Something is astir in America’s heartland. A grassroots coalition of independent farmers, consumer groups, and labor advocates is coming together to challenge the corporations at the top of the country’s food chain and reclaim control over the food supply.
A series of public hearings on the agriculture oligopoly led by the Justice Department’s antitrust division, has opened the door to a serious national dialogue on food policy reform. On Thursday, food and farm justice advocates gathered at a townhall meeting in Ankeny, Iowa amid chants of “bust up Big Ag” to drum up momentum for today’s antitrust meeting, focused on the seed business and the biotech Goliath Monsanto.
In the midst of the healthcare and economic crises, food politics have intensified, with many communities demanding an end to perverse farm subsidies and more equitable nutritional programs. Aside from the more obvious impacts on small farmers and consumers, the food infrastructure’s dysfunction is very much embedded in the workforce that sustains the country from the field to the table.
Monsanto is widely seen as a corrupt link in a rigged production chain. Critics accuse the company of hogging the country’s seed market, driving up prices for farmers, and ultimately flooding retail markets with overpriced undernourishment.
According to the Farmer to Farmer Campaign on Genetic Engineering, about 90 and 80 percent of U.S. soybean and corn fields, respectively, are planted with Monsanto-affiliated genetically modified seed strains. The biotech empire has thus extended its grasp over most of what we eat, including your kid’s frosted flakes and your vegan tofu kebabs.
Monsanto’s scorched-earth expansion tactics have led to legal bullying of farmers who dare resist its hegemony, and threaten to devastate independent organic growers.
According to a report by Food & Water Watch submitted to the Justice Department, the system provides a raw deal for everyone except the food oligarchs:
Although consolidation in the food and agriculture sector have pushed down the real prices farmers receive for their crops and livestock, few of these savings are passed on to consumers…. Consumers are especially vulnerable to the consolidated market power of food companies since food is essential and total consumer demand for food is largely unresponsive to price. This inelastic demand also means that concentrated market power in the food sector can distort competition, raise prices and erode equity more significantly than sectors where consumers are more responsive to prices. According to the American Antitrust Institute, the concentration in buyers, processing and retailing has “undoubtedly contributed to the increased cost of food.”
Since everybody eats, no one is untouched by the country’s skewed agricultural system, but labor is uniquely threatened. Agriculture and livestock workers don’t own the land they help harvest or the animals they slaughter. And for many, their status as undocumented immigrants deprives them of the most basic labor protections.
Generally, workers in processing plants are increasingly at the mercy of just a few bosses, according to F&WW, “Multinational food processing companies operate less than 2 percent of the facilities but employ more than a third (36 percent) of all food processing workers.”
The challenges to organized labor are evident in the rampant exploitation and shameless union busting at meatpacking plants like Agriprocessors and Tyson, documented by UFCW and Human Rights Watch.
“That’s where the greatest injustice has occurred,” said Dave Murphy of Food Democracy Now, a grassroots campaign to change food policy at the national level. He said the 2008 raid on Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, which led to the detention of hundreds of exploited workers, linked broken food policy to draconian immigration restrictions. “These people live in fear of their lives because they’re not taken care of, they’re not looked after, and they’re not valued as human beings,” Murphy said. Consolidation has dehumanized the entire food production system. “You have these injustices when people that are in management positions are not connected to the community,” he said, “and when they’re trying to squeeze another penny out of a pound of tomatoes or a pound of grain.”
Many of the Latino migrant farm workers, moreover, were once self-sustaining farmers in their home countries, but were pushed off their land due to trade policies like NAFTA. Their very presence in America’s food industry attests to a global injustice perpetrated against farming communities in wealthy and poor nations alike.
Both consumers and agricultural workers bear the health burden of industrialized food production. Poverty-wage workers toiling in filthy factory farms are exposed to air pollution and other health hazards. And on the consumption side, obesity and diabetes often festers in nutritionally impoverished communities with limited access to fresh produce. Poor households in “food deserts” make do with a menu of bad options: fast-food chains offer parents a cheap solution when they come home from work too exhausted to cook, and when their monthly food stamp allowance is running low, families might resort to stockpiling soda, sweets and other packaged products.
The Obama administration’s antitrust inquiry won’t cover every food policy issue, but it could lead to federal legal action and other reforms. Friday’s hearing will be followed by several meetings in farm-heavy states that will investigate key questions, including concentration in the dairy industry and regulation of livestock producers. The scope of the investigation is unprecedented, yet grassroots stakeholders still called their own separate town hall meeting, to discuss their grievances and raise concerns that their voices wouldn’t be adequately represented at the official hearing. Many worried that the antitrust panel would emphasize the voices of academics and Big Ag companies rather than small farmers and workers.
Whether they’re organizing in the field, the slaughterhouse or the grocery aisle, groups like Food Democracy Now recognize that, in Murphy’s words, “The American people have no say in how their food is produced.” The workers who actually produce it, meanwhile, may have the least power of all: “They don’t treat these people as human beings; they see them as an expendable part of the machine.”
I hope you found this article important. Before you leave, I want to ask you to consider supporting our work with a donation. In These Times needs readers like you to help sustain our mission. We don’t depend on—or want—corporate advertising or deep-pocketed billionaires to fund our journalism. We’re supported by you, the reader, so we can focus on covering the issues that matter most to the progressive movement without fear or compromise.
Our work isn’t hidden behind a paywall because of people like you who support our journalism. We want to keep it that way. If you value the work we do and the movements we cover, please consider donating to In These Times.
Michelle Chen is a contributing writer at In These Times and The Nation, a contributing editor at Dissent and a co-producer of the “Belabored” podcast. She studies history at the CUNY Graduate Center. She tweets at @meeshellchen.
