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From: ucbesvax.turner@ucbcad.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Govt and Agriculture - (nf)
Message-ID: <187@ucbcad.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 29-Jun-83 18:41:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbcad.187
Posted: Wed Jun 29 18:41:43 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 2-Jul-83 13:49:40 EDT
Lines: 63

#R:isrnix:-25300:ucbesvax:7500019:000:3283
ucbesvax!turner    Jun 29 05:10:00 1983


	Ah, but "Cui Bono" indeed!  Over the decade that farm subsidies
have been in place, we have seen an unparalleled concentration and
industrialization of agriculture.  Not that these things are so terrible
in themselves, but just look at how it has been done.  You are taking as
your premise: "U.S. Ag is good, U.S. Ag is subsidized", therefore at least
these subsidies have been good."  I don't think U.S. Ag is so great.

	What do I think is wrong?  Several things:

	1) The germ plasm of the seed varieties for various staples are
	   becoming the property of subsidy-fattened food conglomerates.
	   They have, in fact, a vested interest in thinning out the
	   genetic diversity of farmlands, since it is leading to a
	   monopoly situation which would be very hard for competitors
	   to break.
	
	2) Farmers tie up huge amounts of capital in farm equipment
	   inventory by letting land lie fallow.  And write off the
	   equipment depreciation on their taxes.  Huge famines might
	   be raking the Sahel, or Somalia--but we can't let world
	   wheat prices be deflated by selling stockpiles of grain,
	   no sirree.  What about our nation's sturdy *farmers*?
	   (Del Monte, General Foods, etc.)
	
	3) Technology-intensive (really, energy-intensive) farming
	   which is favored by the economies of scale that large,
	   government-aided food companies can establish, is eating
	   away our farmland by soil compaction and exhaustion,
	   polluting rivers with nitrogen fertilizers, and poisoning
	   the food chain with pesticides.
	
	Laissez Faire would probably be better than this.  Collectivized
farming (USSR and China, with Cambodia being a rather grisly example) is
not in itself a solution.  Voluntary cooperatives of farmers are, I think,
intrinsically more humane, since they never approach the scale of large
corporations, can coordinate their own marketing policies, and understand
better the uses of charity, since they require it of each other in order
to survive.  The advantages of competition can be balanced with the
advantages of cooperation.

	Radical cooperativism has spontaneously appeared during times of
upheaval.  The Makhnovists in the Ukraine fought for peasant self-
determination, against both White and Red armies.  The anarchist collectives
in Spain were a response to centuries of landlord negligence--and were
quite productive and profitable, even with a civil war raging around them.

	In Nicaragua, similar efforts were rather quickly blunted by
the Sandinistas.  Peasants who wished to undertake their own land reforms
had to move quickly, or else put up with the government's slower version,
a bureaucratic process mainly designed to give the appearance of not
coming down too hard on some of the larger land-holders--while actually
stabilizing a situation whereby the government could take a private,
smoothly-run industrial operation into its own hands, without changing
the working conditions significantly.  This is a travesty of revolution.

	In the supposedly socialist countries, Big Brother says "I know
best."  In the supposedly capitalist countries, Big Brother collects money,
and then hands it to big companies, saying, "You know best."  In both places,
small farmers look up, and say: "but we were here before you."  Blam.