Sometimes the hypocrisy is stunning. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised because the presidential campaign season is well underway. Yes, it’s time for the candidates to trot around rural America lying about all the wonderful things they will do for farmers. Or in the case of the President, issue a feeble excuse for helping rural America—an Executive Order to establish the White House Rural Council. This chutzpah really takes the cake!
This is the same president that has broken the solemn promise that he made during his campaign [PDF; page 2 under header, “Prevent Anticompetitive Behavior Against Family Farms”] to issue fair farm rules. If he were really serious about helping address the economic crisis in rural America, he would stop kowtowing to the meat industry and let the Department of Agriculture write and enforce the rules that would protect farmers against abuses by the consolidated meat industry.
Obama acknowledged during the election that the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act that prohibits price discrimination by meatpackers against small and mid-sized farmers has not been enforced. He said that his Administration would issue the regulations to protect farmers against discrimination by the giant, consolidated meat industry. He promised to strengthen anti-monopoly laws and to protect farmers from fraud, abuse, and market manipulation.
These promises have not been kept because the politically powerful meat industry and its voice in Washington, the American Meat Institute, is using its political muscle to intimidate decision makers and to protect the interests of big meat companies.
The industry is frighteningly consolidated. Weak-kneed farm policy and a Department of Justice that has never seen a merger it didn’t like have created monopolized meat monsters. There are so few companies buying livestock that farmers and ranchers are essentially forced to buy and sell at whatever price the monopolies offer. In the livestock sector, meat and poultry processors increasingly are involved in every single step of production, managing every aspect from genetics to the grocery store.
The poultry industry is so bad that the growers are basically serfs. They don’t even own the birds; they just perform the service of raising the animals for Tyson, Perdue and the other poultry processors under extremely rigid and unfair contracts. They take on the debt for building the factory farm facilities and the costs of manure management and disposal, but they only have five to seven week contracts with the poultry multinationals. A poultry grower, better described as a sharecropper, makes an average of $11,000 a year.
This is a real outrage. And the rules that the Obama Administration is afraid to tackle would begin to deal with some of these inequities. The truth is that the current model of agriculture saps the economic vitality of rural communities. Economically viable farms are the lifeblood of rural areas. The earnings from locally owned and controlled farms generates an economic “multiplier effect” when farmers buy supplies locally and the money stays within the community. The loss of nearly 1.4 million cattle, hog and dairy farms over the past 30 years has drained the income out of rural communities.
If Obama really wanted to help rural America, he would stop defending the meat industry. But, I fear that the Administration and all of the Presidential candidates are just mouthing platitudes about helping impoverished rural America. Yes, they want to keep some nice rural retreats for vacationing. But mostly, they see most of rural America as a sacrifice zone where the extractive industries, like gas fracking, can replace traditional agriculture.
Notice to the Obama Administration: We see that line about energy deeply buried in the Executive Order, and gas drilling isn’t the solution: we need fair farm rules now so that farmers can stay in farming.
Join us on June 22 for our call-in day to the White House to tell Obama to finally enact these fair farm rules.