Lawrence Walker is a long-time social activist who has retired from city strife and is now living in a fishing villiage on the edge of a large lake in Central Manitoba. He calls himself a practicing curmudgeon. He maintains weBlogs at:
"The View From Out Here"
"Good News-Clips"

After many years of living in cities, I've retired to my natal area in central Manitoba. My father was a grain elevator agent for the now-conglomerated United Grain Growers and I remembered a somewhat bucolic place where people lived a simpler and healthier life. Game and fresh farm produce were cheap and plentiful, and people were helpful and friendly. Real estate values are also much lower due to the depopulation of the countryside and that fit my retirement income.

What I returned to after more than 50 years was sadly, and perhaps understandably, a different world. Like the outposts of Newfoundland and the Gaspesian settlements so promoted by the church and Duplessis in Quebec, the western prairies are abandoned cultures. Dying towns struggle to survive while the rural populace is more and more forced into city ghettos.

The young leave to find jobs that are unavailable locally and the older people remain in houses that have lost their value but which they are loath to abandon. Halfway from my village and the regional center is a town that 40 years ago was a thriving community with 5 implement dealers and the usual complement of stores and services. It is now reduced to 30 people and no stores. They must drive 20km to buy a loaf of bread or a bottle of aspirin.

During the depression years of the 30s rural people fought back against the banks, grain cartels and large corporations, and they established institutions like the Cooperative movement, Pool elevators, credit unions, marketing boards, and political parties like the Progressive Farmers, and the CCF (social democrats).

They forgot to teach their children that the wolves are always there.

So I returned to a desperate countryside where farms had been reduced to 1/3 of their former number, implement manufacturers and grain buyers had been conglomerated, and the protective organizations had been institutionalised (castrated). Aid to farmers was a cash cow to the agricultural corporations who receive millions while the struggling small farmers receive a pittance. Similarly in the recent BSE crisis the ones that benefited were the few large packing plants still remaining, while ranchers received a fraction of the prices beef was sold for in the supermarkets.

Large corporations had convinced ranchers that sending beef on the hoof to the US for processing was more cost-efficient and Canadian packers and Slaughter facilities dwindled to a few large corporations. The largest being US-owned Tyson and Cargill who control about 75% of US and Canadian beef production. Meat processing has become more or less continentalized. Many eastern Canadian consumers and fast food outlets were using US beef while Canadian ranchers were in crisis. Politicians and other public figures like Alberta's Ralph Klein (who's never seen a corporation he didn't like) urged the populace to support the ranchers and Canadians rallied to their beef producers. Unlike other countries that had a BSE crisis, consumption of beef was largely not affected. Prices in the supermarkets remained fairly stable. The ranchers on the other hand had excess cattle and the packers made out like bandits, buying low and selling high. An auditor-general report, forced out of the corporate-friendly Alberta government showed their profits burgeoning almost 300%. They made $79 a head before to $219 after BSE. To add insult to injury they also received massive government financial aid since they own extensive cattle herds.

Meanwhile farmers have been forced into specialized crops and production, and their one-time independence from market vagaries by mixed farming has been compromised. This also means that their self-sufficiency has become a memory and they have neither the home garden, the dairy-cow, chickens, nor other food production to take them through difficult times.

Their frustration has resulted in an increasing number of suicides and family breakdowns. A recent study found most family farmers earning a negative farm income, which could only be augmented by outside labour.

Just casualties of progress and a changing world?

No!

These were deliberate policies initiated by all levels of government in the 60's and continued to this day by governments of all stripes. Policies of "efficiency" promoted by large corporations with their own agenda. Their victory will leave a bleary landscape interrupted only by an occasional urban center.

This has, like most macro-economists dreams, proven to be a hell visited upon local economies. Profit and Loss doesn't include the quality of life inflicted by their one-sided accounting, nor the social costs attendant upon them.

A mythology about the benefits of scale has infused agriculture since the sixties. Mindlessly transferring the efficiency of mass-production to farming practices, economists and their corporate mentors convinced the various levels of government to acquiesce to the dismantling of the family farm economy causing devastation to rural communities though-out North America. Canada followed suit and a blind eye was turned to the plight of the small farmer. Various methods were put in place to mitigate the effects but the overall policies were codified by the 1969 "Federal Task Force on Agriculture report, Canadian Agriculture in the Seventies" and all political parties accepted the wisdom of this new reality. It propounded a 2/3 reduction of farmers and a move to mass agricultural production.

Like video lottery machines, mass agriculture was the solution to provincial shortfalls. The farmers would adjust or leave the land and eventually a new balance would emerge. We are now seeing the effects of this misguided policy as evidenced in the "crisis in agriculture".

It has only grown worse since then and western Canada is filled with dead or dying towns where real estate values have plummeted or evaporated, and in the villages that still survive the population is aged and dying. The children that remain can only impatiently wait to be of age to depart to the cities where they join the ranks of the urban poor. They express their rage and boredom with vandalism and ape the urban dress and customs of what they see on TV. "Yo", "bro", and "ho" as well as wearing backward caps and baggy pants are part of their culture. It would be amusing if it wasn't so sad and so self-destructive as they graduate from "booze" to "crack", to show how "cool" they are, like their urban counter-parts.

Meanwhile distress help lines are set up in most communities to deal with the mounting pressure on farm families. Suicide, marriage breakdowns, and child delinquency problems are endemic in the heartland. Seemingly prosperous farmyards hide a massive debt-load and declining income. A recent report shows farmers in a negative-income return situation. But the agricultural mega-corporations are making out like bandits. The move to privatisation and the "new agriculture", dovetailed with the increasing mergers in the corporate world, has been very profitable to a few wealthy investors and corporations.

While drought and the BSE crisis have had a major impact, the problems go much deeper than that. Even without these setbacks most small to medium-sized farmers would still be struggling. As one local farmer expressed it "Even if you get more land you still can't make a decent living." Most survive by having a secondary job or business to cover the negative income part of farm life.

At one time farmers were an example in self-sufficiency. They grew different crops according to demand, they had fall-backs and supplied their own needs and sold the surplus products, from dairy to poultry; beef, pork and sheep; hay and feed grains. But the demands and government regulations of modern farming have changed all that. Now they specialize, and most buy their milk and eggs at the nearest supermarket as well as most all the other foodstuff they used to grow or rear themselves. One of the largest dairy farms in Manitoba is just 17 km away but the milk sold in my town is supplied by Parmalait and Dairyland, and shipped here from 200 km away. Poultry is twice the price it is in major cities. Beef can only be obtained reasonably if you buy bootlegged cattle. Quotas and packing regulations rule. 80% of pork production in Manitoba and Saskatchewan is controlled by the McCains subsidiary Maple Leaf Foods. Corn in my local store 'on sale" was shipped from Ste Catherines, Ontario. Vegetable prices are double or more that of the city.

The National Farmers Union is an organization that supports family farms and sustainable agriculture. They produced a recent study showing the fallacy of the big is better myth and also the static prices paid to farmers as compared to the return to the food conglomerates.

http://www.nfu.ca/briefs/Myths_PREP_PDF_TWO.bri.pdf

While farmers retained (in net income) about one dollar out of every two that they generated in the late 1940s, today farmers retain just one dollar in ten. While new technologies and inputs have helped farmers increase production by about $18 billion (from about $17 billion in the 1940s to about $35 billion today), the corporations that sold those inputs and technologies to farmers swallowed up not only the entire $18 billion in increased production revenue, but an additional $8 billion as well driving farmers’ net income down. Farmers increased their output and gross revenue, but input and technology makers captured 144% of that additional revenue. Over the past fifty years, for every dollar that new technologies and inputs have contributed to farmers’ revenues, farmers have been made to pay $1.44.

There is an apocalyptic war going on. I'm not talking of the aggressive war on mid-eastern people to control oil reserves nor the actions to maintain US hegemony over Latin America. It is not centered in any area like traditional wars. It is a war for global control of the very basic life stock of our existence. Our foods. The main protagonists are USA/Euro supported multi-national corporations, and the traditional family farm (we, in the industrialized nations prefer that term rather than the term "peasantry").

It is usually characterized by the macro-economists as resistance to "better" farming practices. Irrational resistance to the productive "bottom line". The problem is that the bottom line in finance has little relevance to the "bottom line" in human social relations and existence. It ignores culture, conditions of living, and the very existence of societies and human life. It ignores the penalties suffered by the very people it is a subset of.

I need not invoke the many farmers in areas of India who were forced to use Monsanto products after thousands of years of traditional farming only to find they could not afford all the conjunct chemicals needed. When they lost their family properties, over 300 committed suicide in protest in one district and the shame of losing the family lands. And now international corporations are also patenting seeds that peasants took 1000s of years to produce the shameful effects of the policies of Nestles and other neoliberal supported corporations are bankrupting 3rd world countries and driving their people into desperate poverty. The policies of the WTO, IMF, and other neo-liberal organisations policing agricultural policy in the third world ignore the heavily subsidised agricultural policies of the main powers. This puts the 3rd world at a disadvantage in competing for market.

So what has that to do with us? Why should I worry about what is happening in the 3rd world? Because it is happening here and the "bottom line" is that you are going to be held ransom to massive corporate food-suppliers like ADM, Cargill, Tyson, the Canadian potato megalith McCains (who own Maple Leaf Packers, the primary pork suppliers in Canada) and others that control all your foodstuff and determine the prices that you pay in your markets. They are closely allied to Monsanto and other corporations that control the seed stock, "enhance" our foods, and sell the final product to us. A monopoly of our foodstuff and their prices will have a greater effect on our lives than housing costs, minimum wage, or health-care.

The incidence of the increase of cancer, which is overwhelming if one looks at the statistics and has been linked irrefutably to food additives and chemically-enhanced products, is part of this, but if one looks seriously at the influence and control of the "bottom line" multinational food corporations it is enough to make an ordinary paranoid catatonic.

Virtually all your cooking oil is controlled by agribusiness. That means that whether you use the "healthful" non-saturated oils like corn, soya, or canola, they are grown from genetically patented seeds from the major suppliers like Cargill and Monsanto. Control of virtually all our food, from meat and fish, to fruit and vegetables, and grains and flour is in the hands of a rapidly diminishing, through mergers, corporate few.

Coupled with the corporate-friendly policies of the Bush administration you are a target for worldwide control even if EU anti-gm seed initiatives should escape US sanctions. All western nations have instituted neo-liberal policies.

Factory farming is bad for your health. That hasn't escaped the conjecture of most thinking persons. Just like humans, too many animals in congested areas contribute to easier transference of disease. Like the rapid infection of vast numbers of chickens in the Fraser Valley crowded into enclosed areas, or the effect of disease on salmon farms and the transfer to wild stocks, not to mention the feed cannibalism causing BSE infected beef stocks.

Pig-farms have sparked many fights over their pollution of local water resources and the unsustainability of the practice, so that the multi-national producers now have problems finding areas that will accept them. Not so in Canada, where the Manitoba government welcomed a huge pork-producing operation in the Brandon area, claiming that the plant would be a plus for the community in jobs and economic fall-out. When the plant had problems retaining workers due to low pay and oppressive working conditions, they received permission to import workers from Latin America, holding forth citizenship status for those workers who stayed on the job a certain length of time. A released worker would be deported. No unions there. An old form of slavery. Brandon, Manitoba lauded the development and welcomed the Latinos as contributors to the local economy and a tribute to multi-culturalism.

All of this has an effect on our country. All of this has an effect on our health. The urban dweller can no longer ignore the crucial issues which will determine much more than the lack of day-care, gender rights, equal housing, or racism. We are in a fight for survival against the rapacious conglomerates that want to control the very source of our being, what we eat and drink.

Our food, our water, the very air we breathe, are under attack, and we no longer have the luxury of being disengaged if we care about our children, our families, our country, our world. A Chomsky. a Suzuki, a Bono, Sting, Nader or Galbraith cannot save our ass without a massive entry of ourselves into the social equation.

Some links:

http://www.ssu.missouri.edu/faculty/jikerd/papers/default.htm

http://www.stopthehogs.com/index.htm

http://www.beyondfactoryfarming.org/

http://www.newfarm.org/columns/Martens/1203/index.shtml

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031103&c=1&s=nichols2

http://www.themeatrix.com/

Studs Turkel the great American social commentator wrote movingly in 1988 about the plight of the farmer in his book "the Great Divide”. He chronicled the hardships and betrayals that had befallen the "heartland of America" and the people who remained. It has only grown worse.