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In honor of the #heartlandforum today where Presidential candidates address rural communities in Iowa, here's a little primer on food and power.
First, there's a farm crisis brewing right now that we haven't seen since the 1980s. Skyrocketing farmer suicides, bankruptcies, local communities hurting badly. This is a function of corporate concentration.
Ag isn't everything for rural areas, but it matters. One in five rural counties depends on agriculture as their primary income source. 30% of Iowa's economy is tied to ag. Details in this brief. openmarketsinstitute.org/wp-content/upl…
Being a farmer today increasingly means living not in a free commercial society but a feudal one with corporate lords with names like Monsanto-Bayer, ADM, JBS, Smithfield, Land O'Lakes, DowDupont, Cargill, Walmart, Kroger...
These corporate lords are often single buyers or single sellers, dictating terms and prices to farmers and skimming the profits, leaving little for anyone else. This is why three out of four chicken farmers live below the poverty line. pewtrusts.org/en/research-an…
This is a result of corporate concentration. As @clairekelloway and @sarahmillerdc write, "One result of this consolidation is that the price ranchers receive continues to fall, even though the price consumers pay for beef is rising and beef packers are making record margins."
There are many other problems. In 2017, JBS, which is a giant Brazilian multi-national, was caught exporting rotten meat globally. JBS is deeply tied into the corrupt Brazilian government. nytimes.com/2017/03/17/wor…
There are of course labor problems beyond the farmers themselves, reminiscent of The Jungle. 65% of meatpacking and food processing workers - most of whom are people of color - have been injured on the job. foodchainworkers.org/wp-content/upl…
As tractors become computerized, John Deere is using copyright law to restrict farmers from making basic repairs to their equipment. it's like Apple and its coercive terms on your ability to repair your iPhone. This is a controversy known as #RightToRepair 
I'm not going to get into all of it, bc the story is largely the same. Grocery stores and grain trading have consolidated, each causing massive downward pressure on farm income. The important thing to understand is that this is all part of a philosophy of concentrating power.
And it won't surprise you to know that Trump promised a lot and lied about it. Wheee. He lied about offering poultry farmers rights against packers. And he even got rid of GIPSA, the specialized antitrust agency for agriculture. Wheee. So there's a chance for Dems.
It's not that hard to fix rural America. Well it's hard. But conceptually it's just rearranging some spreadsheets, corporate forms, and contracts. It's not building moon bases on Jupiter. There are problems we don't know how to fix. This is not one of them.
Solutions: break up big agribusiness, regulate the resulting pieces, reform coops so they are actually coops, deal with copyright to enable #righttorepair, do a non-shitty Farm Bill, ban kickbacks ('slotting fees') in grocery stores, etc. Basically crack down on ag billionaires.
Last point. It will surprise many of you that Obama actually promised a bunch of this in 2008. And then he didn't do it. And then rural America swung gradually and then very hard to the right over his term, which got worse as a commodities depression ensued starting in 2014-ish.
Also, read this issue brief and follow the authors, @clairekelloway and @sarahmillerdc, from whom I have stolen this fabulous material. Also follow @CLeonardNews, who wrote the book on chicken farming and big agribusiness "The Meat Racket." openmarketsinstitute.org/wp-content/upl…
