Understanding the Politics and Economics of Farm Country
If only one useful thing came out of my previous career as a journalist in southwestern Minnesota, it's my heightened knowledge of the complexities of farm economics. Having interviewed farmers big and small, Democrats and Republicans, and attended seminars covering every agricultural topic from soil conservation to predicting hog futures, the position allowed me to get a handle on the industry that surrounded my rural boyhood home. While I still don't fancy myself an expert on agriculture, I did get enough of an education on the business to speculate on the equally diverse and complex politics of farm country.
The conventional wisdom is that farmers are a homogenously Republican voting bloc. In most of the country, that is quickly becoming the case as small farms are consolidated into the hands of corporate agricultural giants. The populist economic interests of the Norman Rockwell-era farmers are being superceded by the free trade and overproduction interests of ag conglomerates. In the Upper Midwest, where I hail, there are still a disproportionately high number of "bib overalls" farmers tending their 300-500 acres, as yet untainted by the tentacles of corporate ag.....and the politics of our rural areas reflect it.
The issue of free trade seems to be where the battle lines are most markedly drawn, and a couple case studies from my ag reporting days highlighted the disconnect. In the summer of 2002, a large seed company in the Mankato area hosted then Minnesota Senate candidate Norm Coleman, who delivered a stump speech to a crowd full of "ag suits" espousing the mystical inerrancies of free trade in expanding global markets for Minnesota producers. Certainly most well-connected seed companies and corporate livestock producers do stand to make a killing in the global agriculture market based upon the quality (and quantity) of product that their well-oiled machines are able to produce.
A couple of years later, however, I attended a different ag seminar (also in Mankato) hosted by a well-spoken critic of current and future free trade agreements that Coleman has been praising two years earlier. The crowd could not have been more different from those at the Coleman rally, sporting their Osh Kosh B'Gosh's and Pioneer hats, while nodding in agreement with the speaker every time he mentioned the stagnation of crop prices brought upon by the blistering growth of the global corn and soybean markets, particularly those in South America. The prospect of eradicating domestic crop subsidies, the endgame of free-trade advocates, would only accelerate the difficulty of traditional family farms to compete with Brazil in the global market, according to the speaker.
Which viewpoint is winning? Up until 2002, it certainly seemed as though the Norm Coleman position of "free trade for all and to all a good night" was the wave of the future. Bill Clinton and the Gingrich Congress had collaborated on the ruinous Freedom to Farm Act in the late 1990's, which was a dream come true for corporate ag barons and free-trade ideologues, but a horrific nightmare for family farms facing imminent extinction from diminishing crop subsidy rates. The hemorrhaging was so bad that both political parties embraced a full-throttle return to farm socialism as a calculus for keeping their electoral prospects alive in 2002 and beyond. The Farm Bill passed late in the summer of 2002 undid virtually everything from Freedom to Farm, spiking subsidies to unprecedented levels and, as a bone to corporate ag barons, encouraging mass overproduction of nearly every commodity to maintain the "cheap food policy". The result: taxpayers finance the survival of family farms through subsidies which in turn churn out a surplus of product that ADM and Cargill use to deliver food on our store shelves at lower prices than the global standard. It's massively inefficient, but probably the least destructive policy our government can endorse in that the sociological impact of a mass depopulation of rural America that would inevitably follow a social Darwinist farm policy such as Freedom to Farm.
The irony of course is that farmers, a constituency celebrated as a slice-of-apple pie industry full of tireless entrepreneurs, are the only demographic in America enjoying a business model that is unapologetic socialism. This is nothing new, however, as farmers have been on the forefront of ushering in progressive economic reforms dating back to early 20th century populist (and often socialist) firebrands like Eugene Debs, William Jennings Bryan, and Minnesota's own Elmer Benson, founder of the left-wing Farmer-Labor Party which would merge with the Democrats in 1944 to become the DFL. Benson helped organize thousands of militant farmers in west-central Minnesota and northeastern South Dakota throughout the early 20th century, urging them to "raise less corn and more hell". His impact remains in the region today as DFL loyalties and left-of-center economic views continue to be solid among the aging farmers and their offspring in and around Montevideo, Wheaton, and a number of other sparsely-populated areas, especially Benson's native Swift County, where effigies to the late Paul Wellstone can still be seen in the yards of small farmers on remote backroads. The farm politics of Eugene Debs' and William Jennings Bryan's native Kansas, however, is decidedly less leftist than that of its predecessors' tradition.
Another wing of the farm community warming up to Democratic politics and are the sugar growers, mostly because they're souring (no pun intended) on the same free trade policy being celebrated by large-scale farmers. Sugar growers are unique in that they enjoy a closed market, largely insulated from most foreign competition that corn, wheat, cotton, and soybean farmers are forced to compete with. This "sugar cartel" was broken up a bit last year with the signing of the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which was fiercely opposed by sugar growers and even the corporate sugar processors from Minnesota to Louisiana to Florida to Hawaii, who fear the domestic sugar industry will be vaporized if foreign growers saturate the American market with cheap sugar and price American growers out of existence. I'm not sure why the sugar industry sees itself as more fragile to global market forces than any other agriculture commodity, but I'll gladly welcome them into the Democratic Party.
And on that front, there has been some progress. In 2004, a very conservative district of southern Louisiana elected Democratic sugar company executive Charlie Melancon to Congress. Melancon was a leader in the anti-CAFTA efforts, which came up short by a mere two votes. However, the conservative social values of the rank-and-file in the sugar industry kept them from straying from George Bush, suicidally, in the 2004 election. Al Gore got destroyed in sugar county (except for Hawaii) in 2000, and the needle barely moved at all in John Kerry's favor in 2004, despite relentless pleas from industry leaders that their livelihoods were at risk because of CAFTA. Perhaps sugar growers in the Red River Valley shared by Minnesota and North Dakota will have learned their lesson in time for the 2006 midterms (particularly as it pertains to CAFTA-loving Minnesota Senate candidate Mark Kennedy), but I'm certainly not convinced. I made the mistake of predicting seismic swings in Kerry's favor in sugar country two years ago, only to be disappointed by a mere trickle of additional blueness.
The long-term trendline for agriculture is mass consolidation, but current farm programs ensure that the pattern is likely to continue to occur in slow motion. The long-feared prospect of three corporations controlling the vast majority of U.S. agriculture isn't right around the corner, but still probably inevitable due to global market forces and a diminishing ability to finance massive crop subsidies to every small farmer in America. The sociological impact of such a pattern would destroy rural America in every conceivable way that it could be destroyed, so I'm grateful that it appears not to be on the near-term horizon. And since farmers constitute such a tiny percentage of the American population in the 21st century, a left-wing uprising similar to that of the Eugene Debs and William Jennings Bryan era seems very unlikely.
For the next quarter century, it certainly appears that most American farmers will continue to be propped up by a gargantuan farm welfare system promoting overproduction and continuity of the "cheap food program". Fewer farmers will be sacrificed on the altar of corporate consolidation and global market forces this way, but at the expense of having to function in the same unforgiving economic reality that the 99% of Americans who don't work in agriculture have to. Politically, the only way farmers will be subjected to such real world economic forces is if some of the free-market ideologues that the majority of them continue to elect to government actually apply market principles to agriculture. But having tried to in the Freedom to Farm-era and getting smacked down by angry and endangered farmers, it's unlikely market-loving politicians will make that mistake again any time soon.
The conventional wisdom is that farmers are a homogenously Republican voting bloc. In most of the country, that is quickly becoming the case as small farms are consolidated into the hands of corporate agricultural giants. The populist economic interests of the Norman Rockwell-era farmers are being superceded by the free trade and overproduction interests of ag conglomerates. In the Upper Midwest, where I hail, there are still a disproportionately high number of "bib overalls" farmers tending their 300-500 acres, as yet untainted by the tentacles of corporate ag.....and the politics of our rural areas reflect it.
The issue of free trade seems to be where the battle lines are most markedly drawn, and a couple case studies from my ag reporting days highlighted the disconnect. In the summer of 2002, a large seed company in the Mankato area hosted then Minnesota Senate candidate Norm Coleman, who delivered a stump speech to a crowd full of "ag suits" espousing the mystical inerrancies of free trade in expanding global markets for Minnesota producers. Certainly most well-connected seed companies and corporate livestock producers do stand to make a killing in the global agriculture market based upon the quality (and quantity) of product that their well-oiled machines are able to produce.
A couple of years later, however, I attended a different ag seminar (also in Mankato) hosted by a well-spoken critic of current and future free trade agreements that Coleman has been praising two years earlier. The crowd could not have been more different from those at the Coleman rally, sporting their Osh Kosh B'Gosh's and Pioneer hats, while nodding in agreement with the speaker every time he mentioned the stagnation of crop prices brought upon by the blistering growth of the global corn and soybean markets, particularly those in South America. The prospect of eradicating domestic crop subsidies, the endgame of free-trade advocates, would only accelerate the difficulty of traditional family farms to compete with Brazil in the global market, according to the speaker.
Which viewpoint is winning? Up until 2002, it certainly seemed as though the Norm Coleman position of "free trade for all and to all a good night" was the wave of the future. Bill Clinton and the Gingrich Congress had collaborated on the ruinous Freedom to Farm Act in the late 1990's, which was a dream come true for corporate ag barons and free-trade ideologues, but a horrific nightmare for family farms facing imminent extinction from diminishing crop subsidy rates. The hemorrhaging was so bad that both political parties embraced a full-throttle return to farm socialism as a calculus for keeping their electoral prospects alive in 2002 and beyond. The Farm Bill passed late in the summer of 2002 undid virtually everything from Freedom to Farm, spiking subsidies to unprecedented levels and, as a bone to corporate ag barons, encouraging mass overproduction of nearly every commodity to maintain the "cheap food policy". The result: taxpayers finance the survival of family farms through subsidies which in turn churn out a surplus of product that ADM and Cargill use to deliver food on our store shelves at lower prices than the global standard. It's massively inefficient, but probably the least destructive policy our government can endorse in that the sociological impact of a mass depopulation of rural America that would inevitably follow a social Darwinist farm policy such as Freedom to Farm.
The irony of course is that farmers, a constituency celebrated as a slice-of-apple pie industry full of tireless entrepreneurs, are the only demographic in America enjoying a business model that is unapologetic socialism. This is nothing new, however, as farmers have been on the forefront of ushering in progressive economic reforms dating back to early 20th century populist (and often socialist) firebrands like Eugene Debs, William Jennings Bryan, and Minnesota's own Elmer Benson, founder of the left-wing Farmer-Labor Party which would merge with the Democrats in 1944 to become the DFL. Benson helped organize thousands of militant farmers in west-central Minnesota and northeastern South Dakota throughout the early 20th century, urging them to "raise less corn and more hell". His impact remains in the region today as DFL loyalties and left-of-center economic views continue to be solid among the aging farmers and their offspring in and around Montevideo, Wheaton, and a number of other sparsely-populated areas, especially Benson's native Swift County, where effigies to the late Paul Wellstone can still be seen in the yards of small farmers on remote backroads. The farm politics of Eugene Debs' and William Jennings Bryan's native Kansas, however, is decidedly less leftist than that of its predecessors' tradition.
Another wing of the farm community warming up to Democratic politics and are the sugar growers, mostly because they're souring (no pun intended) on the same free trade policy being celebrated by large-scale farmers. Sugar growers are unique in that they enjoy a closed market, largely insulated from most foreign competition that corn, wheat, cotton, and soybean farmers are forced to compete with. This "sugar cartel" was broken up a bit last year with the signing of the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which was fiercely opposed by sugar growers and even the corporate sugar processors from Minnesota to Louisiana to Florida to Hawaii, who fear the domestic sugar industry will be vaporized if foreign growers saturate the American market with cheap sugar and price American growers out of existence. I'm not sure why the sugar industry sees itself as more fragile to global market forces than any other agriculture commodity, but I'll gladly welcome them into the Democratic Party.
And on that front, there has been some progress. In 2004, a very conservative district of southern Louisiana elected Democratic sugar company executive Charlie Melancon to Congress. Melancon was a leader in the anti-CAFTA efforts, which came up short by a mere two votes. However, the conservative social values of the rank-and-file in the sugar industry kept them from straying from George Bush, suicidally, in the 2004 election. Al Gore got destroyed in sugar county (except for Hawaii) in 2000, and the needle barely moved at all in John Kerry's favor in 2004, despite relentless pleas from industry leaders that their livelihoods were at risk because of CAFTA. Perhaps sugar growers in the Red River Valley shared by Minnesota and North Dakota will have learned their lesson in time for the 2006 midterms (particularly as it pertains to CAFTA-loving Minnesota Senate candidate Mark Kennedy), but I'm certainly not convinced. I made the mistake of predicting seismic swings in Kerry's favor in sugar country two years ago, only to be disappointed by a mere trickle of additional blueness.
The long-term trendline for agriculture is mass consolidation, but current farm programs ensure that the pattern is likely to continue to occur in slow motion. The long-feared prospect of three corporations controlling the vast majority of U.S. agriculture isn't right around the corner, but still probably inevitable due to global market forces and a diminishing ability to finance massive crop subsidies to every small farmer in America. The sociological impact of such a pattern would destroy rural America in every conceivable way that it could be destroyed, so I'm grateful that it appears not to be on the near-term horizon. And since farmers constitute such a tiny percentage of the American population in the 21st century, a left-wing uprising similar to that of the Eugene Debs and William Jennings Bryan era seems very unlikely.
For the next quarter century, it certainly appears that most American farmers will continue to be propped up by a gargantuan farm welfare system promoting overproduction and continuity of the "cheap food program". Fewer farmers will be sacrificed on the altar of corporate consolidation and global market forces this way, but at the expense of having to function in the same unforgiving economic reality that the 99% of Americans who don't work in agriculture have to. Politically, the only way farmers will be subjected to such real world economic forces is if some of the free-market ideologues that the majority of them continue to elect to government actually apply market principles to agriculture. But having tried to in the Freedom to Farm-era and getting smacked down by angry and endangered farmers, it's unlikely market-loving politicians will make that mistake again any time soon.
posted by Mark at 5:18 PM
1 Comments:
Interesting insight on a part of America I, as a suburban girl my whole life, have not seen save a couple of visits to orange groves near my grandparent's house, in the county named after them.
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