By: John Nichols
Cap Times associate editor
June 23, 2010
Farm and food policy is usually made in Washington, where the politicians who call the shots often know less about producing milk or growing grain than the average 6-year-old in Wisconsin.
Sure, we have an advantage.
Wisconsin has always been a farm state. Many Wisconsinites grew up on or near farms, or are the children or grandchildren of people who did.
It’s in our nature, and in our culture, to care about family farms, local dairies and cheesemakers, and the food chain, which, in our state at least, is still something we can see and touch.
Unfortunately, as Washington insiders make more and more decisions with an eye toward rewarding big agribusiness companies and tipping the scales against working farmers, Wisconsin’s agricultural sector is taking hits. And the hardest hits to Wisconsin farmers and consumers are coming from the politicians who have not just allowed but often encouraged the consolidation of control over food production in the hands of a handful of multinational conglomerates — conglomerates that manipulate food markets not to enrich working farmers or feed hungry people but to pay off speculators who have never been near farm country.
“Unbeknownst to most, there is no competition behind much of the food people buy,” notes John E. Peck, executive director of Family Farm Defenders. “Just a handful of commodity speculators working for the food giants manipulate the market for cheddar cheese and fertilizer to pork bellies and soybeans at the CME. Within minutes, their bids are translated into global food prices that adversely affect farmers and consumers alike, from Johannesburg to Janesville. We can no longer accept the government turning a blind eye to such corporate corruption. Monopolizing seeds or animals does not serve the public’s interest, and is a fundamental violation of food sovereignty.”
These concerns are especially pressing for Wisconsin’s dairy farmers. “Family farmers are now receiving half of what they got a year ago for their milk, but U.S. consumers have seen hardly any change in the store. The situation is worse than during the Great Depression,” says Wisconsin dairy farmer Joel Greeno. Referring to market manipulation and speculation, Greeno says: “If this illegal activity doesn’t stop we’ll have no family farmers left and end up importing all of our dairy products.”
Greeno and other Wisconsin farmers are calling on the Obama administration to aggressively pursue existing lawsuits involving market manipulation and to get serious about enforcing antitrust laws that were designed to protect farmers, consumers and communities from the excesses of corporate speculation and manipulation.
They’ll get a chance to do so directly this week, at a remarkable antitrust workshop that will be held Friday, June 25, at the UW Memorial Union. One of five workshops around the country sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Justice, the Madison workshop will focus on consolidation of control over the dairy industry. And it will be a high-powered session, bringing Attorney General Eric Holder and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to the heartland, where they will join Sens. Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl, Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin and other members of the state’s congressional delegation to listen to farmers and their allies discuss fundamental questions about who controls our food supply.
These workshops, which are open to the public, provide an opportunity to focus on issues that University of Wisconsin Law School professor Peter Carstensen has for many years been warning are defining the future not just of farming in Wisconsin but of rural communities that rely on farm income and of urban and suburban families, who pay the price — literally — when diversity and competition disappear.
Testifying a few years back before the Senate Agriculture Committee, Carstensen warned: “The American farmer faces increasingly dysfunctional markets for both the inputs and outputs of the farm. The resulting squeeze threatens the traditional structure of American agriculture and is likely to result in the gradual reduction of many of those producing food and fiber in this country to a kind of economic serfdom. Moreover, the economic results of this transformation will be increased costs to consumers, a long-run reduction in innovation and technological progress in agriculture, as well as impoverishment of rural communities. In sum, the failure of agricultural markets to function efficiently and fairly is going to impose major costs on the entire economy.”
Carstensen issued his warning during the Bush/Cheney years when, as he noted, “neither the United States Department of Agriculture nor the two antitrust enforcement agencies, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission, has enforced the existing laws to protect the market process.”
With the departure of the Bush/Cheney administration, things began to shift. But how much of a shift remains to be determined. The Obama administration has been more interested in and engaged with the question of how and when to apply antitrust laws and more generally how to act in the interest of promoting genuine competition.
But that interest and engagement must be ramped up, and move from rhetoric to action. Friday’s workshop in Madison, as well as events that have been organized around it, provide a real opportunity to get federal officials who have the power to do something focused on the need to act in the interest of working farmers and consumers.
Folks should try to get out to the town hall meeting on “Taking on Corporate Power in Our Food System” at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the Memorial Union. (For more information, visit www.familyfarmdefenders.org or call 800-639-3276.)
Regardless of whether Wisconsinites can make it to Thursday’s town hall meeting or Friday’s workshop, we should all keep focused on the reality that Carstensen has highlighted so frequently and so well: “The failure of agricultural markets to function efficiently and fairly is going to impose major costs on the entire economy.”
The choice about whether they fail is being made now, and we all need to ensure that the right choice is made for Wisconsin farmers and consumers.
