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Good piece here from two Iowa reporters, @brianneDMR & @KimNorvellDMR about an agriculture policy package dropped by @ewarren. Notes about this (Thread. Yes, another one). desmoinesregister.com/story/news/ele…
2. First, Warren’s main target is consolidation in agribusiness. This is consistent with her general orientation toward stronger enforcement of anti-trust laws. Corporate mergers and domination of market sectors by individual companies are a factor in farmers’ lives.
3. Is consolidation a uniformly negative factor? No. Is it central to the consolidation of agriculture (that is, the decades-long trend toward fewer, larger farms)? Also no — well, maybe for poultry it is. But consolidation in agribusiness tends to benefit front offices...
4...and short-term investors a lot more than it does farmers or agribusiness employees. There are good, competition-based reasons to want farmers to have a variety of sources for key inputs like seeds and herbicides. Finally -- speaking just from a conservation standpoint --...
5....if you’re thinking in terms of more diversified, sustainable farms you can’t be enthusiastic about specialization, which consolidation tends to encourage. A farm that only grows corn and soybeans is an easy customer for corporate agribusiness, but it's not the future.
6. Second, corporate mergers, like car accidents, are much easier to prevent than to undo. @SenWarren's proposal to beef up anti-trust regulation of agri-business would have been more timely, say, five years ago, before Bayer had bought Monsanto & DuPont had swallowed Pioneer.
7. That doesn't make it a bad idea now, and all credit to her for bringing it up. But some of the horses are already out of the barn in this area.
8. Warren, who being from Massachusetts is certainly no aggie, is addressing some issues genuinely important to Midwest agriculture. That’s encouraging. She's also to started to talk about old chestnuts like country of origin labelling & bans on foreign ownership of farmland.
9. These are fine applause lines but don't bear on any of Midwest agriculture's most important issues. @ewarren can add to the group of proposals she's just announced, and develop a solid program to support the future of farming in rural Iowa and the Midwest.
10. Part of such a program could be undoing some of the damage Trump has done to America's reliability as a supplier of agricultural products. The trade agreements negotiated between NAFTA & TPP were controversial within the Democratic Party, but agriculture depends on exports.
11. A program for rural America could also include preservation of the farmland Iowa and the Midwest depend on. If agricultural land gets paved over for low-density housing, it's gone forever; if soil washes off with each spring rain down the Mississippi, it's gone forever.
12. Agriculture that is resilient and durable in the face of variable markets and climate change needs agricultural land that holds its productive capacity, and plenty of it. Conservation needs to be an integral component of both agricultural production and agriculture policy.
13. This will be a long campaign. Sen. Warren has made a good start at speaking to the needs of the rural economy in Iowa and other states in the Midwest, and I hope she'll build on it in the months to come. [end]
