trapped in monoculture production, are unable to even buy food for themselves.

I believe it is in our national security interest for the U.S. to protect our diversified and sovereign food production system and not allow it to be exploited and dismantled by the powerful multinational corporate interests. They’re interested only in trade, not prices paid to producers, or the overall well-being of any country’s economy.”

Responding to such pleas in March, 1999 a coordinating group composed of different international development organizations, farmers' syndicates, consumer groups, and environmental organizations calling themselves the Food Sovereignty Platform adopted ten demands which sought to place food sovereignty over commercial interests.

Stressing that “agricultural policies in industrialized countries have led to a situation where industrialization, concentration and overproduction have become the main features of the agricultural sector,” the Belgium-based group pointed out that policies focused on the free trade of agricultural products dictated by the WTO tend to serve the interests of the agro-industry to the detriment of the farming community and the consumers.

“Therefore, we demand the implementation of policies based on food sovereignty, which assert the right of all countries to determine their own food and agricultural policy according to their needs in close co-operation with producers and consumers' organizations. We therefore demand that agriculture be excluded from the WTO negotiations or that its rules be fundamentally changed, so as to achieve balance and equity in terms both of access to international markets and of supporting measures for agriculture,” they stated.

Clearly, increasing numbers of consumers in the U.S., as well as throughout the world, in recent years have become more conscious of who controls their food supply and the safety of that supply. While they express their concern about the antibiotics that are given to meat and poultry producing animals simply to make them grow faster, while they are demanding to know if their food has been genetically engineered, or whether their food has been simply irradiated rather than processed in a clean and safe environment, and while they worry about the continuing availability and the cost of such food, however, the merchants of greed remain almost totally obsessed by the need to increase their profits at the expense of the common good.