Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America

By Wenonah Hauter

“A meticulously researched tour de force” on politics, big agriculture, and the need to go beyond farmers’ markets to find fixes (Publishers Weekly).
 
Wenonah Hauter owns an organic family farm that provides healthy vegetables to hundreds of families as part of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement. Yet, as a leading healthy-food advocate, Hauter believes that the local food movement is not enough to solve America’s food crisis and the public health debacle it has created. In Foodopoly, she takes aim at the real culprit: the control of food production by a handful of large corporations—backed by political clout—that prevents farmers from raising healthy crops and limits the choices people can make in the grocery store.
 
Blending history, reporting, and a deep understanding of farming and food production, Foodopoly is a shocking, revealing account of the business behind the meat, vegetables, grains, and milk most Americans eat every day, including some of our favorite and most respected organic and health-conscious brands. Hauter also pulls the curtain back from the little-understood but vital realm of agricultural policy, showing how it has been hijacked by lobbyists, driving out independent farmers and food processors in favor of the likes of Cargill, Tyson, Kraft, and ConAgra.
 
Foodopoly shows how the impacts ripple far and wide, from economic stagnation in rural communities to famines overseas, and argues that solving this crisis will require a complete structural shift—a change that is about politics, not just personal choice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781595587947

Book preview

FOODOPOLY

FOODOPOLY

The Battle Over the Future of

Food and Farming in America

Wenonah Hauter

© 2012 by Wenonah Hauter

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission

from the publisher.

Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to:

Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

Chapter 3 draws from the 2012 Food & Water Watch report Why Walmart Can’t Fix the Food System.

Chapter 4 draws from the 2011 Food & Water Watch report A Decade of Dangerous Food Imports from China.

Chapters 8, 9, and 10 draw from the 2010 Food & Water Watch report Factory Farm Nation: How America Turned Its Livestock Farms into Factories.

Chapter 9 draws from the 2008 Food & Water Watch report The Trouble with Smithfield: A Company Profile.

Chapter 13 draws from the 2012 Food & Water Watch report Genetically Engineered Foods: An Overview.

Chapter 16 draws from the 2012 Food & Water Watch report Farm Bill 101.

Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2012

Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Hauter, Wenonah.

Foodopoly : the battle over the future of food and farming in America / Wenonah Hauter.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59558-794-7 (e-book)

1. Food supply—United States. 2. Agricultural industries—United States. 3. Agriculture—Economic aspects—United States. I. Title. II. Title: Battle over the future of food and farming in America.

HD9005.H358 2012

338.10973—dc23 2012025605

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This book is dedicated to

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Farm and Food Policy Run Amok

1. Get Those Boys Off the Farm!

Part II: Consolidating Every Link in the Food Chain

2. The Junk Food Pushers

3. Walmarting the Food Chain

Part III: The Produce and Organics Industries: Putting Profits Before People

4. The Green Giant Doesn’t Live in California Anymore

5. Organic Food: The Paradox

Part IV: Deregulating Food Safety

6. Poisoning People

7. Animals on Drugs

Part V: The Story of Factory Farms

8. Cowboys Versus Meatpackers: The Last Roundup

9. Hogging the Profits

10. Modern-Day Serfs

11. Milking the System

Part VI: Corporate Control of the Gene Pool: The Theft of Life

12. Life for Sale: The Birth of Life Science Companies

13. David Versus Goliath

14. The Future of Food: Science Fiction or Nature?

Part VII: Building the Political Power to Challenge the Foodopoly

15. Eat and Act Your Politics

16. The Way Forward

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So many people have helped make this book possible.

I could never have completed Foodopoly without the help of my really smart, talented, and wonderful research assistant, Lily Boyce. She was always cheerful and efficient, spent months creating the charts and graphics featured in this book, and helped tirelessly with research. Lily is a star!

I want to acknowledge and thank the extraordinary staff of Food & Water Watch. I owe an intellectual debt to Patrick Woodall, our brilliant and talented research director, for his deep thinking, number crunching, and research, and for being a patient and supportive sounding board as I struggled through the complex web of issues that have created the dysfunctional food system. A special thanks to Patty Lovera, director of the food program, who is incredibly knowledgeable on a broad range of issues, and who helped tremendously with many aspects of this project. Many thanks to Darcey Rakestraw, communications director, who was enormously supportive in so many ways during this project, including helping with editing. I am grateful to Lisa Mastny, who was extremely helpful with editing and with suggestions for clarity, making this dense material more readable. My colleague Lane Brooks, the chief operating officer, took over many of my duties and responsibilities as I wrote this book. I am forever thankful to him for his good judgment and for being a calm, dependable, and good-humored partner in running Food & Water Watch.

I greatly appreciate the wonderful Food & Water Watch staff, who provided research and technical support, covered for me during this long project, and offered endless moral support: Sarah Alexander, Dave Andrews, Sarah Borron, Royelen Boykie, Jon Brown, Tony Corbo, Zach Corrigan, Scott Edwards, Noelle Ferdon, Clay Gatewood, Anna Ghosh, Kim Girton, Mitch Jones, Doug Lakey, Michele Merkel, Eve Mitchell, Rachel Nissley, Darcey O’Callaghan, Matt Ohloff, Genna Reed, Mark Schlosberg, Ben Schumin, Tim Schwab, Adam Scow, Tyler Shannon, Elanor Starmer, Yi Wang, Anna Witowaska, Emily Wurth, Gabriella Zanzanaini, and Ron Zucker.

I am deeply grateful to Helaine and Sid Lerner for their confidence in and encouragement and support for this project. I can truly say that without their dedication to the creation of a better food system, this book would never have been written and so much important work would never be done. A special thanks to GRACE Communications Foundation for ongoing support and assistance with so many areas of my work: Scott Cullen; Leslie Hatfield; Lisa Kleger; Destin Layne; and the staff of the Eat Well Guide, the Meatrix, and Sustainable Table. I am so appreciative of the support and encouragement from Joan and Bob Rechnitz, who have had the great foresight to understand that nature should not be financialized and that extreme forms of energy threaten our food and water.

This book would not have been possible without the knowledge and perspectives of the many people that I interviewed and provided material for the book. I am indebted to the following people for taking the time to speak with me and provide valuable insight and information: Mark Arax, John Bunting, Ben Burkett, Mike Callicrate, Lloyd Carter, Dale Coke, Joaquin Contente, Roberta Cook, Agatha D’Esterhazy, Cap Dierks, Diane Endicott, Hugh Espey, Larry Ginter, Joel Greeno, Andrew Gunther, Sean Hallahan, Kyal Hamilton, John Hansen, Michael Hansen, Diane Hatz, Gary Hoskey, Frederick Kaufman, Kurt Kelsey, Robby Kenner, Kendra Kimbirauskas, John Kinsman, Garry Klicker, Judy Labelle, Anna Lappé, Dr. Robert Lawrence, Ray Leon, Scott Marlow, Michael Masters, Mas Masumoto, Larry Mitchell, Carole Morrison, Dr. Keeve Nachmann, George Naylor, Dr. Marion Nestle, Felicia Nestor, Harvey Nijjer, Kathy Ozer, Stan Painter, Rhonda Perry, Michael Pertschuk, Chris Peterson, Dr. Daryll Ray, Matt Rogers, Valerie Ruddle, Rebecca Spector, Steven Stoll, Dr. Robert Taylor, Warren Taylor, Bruce von Stein, Lori Wallach, Dr. David Wallinga, Mike Weaver, Tom Willey, Brad Wilson, Donna Winburn, and Mark Winne.

I am extremely grateful to Marc Favreau, my editor at The New Press, for having the confidence in this project and for helping me every step of the way. I am so very fortunate to have had Marc shepherding this project. His patience and understanding have made this experience a pleasure. Thank you also to my production editor, Sarah Fan, who along with Marc provided an experienced eye with editing and made this a much better book than it would have been otherwise. I am grateful to Rachel Burd for the thorough and painstaking copyediting. Thank you also to Azzurra Cox and all of the other helpful staff of The New Press.

Many thanks to my dear friend and colleague Maude Barlow, who saw the value of this book when it was just an idea and who helped make it possible with important introductions and ongoing moral support when the going got tough. I appreciate the advice, positive reinforcement, and camaraderie of my colleague and dear friend Lisa Shubert, who was always available with a kind word.

I am fortunate to have been trained by the brilliant organizers of the Midwest Academy, who taught me that the only way we can bring about long-term progressive change is by building political power, and that it takes a long-term grassroots organizing strategy. I owe Steve Max, Jackie Kendall, and David Hunt a deep debt of gratitude for years of organizing mentoring.

I spent almost a decade working for Public Citizen, a group that Ralph Nader founded forty years ago. I am grateful to Ralph for helping to shape my worldview and for his decades of fighting the foodopoly, among so many other injustices. He also had the wisdom and foresight to help support and publish the landmark book by the late Al Krebs, The Corporate Reapers: The Book of Agribusiness. In writing Foodopoly, I drew freely from Al’s work. Those of us in the fair food and farm movement miss him deeply. His knowledge and insight on agriculture and farm policy—from the 1770s to 1990—was unmatched.

I also owe an intellectual debt to social scientists Dr. Bill Heffernan and Dr. Mary Hendrickson, who were pioneers in documenting the foodopoly. Their excellent research on consolidation in the food system and the impact this has had on farmers and consumers laid the groundwork for this book.

I want to acknowledge Tim Wise, director of research and policy at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, whose important work on farm income and rural development provided the underpinning for many of my arguments on agriculture policy. Likewise, I would like to recognize Dr. Daryll E. Ray, director of the Agricultural Policy Analysis Center at the University of Tennessee, for his decades of work on farm policy, which provided the basis for my analysis on the negative role of overproduction on our food system and recommendations for changes in policy.

I am very appreciative of Harriet Barlow, who emanates wisdom on the commons and helped facilitate my opportunity to spend a delightful and idyllic month at the Blue Mountain Center, during which time several chapters of this book were written. The center’s staff—Ben Strader, Alice Gordon, Sis Eldridge, Diane McCane, Nico Horvitz, and Jamie Barret Riley—made the writer’s retreat an enjoyable and productive experience, as did all of the interesting people who were part of the residency program.

With all my heart I am so thankful to have loving and supportive friends and family, who have been patient and enormously understanding over the last year while I was completely absorbed in this project. My beloved children, Adrina Miller and Che Miller, always my most enthusiastic cheerleaders, provided constant love, care, and encouragement. I am so lucky that our family bonds are deepened by mutual respect and friendship.

My dear stepdaughter and friend, Christy Nichols, texted or e-mailed me almost daily with uplifting messages to spur me on and sent me flowers to brighten the day. I so deeply appreciate her kindness and positive reinforcement. My cherished friend of four decades Sue Hays and her husband, Tom Hays, never ceased to offer support, care, and delicious meals. My extended family and friends—Erin Dougherty, Alton Dulaney, Debbie and Wayne Hauter, Kelsie Kerr, Pat Lewis, Kathy and Chip Reid, Mary Ricci, Leo and Jan Scolforo, and Kelly Wolf—were all helpful and supportive through the different phases of this project. I am grateful for the young people in my life, who inspire me to keep on fighting for a better world: Mark and L.J. Hilberath; Tyler, Christian, and Bennett Nichols; and Jackson Wolf.

Lastly, I must thank the farmer in my life, my loving husband, Leigh, who tutored me in politics and has been my friend, companion, and comrade. We have shared almost three decades in the struggles not only for a fair food system but also for social, economic, and environmental justice.

INTRODUCTION

In 1963 my dad bought a ramshackle farm with rich but extremely rocky soil in the rural Bull Run Mountains of Virginia, forty miles southwest of Washington, D.C. Today it is on the verge of suburbia.

He grew up in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, rode the rails, and eventually, in his late fifties, found his way back to the land. So we moved to what was then a very rural landscape—a place culturally a world away from the nation’s capital and physically linked only indirectly by two-lane roads. Our old farmhouse, with a mile-long rutted driveway accessible only by four-wheel drive, was off another dirt road and had no electricity or plumbing. Eventually my dad did manage to get the local rural electricity co-op to put in poles and hook up power, but he never did get around to installing indoor plumbing.

He was an unusual man—a religious iconoclast and an organic gardener at a time when few people knew the term. He was considered a crank and a hobby farmer, if you can call it that, growing a few vegetables and keeping bees. His wild-blossom honey was the only vaguely successful part of his farming venture. My dad, who died in 1991 at the age of eighty-one, would be shocked now to see both his farm and the massive development around it.

Today the hundred acres of mostly wooded land is bordered by a megamansion subdivision on one side and an expensive gated community a mile away as the crow flies. Thousands of town houses and new subdivisions have cropped up where once there were fields dotted with cows. This has brought on the box stores, including Walmart and fast-food joints—blights on the once bucolic rural landscape. A major highway, I-66, recently engineered to be either six or eight lanes depending on the location, means we can zip into the nation’s capital during the rare times that commuters are not clogging the road.

Since 1997, my husband has run the farm as a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program, feeding five hundred families each season with subscription vegetables grown using organic practices. It’s a successful family business that suits my activist husband, who taught high school and college and worked for public interest organizations, but who really prefers the challenge of farming without chemicals. It works financially, because we own the land outright, and because we live near a major metropolitan area where urban and suburban residents are seeking greater authenticity in the food they eat. They want their children to see where food comes from and to learn that chickens enjoy living together in a pasture. We often joke that for most people the CSA is more about having a farm to visit than the vegetables.

As a healthy-food advocate, I feel privileged to have grown up a rural person and to have had the real-life experience of pulling weeds, squishing potato bugs, canning vegetables, gutting a chicken, baking bread, and chopping wood for the cookstove. As a teenager I felt deprived, but as an adult I am grateful to know where food comes from and how much work it takes to produce it. My family is also extremely lucky that my dad bought almost worthless land in the 1960s that today is located near a major metropolitan area populated by a largely affluent and educated population. But most farmers, or people aspiring to be farmers, aren’t so lucky. Fortunately, farmers’ markets and similar venues help capture the excitement and nostalgia for farming, and for a simpler and healthier lifestyle, and they are delightful for the customers and can be profitable for farmers.

But despite my firsthand knowledge of and appreciation for the immense benefits of CSAs and farmers’ markets, they are only a small part of the fix for our dysfunctional food system. Food hubs, which aggregate and distribute local food, are beneficial for participating farmers and the purchasing food establishment. But, so far, they must be subsidized by nonprofits or local governments because they are not self-sustaining. We must delve deeper into the history of the food system to have the knowledge to fix it. I decided to write this book because understanding the heartbreaking story of how we got here is not only fascinating but necessary for creating the road map for changing the way we eat.

The food system is in a crisis because of the way that food is produced and the consolidation and organization of the industry itself. Solving it means we must move beyond the focus on consumer choice to examine the corporate, scientific, industrial, and political structures that support an unhealthy system. Combating this is going to take more than personal choice and voting with our forks—it’s going to take old-fashioned political activism. This book aims to show what the problem is and why we must do much more than create food hubs or find more opportunities for farmers to sell directly to consumers. We must address head-on the foodopoly—the handful of corporations that control our food system from seeds to dinner plates.

While the rhetoric in our nation is all about competition and the free market, public policy is geared toward enabling a small cabal of companies to control every aspect of our food system. Today, twenty food corporations produce most of the food eaten by Americans, even organic brands. Four large chains, including Walmart, control more than half of all grocery store sales. One company dominates the organic grocery industry, and one distribution company has a stranglehold on getting organic products into communities around the country.

Further, science has been allowed to run amok; the biotechnology industry has become so powerful that it can literally buy public policy. Scientists have been allowed to move forward without adequate regulation, and they are now manipulating the genomes of all living things—microorganisms, seeds, fish, and animals. This has enabled corporations to gain control over the basic building blocks of life, threatening the integrity of our global genetic commons and our collective food security. Biotechnology has moved into the world of science fiction, as scientists actually seek to create life-forms and commercialize them. Reining in and regulating the biotechnology industry is critical to reforming the dysfunctional food system.

These structural flaws are often overlooked by the good-food movement, which focuses on creating an alternative model from the ground up that will eventually overtake the dysfunctional system. However, this approach raises the question: for whom and how many? A look at the most recent statistics on local food illustrates this point. A November 2011 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, using 2008 data (the most recent available), found: Despite increased production and consumer interest, locally grown food accounts for a small segment of U.S. agriculture. For local foods production to continue to grow, marketing channels and supply chain infrastructure must deepen.¹

The study found that levels of direct marketing to consumers are highest in the Northeast, on the West Coast, and in a few isolated urban areas outside these regions. Direct marketing of local foods to consumers at farmers’ markets and CSAs, along with local food sales to grocery stores and restaurants, generated $4.8 billion in sales in 2008.² This figure is infinitesimal in comparison to the $1,229 trillion in overall sales from grocery stores, convenience stores, food service companies, and restaurants.

According to the USDA, only 5 percent of the farms selling into the local food marketplace are large farms (with over $250,000 in annual sales), but these large farms provided 93 percent of the local foods in supermarkets and restaurants. Eighty-one percent of farms selling local food are small, with under $50,000 in annual sales, and 14 percent of farms selling local foods are medium-sized, with $50,000 to $250,000 in sales. The small and medium-sized farms sell nearly three quarters of the direct-to-consumer local foods (both CSAs and farmers’ markets) but only 7 percent of the local foods in supermarkets and restaurants. Although the 5,300 large farms averaged $772,000 in local food sales, small farms sold only $7,800 and medium-sized farms sold only $70,000 local foods on average.³

Of special significance is the finding that over half of all farms that sell locally are located near metropolitan counties, compared to only a third of all U.S. farms. This illustrates the difficulty that farmers who grow corn, soy, wheat, and other feed or cereal grains for commodity markets have in converting their farming operations to direct sales to consumers. These farmers sell crops that reenter the food system as a component of another food—as a sweetener, an oil, a starch, or as feed for animals. The lack of a local market, a distribution network, or in many cases the infrastructure needed to harvest, aggregate, or process local foods is also a tremendous hindrance to creating an alternative food system.

Look at a map of the large agricultural middle of this nation to understand that the few remaining farmers who grow the millions of acres of corn and soybeans, fencerow to fencerow, do not live where they can sell directly to the consumer. Most farmers don’t have nearby affluent urban areas to which to market their crops. They can’t switch from commodities to vegetables and fruit even if they had a market, because they have invested in the equipment needed to plant and harvest corn and soy, not lettuce, broccoli, or tomatoes.

Overly simplistic solutions are often put forward by some leaders in the good-food movement that take the focus away from the root causes of the food crisis—deregulation, consolidation, and control of the food supply by a few powerful companies. One of the most prevalent policy solutions put forward as a fix for the dysfunctional system is the elimination of farm subsidies. This silver bullet prescription implies that a few greedy farmers have engineered a farm policy that allows them to live high off the hog on government payments, while small farms languish with no support. Proponents of this response say that if we remove these misapplied subsidies to these few large farms, the system will right itself.

Unfortunately, the good-food movement has been taken in by an oversimplified and distorted analysis of farm data. It is based on a misinterpretation of misleading U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics that greatly exaggerate the number of full-time family farm operations. A close look at the USDA’s Census of Agriculture shows that one third of the 2.2 million entities counted as farms by the agency have sales of under $1,000 and almost two thirds earn under $10,000 a year. These small business ventures are counted even though they are far from being full-time farming operations. In most cases these are rural residences, not farms, and the owners are retired or have significant off-farm income. They have a part-time agriculture-based business as part of their rural lifestyle—anything from having a vineyard to growing flowers or mushrooms.

Counting these small ventures as farms not only skews the statistics on the number of farms in the United States; it also makes it appear that only a small percentage receive government payments. In reality, we have under a million full-time farms left, and almost all of them, small and large, receive government subsidies. This is not to say that the subsidy system is good policy. Rather that it is a symptom of a broken food production system, not the cause of the problems. If we penalize farmers for policies that the powerful grain traders, food processors, and meat industry have lobbied for, we will never create a sustainable food system. We need midsize farming operations to survive and to be transitioned into a sustainable food system.

Midsize family farmers have an average income of $19,277—a figure that includes a government subsidy.⁴ The cost of seeds, fertilizers, fuel, and other inputs is continuing to rise as these industries become more monopolized. Most farmers are scratching by, trying to hold on to their land and eke out a living. We are losing these farms at a rapid rate, resulting in the consolidation of smaller farms into huge corporate-run industrial operations with full-time managers and contract labor. Telling these farmers that all they have to do once the subsidies are taken away is grow vegetables for the local farmers’ market is not a real solution for them or their communities. Rural communities are seeing the wealth and the profit from agriculture sucked into the bottom lines of the largest food corporations in the world.

Economically viable farms are the lifeblood of rural areas. Their earnings generate an economic multiplier effect when supplies are bought locally, and the money stays within the community. The loss of nearly 1.4 million cattle, hog, and dairy farms over the past thirty years has drained not only the economic base from America’s rural communities, but their vitality. These areas have become impoverished and abandoned, and the only hopes for jobs are from extractive industries such as hydraulic fracturing or from building and staffing prisons.

Something is fundamentally amiss in a society that does not value or cherish authentic food that is grown full time on appropriate-size family farms. The benefits of farmers—rather than corporate managers—tending crops and the land are many. Fred Kirschenmann, a North Dakota farmer and a leader in the sustainable agriculture movement, along with his colleagues at the Agriculture in the Middle project write extensively on this point and poignantly outline the benefits of these vulnerable midsize farms in today’s economic landscape. They fall between the large, vertically operated commodity operations and the small-scale ones that sell directly to consumers. Farms in the middle also provide wildlife habitats, open spaces, diverse landscapes, soils that hold rainwater for aquifers, perennials that reduce greenhouse gases by removing carbon from the atmosphere, and crop and pastureland that reduce erosion and flooding.⁵

These are the farms that could be changed to provide sustainably grown organic food for the long term. Many are located in the Midwest and South, where there is no large population to buy directly from them, but they have the capacity to produce food for the majority of Americans—if given a chance.

Changing farm policy to provide that chance is key to preventing our nation’s rural areas from becoming industrial sites and to truly remaking the food system for all Americans. We must address the major structural problems that have created the dysfunction—from the failure to enforce antitrust laws and regulate genetically modified food to the manipulation of nutrition standards and the marketing of junk food to children. We need to move beyond stereotypes and simplistic solutions if we are to build a movement that is broad-based enough to drive policy changes.

Most people are several generations away from the experience of producing their own food. This leads to many misconceptions—from over-romanticizing its hard, backbreaking work to the dismissal of farmers as greedy, ignorant, and selfish welfare queens. Understanding the difficult challenges they face is critical to developing the policy solutions necessary for saving family farms and moving into a sustainable future. We need to develop a rural economic development plan that enables farmers to make a living while at the same time providing healthy, affordable food choices for all Americans.

We have the opportunity, before it is too late, to change the course of our food system’s development away from factory farms and laboratories and toward a system that is ecologically and economically sound. We can challenge the monopoly control by fighting for the reinstatement of antitrust laws and enforcement of them. We have the land and the human capacity to grow real food—healthy food—but it will take a wholesale effort that includes restructuring how food is grown, sold, and distributed. It means organizing a movement to hold our policy makers accountable, so that food and farm policy is transformed and environmental, health, and safety laws are obeyed.

It will require a massive grassroots mobilization to challenge the multinational corporations that profit from holding consumers and farmers hostage and, more important, to hold our elected officials accountable for the policies that are making us sick and fat. We must comprehend the complexity of the problem to advocate for the solutions. We cannot shop our way out of this mess. The local-food movement is uplifting and inspiring and represents positive steps in the right direction. But now it’s time for us to marshal our forces and do more than vote with our forks. Changing our food system is a political act.

We must build the political power to do so. It is a matter of survival.

Note: Full-color versions of the graphics that appear throughout the book are available at www.foodandwaterwatch.org/foodopoly-infographics/.

PART I

Farm and Food Policy Run Amok

The dysfunctional food system that we suffer from today is the result of longstanding farm and food policies that were first proposed by some of the most powerful men in the country shortly after World War II. These men envisioned a future in which most young rural men would supply cheap labor for manufacturing in the industrial North rather than continuing to farm, and in which a small number of large industrialized farms would supply the necessary food. They foresaw a future in which food production would be globalized for economic efficiency and the free market would create the cheap inputs necessary for processed food. The visions that these powerful men had in the late 1940s and early 1950s were eventually enshrined in federal farm policy and in global trade agreements.

1

GET THOSE BOYS OFF THE FARM!

Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

—William Jennings Bryan, Cross of Gold speech, July 9, 1896

Although most consumers—eaters—view food first and foremost as the sustenance necessary for life, Big Business thinks of our kitchens and stomachs as profit centers. The unwavering determination by the leaders of a handful of powerful multinational corporations to concentrate ownership and control of the food production and delivery systems has created unprecedented consolidation down the entire food chain. Food and agricultural products have been reduced to a form of currency on income statements that cause a rise or fall of quarterly profits. The worth of these products is measured on the return on investment, or as an opportunity for mergers or acquisitions, that drive the strategy of the parent company. Their value is described in a Wall Street–speak of deals, synergies, diversification, and blockbuster game changers.

Even hedge funds, those poorly regulated firms that played a role in causing the recent financial crisis, have become some of the largest investors in food companies, farmland, and agricultural products. These firms invest the money of high-wealth individuals and institutions into broad segments of the economy—including food and agriculture. They have speculated in food commodity markets (contributing to price spikes in corn and soybeans) and bought restaurant chains (Dunkin’ Donuts), and are buying up farmland in the United States and the developing world. A private investment company even owns Niman Ranch, the firm that pioneered producing pork more sustainably.¹

Hedge funds have been big proponents of grabbing land—they have bought farmland worldwide—to capitalize on expectations of profitability from the catastrophic impacts of climate change on agriculture. The dramatic increase in the price of land in the U.S. Midwest over the past few years has led the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City to warn about the crash that could result from a farmland bubble. The U.S. Senate’s Agriculture Committee warns that distortions in financial markets will catch the country by surprise again.

This financialization of food and farming has wreaked havoc on the natural world. The long list of the consequences of industrialized agriculture includes the polluting of lakes, rivers, streams, and marine ecosystems with agrochemicals, excess fertilizer, and animal waste. Nutrient runoff (nitrogen and phosphorus) from row crops and animal factory farms, one of the foremost causes of the conditions that starve waterways and the ocean of oxygen, is creating massive dead areas of the ocean, such as one at the mouth of the Mississippi River the size of the state of New Jersey. Planting and irrigating row crops has caused serious erosion, as irrigation and rainwater wash the topsoil away at the rate of 1.3 billion tons per year. And as soil scientists are fond of saying, No soil, no life.

The relentless drive for profit by agribusiness has had long-lasting and negative effects on all aspects of society. Public health has been sacrificed on a diet of heavily advertised processed foods that are high in calories and low in nutrients, resulting in consumers who are overweight and poorly nourished. Obesity affects 35 percent of adults and 17 percent of children in the United States, and causes a range of health problems from heart disease to diabetes. And while many Americans are overfed and dieting, one in six Americans frequently goes hungry.

No segment of society has been more affected by agribusiness and its allies in government over the past sixty years than farmers. After World War II, farmers became the target of subtle but ruthless policies aimed at reducing their numbers, thereby creating a large and cheap labor pool. In more recent times, federal policy has been focused on reducing the number of farms as labor has been replaced by capital and technology. In 1935, 54 percent of the population lived on 6.8 million farms; between 1950 and 1970, farm populations declined by more than one-half. Today under a million farms produce the bulk of the food produced in the United States, and farmers are less than 1 percent of the nation’s population.

The struggle to eke out a living has intensified each decade since 1950, because farmers have been locked into a system of low crop prices, borrowed capital, large debt, high land prices, and a weak safety net. Unchecked corporate mergers and acquisitions have increased the economic pressure, since fewer firms are competing to sell the seeds, equipment, and supplies that farmers use every day. At the same time, they have few choices where to sell their products. A handful of agribusiness and food industry multinational corporations stand between the farmers who produce the food and the more than 300 million people who consume it in the United States.

Consolidation at the top of the food chain has affected every segment below, including farming. Large-scale industrial operations comprising only 12 percent of U.S. farms make up 88 percent of the value of farm production. Family farming stands on the edge of extinction; most small and medium-size farms are dependent on off-farm income for survival. Although crop prices have been higher since 2008, the increased income has been gobbled up by higher costs for seeds, chemicals, fertilizers, fuel, and feed.²

The loss of farms has caused a rural bloodletting, leaving rural towns and counties forlorn, boarded-up, and in some cases completely gone. A Los Angeles Times analysis of census data from fourteen hundred rural counties in the U.S. heartland, the region between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, found that rural areas are sparsely populated and continuing to lose people.³ When farms go out of business, the local businesses that depend on them also disappear: the implement dealers and farm supply companies and all of the stores and service providers. Hard times also mean that rural youth disappear to urban areas in search of jobs—even those who would prefer to farm and live a rural lifestyle.

Farmers have fought back against the rural exodus that has stretched over more than a century. Activists have long been engaged in a struggle with banks, railroads, and business interests over their inequitable position within the economic system. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were marked by populist uprisings against the unfair economic policies that threatened farm family livelihoods. They banded together to form organizations: as part of the Grange, the Farm Alliance, and the National Farmers Union, they organized, ran candidates, and joined with progressive allies in labor and social justice movements. Most of this story has been erased from public consciousness, especially the history of the post–World War II farm movement. Farmers were still a large and vital political force that had to be reckoned with in the 1950s. And they were willing to take militant action to protect their families and communities.

The National Farmers Organization (NFO) organized in 1955 to protest a move to reduce crop prices that was being perpetrated by President Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Ezra Benson. Benson was set on destroying the New Deal program for agriculture—measures that had been designed to ensure fair farm prices. The large and powerful grain-trading, food-processing, banking, and industrial giants had been conspiring to cut the cost of grains and to drastically reduce the number of farm families. Farmers were considered excess labor by the captains of industry—workers who should be shifted into factories, while large, highly capitalized farms produced all the foods needed for domestic consumption and for the global trade they envisioned.

In 1942, several businessmen and an advertising executive had created an organization that was to have a powerful role in shaping the post–World War II economy and society—an influence that continues to this day. They aimed to make the Committee for Economic Development (CED) a place where leaders of business could hammer out their differences on economic policy, and then use the new technique of public relations to promote their agreed-upon agenda. Among the founders were Paul Hoffman, president of Studebaker; William Benton, the inventor of modern consumer research and polling; and Marion Folsom, an Eastman Kodak executive.

All three eventually were placed in high government positions. Hoffman was appointed by President Truman to administer the Marshall Plan, the large-scale economic aid program designed to rebuild war-torn Europe and to combat communism. Later, as president of the Ford Foundation and administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, he became one of the architects of the Green Revolution.

Benton eventually left public relations and was instrumental in organizing the United Nations. He published the Encyclopedia Britannica and became a senator representing Connecticut. Folsom staffed the U.S. House Special Committee on Postwar Economic Policy and Planning. He was instrumental in developing the first tax law revision since 1874 as Eisenhower’s undersecretary of the Treasury Department in 1953 and was later appointed by Eisenhower as secretary of health, education, and welfare.

In the early 1960s the very influential CED, at that time a think tank headed by men representing Ford Motor Company and Sears, had released a report declaring that there were too many farmers. The corporate solution: get farm boys off the farm and into vocational training for industrial skills and relocated to where their labor was needed.⁴

So, in August 1962, when twenty thousand farmers convened for the annual NFO convention in Des Moines, Iowa, they were fighting mad. The CED report had only added insult to injury. Agribusiness, the food-processing industry, and the nation’s banks had been lining up over the previous decade to depress farm prices.

The release of the CED’s screed against farmers during the summer of 1962 stirred the NFO to organize catalog marches in seven cities, where protesters dumped Sears catalogs in front of their stores. Long caravans of Ford cars and trucks drove in circles around Ford establishments in several cities. Shortly thereafter, both companies disavowed the report, and hearings were held in the U.S. Senate and House agriculture committees to discredit the proposed solution to the so-called farm problem that the CED had been peddling.

The CED, operating in a quasi-public sphere, represented the most powerful economic interests in the nation. Its members called "for action by

Reviews for Foodopoly

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

3.5 Can one possibly be surprised to hear that above all money and power talks? It is apparent in almost every societal issue, that this is true. So that this is true, even in the control of the food we eat, the lack of policies that should proect us, was not a surprise, but some of this book was as we're the statistics. The loss of 1.4 cattle, hog and dairy farms in the last thirty years, didn't realize this number was so huge. Also didn't know that hedge funds were grabbing lands. That four bug grocery chains control the quality and the prices. Big corporations taking the place of individual farms, setting prices and controlling advertising. What is marketed and how to the consumer. Not at all concerned about standards, our health, our children's health, nor the long range consequences of such actions. Money is indeed king.The bottled water market, is a scan and a very money making one at that. Even when we think we are doing the right things, buying organic foods, that may not be the case. Much of our organics, even if farmers here could supply the same, the profit margin is much larger, if they are imported from other countries. Countries were safety and health standards are not the same as ours. Hence, many of the cases of ecoli, and samonella that seem to be be on our news monthly with new recalls. Knowing where your food is coming from is key, buying from local farms smart, but many just don't have access. Current anti trust laws little stop these corporations from grabbing more control, and don't act as though deterrent they should. The author feels that these laws need to be changed to better protect the consumer, and that communication between consumers and local farms need to be strengthened. Flexitarian is the word for those who are incorporating meatless days into their meal planning. Not only better for health but for the environment. The author presents much information, even graphs for comparisons. One can certainly tell where her bias is, but this doesn't mean it is wrong. In fact, after reading this, it is almost impossible not to see where we are heading, if nothing is done. Scary thoughts. Who and what are in control of feeding our families. It should be us and this book at least lets one make and informed opinion.