GET THOSE BOYS OFF THE FARM! - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 9

ing the secretary of agriculture the ability to lower the prices farmers received for goods. The phrase was
doublespeak for making cheap grain available and getting government out of agriculture.
Benson specifically labeled supply management as “socialist” and worked with the CED to recruit aca-
demics into a wholesale propaganda effort against existing farm programs. Numerous organizations bey-
ond the CED, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers Association, engaged
in a full-court press to destroy parity for farmers, including producing research, publishing reports, and
lobbying all branches of government intensely. 12
John Davis, Eisenhower's assistant secretary of agriculture, went on to head a business and agriculture
program at Harvard funded by the Corn Products Refining Corporation. He wrote in the Harvard Business
Review that vertical integration was the best alternative to “big government programs.” He called this new
type of farming “agribusiness,” a term that came into common usage during the Eisenhower years. 13
The thirty-year erosion of the New Deal programs, which had enabled farmers to earn an income on par
with urban workers, forced farmers either to leave farming or borrow heavily. As a result, the farm popula-
tion declined 30 percent between 1950 and 1960, and by another 26 percent between 1960 and 1970—the
precise outcome the industrial tycoons had plotted to facilitate. But as the farm crisis worsened, a new
protest movement grew.
No one had a larger impact on agriculture during the second half of the twentienth century than Benson
protégé and Cornell University graduate Earl Butz. Cornell had been the mouthpiece for farm policy under
both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. Alan Emory, a reporter writing in February 1954 in the
Watertown Times , an upstate New York paper, observed that the “boys from Ithaca” have a “preference
for big agriculture over the individual farmer” and “appear more interested in low prices for raw materials
than in increased purchasing power for the farmer.”
Butz, as President Nixon's second secretary of agriculture, facilitated the agribusiness agenda, becom-
ing infamous for slogans like “agriculture is big business” and for saying that farmers must “adapt or die.”
As prices continued to drop in the 1960s and 1970s, the Farm Bureau and an agribusiness coalition chal-
lenged an opposing coalition of twenty-five farmers' organizations in the battle over the farm bill in 1970,
a reauthorization that takes place approximately every five years. The legislation ended up reducing price
supports in an attempt to encourage exports. The Nixon administration set in motion an economic policy
that relied heavily on the export of grain, arguing that the United States had a “comparative advantage” in
producing capital-intensive crops, while the developing world was suited to growing labor-intensive fruits
and vegetables.
Crucial to the expansion of food trade were the negotiations around the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade, or GATT, the forum that served multilateral institutions until the WTO replaced it in 1995. Dur-
ing the early 1960s, the CED and like-minded corporate-sponsored organizations geared up to push what
became the 1995 WTO treaty, which included the Agreement on Agriculture. While the purported function
of this treaty is to remove trade barriers and increase competitiveness, its purpose is to allow the largest
food companies and grain traders to source crops where they can be obtained at the lowest cost.
The dismantling of parity in the 1950s, the farmer unrest it garnered, and a background of grain and
food industry demands for cheap commodities resulted in a new farm program in the early 1970s and set
the stage for the farm crisis of the 1980s. The new program created a target price for commodities, and if
the price fell below the rate set by the USDA, then U.S. taxpayers, rather than the food and grain compan-
ies, would have to pay the cost of production. Participating farmers received an annual “deficiency check”
to make up for the dismantling of parity programs. Food companies such as Kellogg and General Mills,
grain traders such as Cargill, and their trade associations, using their political clout, had managed to in-
crease their profits by waging a multi-decade campaign that not only lambasted farmers for inefficiency
but increasingly accused them of being on the public dole.