The largest US farmer organizations (the American Farm Bureau Federation and the major commodity groups) remain stuck on the treadmill of high input agriculture with all of its destructive environmental externalities – from the hypoxia-eutrophication dead zones of nitrogen fertilizer run-off to the toxic fecal cesspools of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, from the pollinator to the songbird die-offs, from the unprecedented levels of topsoil erosion, to the fact that a third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions come from industrial agriculture. By insisting on basing policy on this ideology, farm economists and journalists intentionally obscure the logical economic analysis of the inevitable disastrous outcomes of free markets: low incomes for family farmers, the hollowing out of rural communities, pollution of water and air, moving livestock production out of the hands of family farmers, the monopolization of food and farm input industries, and bleak futures for kids who would love to grow up to be farmers. These programs “approached the problem of producers’ prices indirectly, in that they didn’t have direct price floors, but did manage the ‘quantity, quality, and rate of shipment to market,” and achieved prices of 100% of parity or more for a lot of fruits and vegetables..” Even today, according to USDA, parity standards are used in 45 fruit and vegetable market order programs, but not for the purpose of achieving actual “parity” (or “living wage”) price levels.
Author: Editor
Published at: 2025-04-19 22:00:00
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