Insight into Industrial/ Export Agriculture and CAFTA

--Poor Farmers Starve, Rich Landowners Who Don't Even Farm Get $1.3 BILLION in Subsidies--

Between 2001 and 2006, the US government handed out nearly $100 BILLION in crop subsidies to farmers, more than $17 billion annually (US Department of Agriculture, 2007), required by the Farm Bill, which has evolved in a questionable manner since its inception in FDR's New Deal. Sounds like a wonderful plan and a lot of money going towards farmers, huh? Funny that just the opposite has occured (perfect example of how the Bush administration can disillusion the public: similar example: make a law allowing even more pollution to enter the atmosphere and name it the "Clean Air Act"). When this law requiring the federal government to subsidize agriculture was passed by the New Deal in the 1930s, there were several million small farms in the US and the majority of the population lived and worked on those farms that produced food for the nation and an income. Today, the small farm has all but gone extinct and the 150,000 farms that exist account for nearly 3/4 of farm sales, only 2% of the USA population still living on farms (US Census, 2005). In 75 years, the USDA has been bought out by completely by corporate food producers: large corporate farms get the largest portion of subsidy money, despite their already financial robustness and their reluctance to pay fair wages to immigrant laborers and their increasing reliance on mechanical labor. Small farmers get next to nothing, have an actual relationship with the land and how to farm, and have a hard time paying their property taxes and are eventually bought out by the agribusinesses that have monopolized the entire countryside.

Now, this should but rarely does make the domestic farmer pissed off and up in arms with agricultural policy (for Goddess knows what reason---but I think we can probably blame the right wing press that fattens rural America with its news and then turns around and feeds rural America to corporate America...Sigh...Let it Come to An End, Please!) But it DEFINATELY makes the international farm community angry!

Here in Central America, after DR-CAFTA (Dominican Republic and Central Amerian Free Trade Agreement) was passed, farmers started to realize what a bad idea it was to open their markets to international consumers: they're prices and crops are simultaneously devalued and over produced. Subsidies within rich countries like the USA have made producing certain crops more expensive than not producing anything at all (quite different from the situation in the STates, where even people who live on fallow farms get paid half a million dollars/decade--for not doing ANYTHING...read the Washington Post series on AG subsidies, Sundays, July 2-December 28, 2006). Farmers in the US, on average, recieve around $21,000/yearly to produce crops such as corn, soy, wheat and rice. Farmers in poor countries who were sold on the idea of CAFTA because they believed they would have more consumers for their product, recieve little or no subsidy money and couldn't even sell it at cost. Mexican peasants have formed the EZLN and have brought international attention to the injustice of NAFTA. The situation in Africa is even worse.

Despite the prices not having anything to do with supply and demand, farmers are compelled both in the global south and in the US to continue to produce as much as possible, using chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and soil-compacting heavy machinery, all of which have had a huge impact on the environment--again, globally and in the US.

I hope this sheds a little light onto the darkness that is industrialization and corporatization of our most basic need as humans: food. I hope this also gives the reader some idea of why A Call to Farms was started and what its future mission is: to continue implementing community food projects in the name of cultural and food sovereignty, strengthening local economies rather than greedy multinational companies, and to have a good time playing in the dirt while we begin to understand how much work it takes to feed ourselves sustainably, in fairness to our own health as well as the earth.

Thanks for reading! Any suggestions or confusion, please say so! I know I get carried away in my debate and have no problem providing source information or clarifying what I mean!