[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Localism and Its Enemies

[Bill Totten]

by David Bollier

http://onthecommons.org (March 03 2008)


One the great lessons of Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma
(2006), is that the industrial agriculture system necessarily entails
all sorts of nasty consequences:  greater fuel consumption to transport
food to market, crop monocultures instead of biological diversity,
pesticide-laden food instead of organic produce, enormous lagoons of pig
excrement from factory-raised pork, et cetera.  Yet the locally grown
alternatives, which tend to be more wholesome and ecologically friendly,
have several strikes against them from the git-go.

A Minnesota organic vegetable farmer, Jack Hedin, brought this to public
attention in a recent oped piece in the New York Times {1}.  Hedin
described how big agribusiness companies in California, Florida and
Texas are using federal regulation and subsidy programs to prevent
regional farmers from offering healthier, more ecologically benign local
food.  The regional farmers want to produce more organic produce to meet
growing consumer demand for locally grown crops.  But the Big Guys are
using their political muscle with the federal government to stifle this
budding competition.

As Hedin puts it:

Consumers ... will be dismayed to learn that the federal government
works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement
from expanding.  And the barriers that the United States Department of
Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that
House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect.

The federal commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who
usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops
(soybeans, rice, what and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables.
Because my watermelon and tomates had been planted on "corn base" acres,
the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the
commodity program.


Farmers who violate these rules not only lose their subsidy for the year
for the affected acreage, they are penalized the market value of the
unapproved crop - and may be permanently blackballed from future
subsidies.  What this means is that the nation's farmers suffer if they
innovate by growing fruits and vegetables for the local market.  They
are discouraged from growing local food at the very time when consumers
are demanding such produce, oil is becoming more expensive and the
environment would benefit from greater diversity of crops.

We hear a lot from free-market conservatives about "letting the market
decide and "getting government off our backs".  Yet when it comes to
propping up their own market franchise, big agribusiness has no problems
at all with "government paternalism".

This story points up the need for local and regional farmers to get more
political, and to make common cause with consumers, environmentalists
and other commoners.  Farmers' markets, the Slow Food movement and the
local food movement are surging these days, but they are not going to
become a bigger presence in our lives unless they can express their
interests on a bigger playing field, national politics.

Link {1}:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/opinion/01hedin.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=jack+hedin&st=nyt&oref=slogin

http://onthecommons.org/node/1250

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