GET THOSE BOYS OFF THE FARM! - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 16

years that trade will ultimately fix the rural economy. He says, “Trade has only been an engine for agricul-
ture three times—during World Wars I and II and the Soviet grain deals in the 1970s. But we've bet our
entire farm policy on something that only worked three times in a century.”
The failure of this strategy for American farmers is apparent from the lack of growth in exports. Dr.
Daryll Ray, a well-respected agricultural economist from the University of Tennessee, says that export val-
ues were expected to soar when prices were lowered by deregulation, and that this would “propel U.S.
agriculture to the promised land of accelerating export growth and financial prosperity.” He testified to
Congress in 2010: “While the export-centric narrative was successful in moving farm policies to the check-
writing payment programs of today, the grain-export promises failed to occur. . . . Amazingly and contrary
to general belief, the U.S. is now exporting a smaller proportion of its combined production of corn, wheat,
and soybeans than in 1980—45 percent in 1980 and 25 percent in 2009.” 22
Rather than boosting prosperity from trade, the result of deregulation was a massive increase in the pro-
duction of commodity crops, causing prices to plunge for most of the past fifteen years. By 1999, the real
price of corn was 50 percent below 1996 levels, and the price of soybeans was down 41 percent. To quell
the anger and political heat when crop prices collapsed in 1998, Congress first authorized “emergency pay-
ments” to farmers—essentially, grants to keep farmers afloat. Meanwhile, the meat industry, grain traders,
and food processors enjoyed low-priced commodities at the expense of taxpayers for more than a decade.
According to Tim Wise at Tufts University, “The biggest winner from cheap commodity crops has been
the industrialized meat industry”—the country's largest purchaser of corn and soybeans. Wise estimates
that when crop prices plummeted, the cost to industry of producing meat dropped between 7 and 10 per-
cent. Industrial producers pocketed the savings, enabling them to greatly expand their operations during
the years of extremely low commodity prices. 23
Wise's research demonstrates that small livestock producers are further disadvantaged when they pay
the full cost of growing the grain they produce while corporate buyers pay below the cost of production.
Diversified, smaller livestock growers that use hay, pasture, and grains require more labor and are more
vulnerable to low prices. Wise says that “industrialized livestock operations drive down the price of live-
stock, further squeezing diversified farmers out of animal production and into bulk row crops.” When farm-
ers are forced out of small-scale livestock production and into commodity crops, overproduction snowballs
even more. 24
This fact has been apparent since 1997. But because of the political power of agribusiness, no attempt
has been made to reintroduce supply-management policies or to shore up prices and increase food security
with a grain reserve. Even with 1998's “emergency payments,” net farm income declined 16.5 percent dur-
ing the first five years after the passage of the legislation now known to many farmers as the Freedom to
Fail Act.
Rather than address the primary cause of low prices, Congress set the treadmill on high speed and
quelled the political fallout by making emergency payments permanent in the 2002 Farm Bill. As a result,
the subsidy system we know today was born.
It should be no surprise, considering the history of farm policy, that farmers are blamed for the subsidy
system—rather than the architects of the broken food system. Subsidies are an easy target, whereas un-
derstanding the cause of the dysfunctional system—a combination of deregulation and the dismantling of
complex farm policies—is complicated. Oversimplifying the convoluted set of conditions that have landed
us here, from the failure to enforce antitrust law to the system of legalized bribery that corrupts the political
system, does a disservice to farmers and eaters.
Ozer, with the National Family Farm Coalition, says: “Unfortunately, it is widely believed that the
biggest problem with the food system is subsidies, and that farmers are greedy. Blaming the victims of a
system that is rigged to keep them overproducing and dependent on Monsanto and DuPont for overpriced