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Bush Team Squeezes Farmers, Stifles Dissent |
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by Jim Goodman
(No verified email address) |
26 Feb 2006
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Organic farmers were as surprised as other members of the organic community when the USDA appointed five new members to the National Organic Standards Board without any public comment. This break with traditional consensus and public input undermines federal law, which indicates that the organic standards board should be balanced and represent the organic community as a whole, not agribusiness. |
The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts a drop of 23 percent in income for the farming sector this year, on the heels of last year's 12 percent drop.
Proposed cuts in farm subsidy payments will account for a significant portion of the decrease in income, a fact farmers will have to get used to in a globalized free trade economy. Much like the rest of the nation's working class, we will be expected to live without a financial safety net.
While subsidy programs are at best a very poor solution to a very big problem (low farm income), the real beneficiary of the subsidy program has always been the corporate grain buyers and the dairy and livestock processors. Farmers only want a fair price for what they produce, not government programs that encourage overproduction of low-priced commodities.
The U.S. agricultural economy has and always will be designed to ensure corporate agribusiness a profit at the expense of farmers and consumers. We will, of course, be expected to remain silent, work harder, and avoid dissent, in a nation ruled by an administration that will not tolerate dissent.
Organic farmers were as surprised as other members of the organic community when the USDA appointed five new members to the National Organic Standards Board without any public comment. This break with traditional consensus and public input undermines federal law, which indicates that the organic standards board should be balanced and represent the organic community as a whole, not agribusiness.
I'm sure that the USDA realizes that it is much easier to eliminate dissent at the outset and fill the board with friendly faces -- no sense inviting opposition to your intended goals of making organic farming another source of profit for corporate agriculture.
While the USDA has done its best to weaken long existing standards prohibiting synthetics in organic food processing, requiring pasture for cattle and outdoor access for poultry, the department, like the rest of the administration, does not tolerate public dissent well.
A recent legislative proposal in Virginia would make it illegal for poultry to be raised outdoors, a practice generally followed by small-scale poultry producers.
If this legislation becomes law, a precedent will be set, and while small farmers will suffer, industrial farms like Tyson will carry on with their idea of organic farming, and again, dissent will be avoided.
Using the World Trade Organization as a weapon, the administration has sued the European Union to force it to accept U.S. imports of genetically engineered crops. European consumers have from the beginning of the genetically engineered "revolution" refused to accept such food. Citing this refusal as a restraint on free trade, the Bush administration, acting on behalf of the multinational gene giants, will again attempt to force unwanted commodities on the Europeans.
Perhaps the sudden "ineligibility" of French farm activist Jose Bove to enter the United States last week was an attempt to send a message to all who protest against globalization and corporate control of the economy and those who engage in symbolic political protest.
The dismantling of the McDonald's in Millau, France, which made Bove and his fellow farmers heroes, was never a statement about McDonald's itself, but rather a statement against economic imperialism. Much as the Boston Tea Party was an act against economic and political imperialism, so too the French farmers' acts were a form of protest against what they saw as an assault on their right of self-determination to produce food locally and protect their culture.
The Boston Tea Party was a protest against an imperial government that allowed no dissent and it was part of the inspiration for the concept of "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness." Now dissent and protest are "moral crimes," or so says the U.S. government. Allowing Bove into the United States might stimulate further dissent and a nation of dissenting farmers would be far more than President Bush and his circle could tolerate. *
Farmers, like everyone else, need an economic safety net, not subsidies and not encouragement to produce more cheap commodities. We need fair prices and profitable farms. Workers need a living wage, health care and a dignified retirement; so do farmers.
Why does it seem when we try to make that clear to the "representatives of the people," our voices are not heard? I think it all goes back to intolerance to dissent in any form. We have allowed the president to put on a pair of rose-colored glasses, and he cannot see us through them.
Jim Goodman is an organic dairy farmer from Wonewoc, Wisconsin.
2006 The Capital Times
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