Like choirboys passing notes behind the preacher's back, I hand a local farmer the order of worship before a recent Sunday service and he hands me a neatly folded, four-page handwritten note in return.
During the opening hymn, I read it. The first line quotes Lewis Mumford, an American philosopher: "In their worship of the machine, many Americans have settled for something less than a full life. ... They have confused progress with mechanization."
Afterward, the note-passing Lutheran explains. "What's happening -in agriculture in the name of technology isn't progress. Anymore, we're just small pieces of big corporate machines. And the companies are getting bigger and we're getting smaller. If we don't enforce our antitrust laws soon, you can kiss independent farming good-bye."
Gee, first Mumford, then Marx. What happened to the Law and the Gospel?
To many farmers, antitrust is the law. To mega-ag businesses, however, the lack of antitrust action is a new gospel: globe-spanning corporations preaching efficiency, shareholder profit, "marketing chains."
On Sunday April 18, 1999, Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., will examine the effects of this new agricultural theology on farmers. Wellstone will host Assistant U.S. Attorney General Joel Klein, the head of the Justice
Department's Antitrust Division, and Michael Dunn, the assistant secretary of Agriculture, at a meeting in South St. Paul, Minn.
Wellstone wants to hear farmers' views on the need for new antitrust action in agriculture and the impact vertical integration is having on farmers and farm prices. (To attend the gathering at the Best Western Drover's Inn, call Wellstone's St. Paul office at 612-645-0323.)
Most farmers already know the answers to these questions, Company-by-company, day-by-day the evidence - at least to them - is overwhelming. For example, according to a Feb. 5 report by William Heffernan, a University of Missouri rural sociologist, titled "Consolidation in the Food and Agricultural System":
DuPont's recent $7.7 billion buyout of Pioneer, means two giants, DuPont and Monsanto, virtually own the biotech-based seed market for U.S. corn, soybeans, cotton and wheat production.
Five firms, IBP, ConAgra, Cargill, National Beef and Packerland, control 83 percent of the U.S. beef-packing industry
Six firms, Smithfield, IBP, ConAgra, Cargill, Farmland Industries and Hormel, control 75 percent of all U.S. pork slaughter.
Six firms, Tyson Foods, Gold Kist, Perdue Farms, Pilgrim's Pride, ConAgra and Continental Grain, grow and slaughter 58 percent of all U.S. broilers.
Four firms, ADM, ConAgra, Cargill and Cereal Food, own and operate 62 percent of all US flour milling.
Four firms, ADM, Cargill, A. E. Staley and CPC International, own 74 percent of the U.S. corn wet milling industry
Four firms, ADM, Cargill, Bunge, and AGP do 80 percent of all U.S. soybean crushing.
Four firms, the proposed Cargill/Continental marriage, ADM, a joint venture between Bunge, ConAgra and Farmland, and an alliance between Cenex-Harvest States, ConAgra and Farmland control 60 percent of all U.S. grain export facilities.
There's more, according to Heffernan - whose entire report can be accessed at www.nfu.org - much more. Alliances, joint ventures, and other business structures link many of these segment-dominating firms to other equally dominating businesses to form "food chain clusters." The report identifies three major clusters: Cargill/Monsanto, ConAgra and Novartis/ADM.
The primary defining factor in these clusters, he explains, is that "the food product is passed from stage to stage, but ownership never changes ... (and) prices along the line of production are never discovered until the (food) is sold to the consumer."
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