BioDiverseCity Land Co-op

(To read this in order, you have to scroll down the blog to get to the earlier parts. It reads from the bottom up, the way democracy also should read).

In Part II I briefly mentioned the relationship between US food-oriented corporations and foreign policy. It’s not a stretch to say that maintaining unfair trade, especially in food, was one of the major purposes to which the US military was mis-directed over the past century and a half. In 1954, the role of United Fruit Company in encouraging (directing?) the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the government of Arbenz in Guatemala is very well documented.

Likewise, when the Castro brothers, along with Ernesto “Che” Guevara and a small army finally overthrew Batista in Cuba in 1959, one of their first acts was nationalizing the lands of that same United Fruit Company. Once again, United Fruit went into action, encouraging (directing?) the US CIA to intervene, and a hastily-organized disastrous invasion of newly-liberated Cuba occurred at the Bay of Pigs–sometimes called the “Bay of Pigs Fiasco.”

(The CIA was very busy in 1954, also staging the overthrow of the elected government of Mossadegh in Iran, a blunder that the USA is still paying for dearly in the form of the extremely distorted course of events in the Persian Gulf region. But that topic is covered under Part IV on national liberation and beginning of the end for neo-colonialism.)

I would argue that the role of cheap food is crucial in shifting the USA from a producer base to a consumer base, where we are now dependent upon a global economy for meeting the needs of our outsized spending habits. If the manufacturers of all sorts of consumer products wanted to move more of these products, food would have to become a much smaller part of each household’s budget, in order to allow that household more wiggle room in buying other products flooding the market.

Examples of these other products might be: the house they lived in, all its furniture, home electronics, fashion that had to be discarded each time “back-to-school” rolled around in August, automobiles, gasoline, vacation trips, second homes in vacation hot spots, later computers, monitors, Nintendos, cell phones, digital cameras, printers, disk drives, iPhones, mp3 players, PDAs, GPS devices, XBoxes, Wii games, electronic toys of all sorts, a boat to go fishing, an ATV when you’re not fishing, a snowmobile to play in the snow, trailers to haul all that, storage sheds to store it all, a second, third, fourth automobile for the spouse and two teens, plus all the credit cards needed to buy all that stuff, not to mention the insurance to cover it all.

So, food went from being approximately 19% of the typical US household budget, down to about 9% in around 2005, while these other products filled up the remaining 125% of the household budget.

Someone would have to pay for this easing of the burden of food on the household. Ah, the farmer.

First, as we mentioned, the farmers who were unlucky enough to live in those countries that grew things the USA coveted had to be dispossessed of their land, then re-hired as plantation workers to pick coffee, bananas, cocoa (and coca), pineapples, and ever more exotic fruits as the American palate got more and more exotic in its tastes. Thus, the “Banana Republic” was born. Countries like Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Cuba, the Caribbean islands, Colombia, and on and on became home to some truly evil dictatorships, all to assure the flow of cheap luxury food to the USA.

In the USA, it was necessary to keep the farmer in check, but this was easily done through oligarchic control over the pricing of farm produce. A series of enormous food corporations came into being which managed the flow of foods and somehow miraculously ensured that farmers were getting sometimes a little more, sometimes a lot less, than their costs of production.

Occasional attempts by farmers to organize themselves into something analogous to labor unions in the factories, mines and mills were made. There was the Grange movement. There was the Farmers’ Union. There was National Farmers Organization. Efforts were made to restrict production–the sometimes violent milk strikes of Farmers’ Holiday Association and other groups in the 1930s and other efforts to push prices back up. All to no avail.

The fundamental problem always facing farmers was that they “owned” their land and operations (with guidance from their bankers), and hence, were always by nature in competition with the neighboring farmers. When a group of farmers is trying to hold out for higher prices, they can only hold until the first one caves in and accepts the lower price. Given the high debt load farmers have always faced, caving in doesn’t take long, and prices paid farmers are kept low. You don’t need to see a vast capitalist conspiracy in this arrangement; it’s just the way “Mr. Market” works.

The process of letting Mr. Market remove farmers from their land gained speed with the first Great Migration of rural blacks to the north, ca. 1910-1930. It progressed apace with the coming of the Dust Bowl in the great plains breakbasket states of Oklahoma and Texas, Colorado, parts of New Mexico, Kansas, Arkansas, and other places where food staples had been grown. This led to the first wave of environmental refuges inside the United States, headly mostly west toward California, where the formerly independent, self-reliant farmers were transformed into wage-laboring, largely homeless farmworkers working for large landowning food corporations. Then came the Second Great Migration of southern black rural folk going north to work in the factories, most never to return to the land, instead rearing a new generation of completely urbanized Baby Boom African-Americans.

In the 1950s, the rural brain drain continued slow but steady, as it did in the 1960s. And the 1970s. Don’t forget the ’80s. In the 1980s, here in Wisconsin, we faced a severe small farm crisis, and the Wisconsin Farm Unity Alliance arose to attempt to deal with the crisis. Too small to change the course of events, such a movement could still contribute to the ongoing national discussion about what to do with those farmers–everything except assuring them reliable parity pricing for their crops.

Two people who perhaps understood the importance of parity pricing for farm crops, from the “left” and “right” directions perhaps, were Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, and Charles Walters, author of Unforgiven, and founder of the magazine Acres, USA. Parity pricing could be called simply “fair trade for farmers” as the basic idea was that farmers should receive a price for their products that would provide a parity, a level equal to that enjoyed by other prosperous classes in society. In the 1950s and 60s, that might have meant being on parity with the highest-paid trades union workers, the middle-class professionals or others earning a living able to sustain a family without fear of financial ruination.

In this current era, we are in uncharted waters. It is difficult to know with whom farmers might achieve parity, with the entire US middle class of professionals on the brink of financial ruination, with the labor unions decimated and powerless to improve worker wages, and with farmers themselves once again selling products at prices dangerously below the cost of their production.

At this point, the drive to push down real wages for workers in the USA has come round to backfire on finance capital. What seemed to have been an application of Naomi Klein’s concept of “shock doctrine” in the fall of 2008 now seems to have taken on a life outside the control of finance capital, domestically or globally. Events seem to be spiralling out of their control.

Once you have driven down the standard of living of your domestic market–US workers, farmers, and the middle classes–you find yourself with a shrinking market to sell all those outsourced goods to. Without continuing high levels of government direct payments, at this stage it seems that the economic downturn will continue on toward some unknown level of ruination. While I may have argued that finance capital had wanted to weaken the farm sector to the point where cheap food would not compete for household dollars with all the other junk from southeast Asia and China steaming its way toward the US ports, now the very productivity of US farmers seems in jeopardy, if massive farm bankruptcies follow this downtrend in the economy.

Likewise, with the specter of mass hunger in the USA, the very health and productivity of the next generations of workers needed to maintain at least some skeleton-crew level of staffing of the US domestic economy is in peril. Capital has gone too far, the shock doctrine has backfired, and we are all in uncharted waters here.

Next Part IV: Revolutions against neo-colonialism, run-away production, and the US worker becomes disposable.

Readings

Peter Chapman, Bananas! How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World, Canongate US, 2008.
John C. Culver, American Dreamer: A life of Henry A. Wallace, W.W. Norton, 2001.
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, Montly Review Press, 25th Ann. edition, 1997. Yes, this was the book given to Barack Obama by Hugo Chavez at their meeting in South America, 2009.
Kinzer, Stephen and Schlesinger, Stephen. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Thomas Kriger, The 1939 Dairy Farmers Union Milk Strike: The Story in Words and Pictures, Journal for Multi-Media History, 1998.
Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948 (New York, 1973), pp. 15-27.
Charles Walters, Unforgiven, Acres USA 2nd edition, 2002.