Dollars & Sense - Farms Today

REAL
WORLD
ECONOMICS
Land Grabs, Here and There

PAGE 14
Farmers and Climate Change

PAGE 32
Keystone XL and Eminent Domain

PAGE 43
FARMS TODAY
Plus: The Assault on Retirement

Social Security Absurdity
The Pension-Busters Playbook
Class-Based Pension Math
U.S. & CAN: $4.50
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March | April
2015
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Seeds and Struggle
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Dollars & Sense magazine explains the workings of

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< From the Editors
Farms Today
n his comment for this special issue, a collaboration between Dollars & Sense and Farm
Aid, Willie Nelson argues that we need a new and broader definition of wealthfrom
what can be extracted from producers and nature to what sustains producers, their families, their communities, and the natural world. As caretakers of our soil and water, he
writes, this has been and always should be the essential role of the family farmer.
The economic future of family farmers in the United States is at the core of Farm Aids
work. But this fundamental oppositionbetween extraction and sustenance, between
depletion and renewalspans a much broader spectrum of issues, in the United States
and around the globe.
Lukas Ross and Timothy A. Wise tell two parallel stories of land grabs today. Wise describes an abortive land grabfinanced by Brazilian and Japanese investorsin
Mozambique. As he points out, the land grab failed not because the land was not suitable for agriculture, but because it wasand the people that were already farming it
mobilized to fight off the land grabbers. Ross, meanwhile, focuses on the United States,
and big financial institutions acquiring large swaths of land.
Sasha Breger Bush turns our attention to the unequal relationship between farmers
and the companies that dominate the food industry. Again, we have a dual focus on the
United States and developing countries. Breger Bush describes how, in the United States,
poultry farmers find themselves under the thumb of giant integrators like Perdue,
Tyson, and Pilgrims Pride. In developing countries where coffee is widely grown, farmers
face a similar relationship with coffee processors. In both cases, there is a fundamental
relationship of unequal exchange.
Writer and photographer David Bacon provides a vivid picturein words and images
of the conditions and struggles of migrant farm workers in the United States today. Bacon
gives an overview of this migrant work forcemost of them indigenous people from
Mexico, shuttling between the farms of California and Washington Stateas a prelude to
the poignant first-hand testimony of migrant farmworker and organizer Rosario Ventura.
Bacons powerful black-and-white photos provide an apt accompaniment.
University of Maine researchers Stephanie Welcomer, Mark Haggerty, and John
Jemison take us inside Maine farming, and farmers varied reactions to the climate
change. Almost all farmers, they note, are making adaptations to deal with new and increasingly volatile weather conditions. Few, however, speak directly about global climate
change, much less the need for climate policy to avert more severe change in the future.
Welcomer, Haggerty, and Jemison suggest that, sooner rather than later, farmers must
confront this reality more directly.
This is an unflinching look at the difficult realities confronting farmers and farm workers today. However, the picture is far from hopeless.
Wise points to Mozambique farmers successful fight-back against the land grabbers.
Bacon and Ventura describe migrant farm workers organizing. Mark Paul and Emily
Stephens describe the growing phenomenon of community supported agriculture, reestablishing a direct relationship between farmers and eaters. Elizabeth Fraser and
Anuradha Mittal explain how the world seed market is dominated by a handful of corporations, but also how national governments are pushing back and the global movement
against the seed giants is growing. Finally, John Ikerd explains how todays practices of
industrial agriculture have failed. Ikerd ends on a hopeful notehow a new kind of
agriculture is emerging to meet the ecological, social, and economic challenges we face
today. Photographer Mishka Henners beautiful yet disturbing satellite images of industrial feedlots, accompanying this article and on the issues cover, capture a contaminated
landscape barely recognizable as agriculture.
To be sure, the necessary transformations will not be easy. When we think about agricultureas when we think about any aspect of societywe need to understand that power
is real, and that the few are, indeed, very powerful. But the many are not powerless. D&S
DOLLARS
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REAL
WORLD
ECONOMICS
NUMBER 317 | MARCH/APRIL 2015
CON TENT S
TH E
page 14
R E GUL AR S
4 the short run
page 24
6 comment
FEATUR ES
11 The Failure of Modern Industrial Agriculture

JOHN IKERD
photos by M I S H K A H E N N E R
14 Land Grabbing Around the World

Wall Streets U.S. Land Grab

LUKAS ROSS
The Great Land Giveaway in Mozambique
TIMOTHY A. WISE
19 These Things Can Change

Migrant farmworkers stand up in Washington State.

text by D A V I D B A C O N and R O S A R I O V E N T U R A
photos by D A V I D B A C O N
Willie Nelson on the Wealth of the Land

and the Power of the People
7 making sense
Seeds of Change | Community

Supported Agriculture
40 in review
Christopher Leonard,
The Meat Racket
41 economy in numbers
Food Insecurity in Affluent America
43 ask dr. dollar
Keystone XL and Eminent Domain
24 No Friendship in Trade
Farmers face modern-day robber barons, in the United States
and worldwide.

SASHA BREGER BUSH
32 Maine Farmers and Climate Change

Reactive, or Proactive?

S T E P H A N I E W E L C O M E R , M A R K H A G G E RT Y,
and J O H N J E M I S O N
MARCH/APRIL 2015 l DOLLARS & SENSE l 3
< The Short Run

By Christopher J. Cooper and Alejandro Reuss
Staples in the Job Market

According to Business Insider, managers at office-supplies giant Staples
have threatened to fire employees
who work more than 25 hours per
week. Staples workers recently started a petition on change.org, asking
the company not to cut part-time
hours because of Obamacare. (The
Affordable Care Act imposes a
$3,000 penalty on employers who do
not provide health insurance for employees working at least 30 hours per
week.) The petition also described
General Managers telling part-time
employees to leave now or be fired in
Business Insider, stated: Staples

policy regarding part-time associates weekly hours pre-dates the
Affordable Care Act by many years.
Some managers may have reiterated
the existing policy to our associates
as part of our ongoing efforts to improve the efficiency and competitiveness of our stores.
Of course, it can be very hard
on workers to have their hours cut.
So its a relief that the air is now
cleared. The general public may
have thought that the companys
top management was heartless.
Now, we know it for a fact. CC
year, according to the investigativejournalism website First Look (firstlook.org). As a result, the NSA has
been able to hack the once-protected
encryption of the Apple iPhoneuntraced, without the manufacturer, the
phone provider, or the user knowing.
The only way to use the device and be
clear of potential hacking, reports First
Look, is to use iMessage, FaceTime, or
to make calls over VoIP (voice over
internet protocol) channels.
Why do we trust our smartphones
so completely? Most of us put too
much sensitive information into them,
including things we would never divulge to a living soul. Many of our
phone calls and text messages may be
the boring stuff of daily life, but what
about our internet browsing histories
or Google searches?
How comfortable would we all feel
with our search histories being exposed to our friends and families, to say
nothing of the NSA? CC
All About the Workers
the middle of transactions with customers. (Presumably, this happened

as their weekly hours approached the
25-hour mark.)
Staples corporate responded
quickly by denying that the practice
had anything to do with Obamacare.
The company, in a statement sent to
The Most Sacred Trust

The National Security Agency (NSA)
and its British counterpart, the
Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ), have targeted
Gemalto, a company that manufactures more than 2 billion SIM cards per
4 l DOLLARS & SENSE l MARCH/APRIL 2015
Apparently, 2015 is all about increasing worker morale. According to CNN,

Walmart is changing its scheduling
system so that employees get two
weeks notice about the shifts that
they have to work. Up to now, workers
have had to keep their schedules clear
to accommodate last-minute shift
changes. In addition, the company is
raising its lowest hourly wage from $8
to $9. Then, by next February, pay will
go up to $10 per hour.
Given that protesters have been demanding $15/hour, this may not seem
all that generous or worker-friendly.
Even less so when you realize that, as
the Center for Effective Government
recently reported, Walmarts ex-CEO,
Mike Duke, makes $1,070 per hour, 24
hours a day, from his retirement package. The four Walmart heirs who own
50% of the company, meanwhile,
each earn $445,776 per hour from
their shares. CC
All About the Workers, II

Apple is also changing its ways when
it comes to labor, reports Bloomberg
Business. Workers in the factories
that produce Apple products have
often been required to pay recruitment fees (to intermediaries who
recruit them for jobs in the factories).
These fees are not trivialearlier,
Apple had deemed fees over one
months wages excessive. Now, the
company has decided that the recruitment fees will be paid for by the
supplier instead (and, indirectly, by
Apple itself, as these costs will be
reflected in the companys contracts
with the factories).
As Apple senior vice president Jeff
Williams described the recruitment
fees, It is in essence bonded servitude.
Yes, how good of them to notice. CC
Rubionomics
New York Times columnist David
Brooks recently wrote an article that
made Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a
possible presidential contender for
2016, proud enough to post a link on
his Twitter account. Why wouldnt
he? Brooks touts Rubio as most intellectually creative of the presidential contenders.
Brooks column describes the economic plan that Rubio outlines in his
new book, American Dreams:
Restoring Economic Opportunity
for Everyone. The plan includes tax
breaks for business, such as the ability to immediately deduct every dollar they reinvest. (Brooks does note
that Rubio puts the emphasis on the
supply side. Indeed.) Meanwhile,
Rubio would flatten the federal income tax to two ratesdown to
35% at the top and up to 15% at the
bottom. (Brooks praises this as
simplify[ing] the tax code.) While
the benefits of such tax breaks
would presumably go primarily to
businesses and rich individuals,
Brooks claims Rubios plan shows
how Republicans might use government to enhance middle-class prospects. Tax cuts for the rich unleashing economic growth that benefits
everyone? (Wait this sounds a lot
like trickle down.)
Whats the difference between
Reaganomics and Rubionomics?
There isnt one. We all understand that
politicians want economic growth, but
to create growth by making rich people
richer? That is so 1981. CC
Go
!
l
a
t
i
Dig
Save
trees
McJournalism
A recent article by New York Times
business reporter Stephanie Strom,
McDonalds Seeks Its Fast Food Soul,
unleashed a mini-storm on Twitter.
The article focuses on the challenges
facing the McDonalds and its new
CEO Steve Easterbrook, of balancing
speed, variety, and qualityunder
ntense pressure from new competitors
in the fast-food racket, like Chipotle.
Critics immediately jumped on
an obvious hole in the articlethe
near-total absence of workers or labor
conditions from the analysis. As
Douglas K. Smith pointed out on the
blog Naked Capitalism, Strom failed
to deal with a long list of labor issues
at McDonalds that anyone, including
journalists, following McDonalds
knows: low wages, illegal discrimination, wage theft, company anti-unionism, and so on. Not to mention the fact
that McDonalds workers have been in
the streets demanding living wages.
Strom felt compelled, apparently, to
shoot back, accusing critics of failing to
read to the end of the article. The problem? All that the ending did have about
labor was CEO Easterbrooks declaration about fighting brand disparagers
about the companys labor image. Is
Strom a cynical shill for the likes of
McDonalds? More like someone for
whom workers just dont enter into a
story about a corporations soul, except
maybe as an annoying image problem
for CEOs to manage. AR D&S
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< Comment
The Wealth of the Land and the Power of the People

BY WILLIE NELSON
ast year at the annual Farm Aid

concert in Raleigh, N.C, I met
Phillip and Dorathy Barker, Black farmers who, like many minority farmers,
lost much of their farmland as a result
of discriminatory lending practices by
banks and the U.S. Department of
Agriculture. Today, Phillip and Dorathy
farm the 20 acres they were able to
hold on to in Oxford, N.C. They also
operate a non-profit organization,
Operation Spring Plant, which provides resources and training to minority and limited-resource farmers, including a program that introduces
young people to farming and provides youth leadership training.
Phillip said one of his goals is to provide tools for the next generation and
to help young people come
back to the farm to understand
the wealth of the land.
Wealth of the land. Thats a
powerful phrase.
Phillip believes the next
generation must see a sustainable livelihood from the land,
but the wealth he refers to
cant be measured only in dollars. It is measured in the experience of working on the land,
tending the soil, and caring for
the animals and crops that
grow from it. Its measured in
the ability to be independent,
to feed himself and his family.
Its measured in the way he
and Dorathy sustain and
strengthen their community.
Its measured in being rooted
to a place, and passing something valuable to the next
generation.
It seems to me that understanding the real wealth in the
land is key to a sustainable future for all of us.
Our greatest challenge is in

re-visioning how the majority see
wealth. The wealth of the land cannot be boiled down to the investors
return on investment. It cannot be
We need to redefine
wealth as the ability to
make a decent living
from the land as well
as to sustain it for the
next generation.
To support a family
and a community.
To work in partnership
with nature.
gauged by the commodities it returns to usin gallons of oil and

bushels of corn.
The drive to extract as much value
from the land as possibleto maximize production without regard to
whether were exhausting the soil, to
give over our farmland to Wall Street
investors, to seize land held by families
for generations for corporate profit
bankrupts the land, our food, our nation, and our future.
We need to redefine wealth as
the ability to make a decent living
from the land as well as to sustain it
for the next generation. To grow
crops for food and fuel while simultaneously enriching the soil upon
which future crops depend. To support a family and a community. To
work in partnership with nature to
protect our health and the
health of our planet. As caretakers of our soil and water,
this has been and always
should be the essential role of
the family farmer.
Today, fewer than 2% of us
live on farms. Clearly, we cant
all be family farmers, but we
can all shift our priorities to
ensure were doing our best to
support them and encourage
new farmers to get started on
the land. Playing music to
bring awareness is how I started Farm Aid in 1985, and its
how I continue to support the
people who best know how to
care for the land: our family
farmers. Each and every one
of us has the power to do
what we can to support and
sustain family farmers.
Our common wealth depends on it. D&S
W I L L I E N E L S O N is the
founder and president of Farm Aid.
< Making Sense
Seeds of Change
Corporate Power, Grassroots Resistance, and the Battle Over the Food System
Over a decade ago, Dollars & Sense published the article Genetic Engineering and the Privatization of Seeds, by Anuradha Mittal and Peter
Rossett, on genetic modification and its impact on the world food system (March/April 2001). In it, the authors asked, will biotechnology feed the
world? while providing an overview of the landscape of corporate control, widening inequality, private property claims, and growing farmers resistance around the world. This article acts as a follow-up, highlighting some of the key developments in recent years.
BY ELIZABETH FRASER
A N U R A D H A M I T TA L
AND
or most of history, farmers have

had control over their seeds: saving, sharing, and replanting them with
freedom. Developments in the course
of the 20th century, however, have
greatly eroded this autonomy. Legal
changes, ranging from the Plant
Variety Protection Act (1970) in the
United States to the World Trade
Organizations Agreement on TradeRelated Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPS), have systematically eroded farmers rights to save
seeds for future use. By the end of
2012, Monsanto had sued 410 farmers
and 56 small farm businesses in the
United States for patent infringement,
winning over $23 million in settlements. Here, we describe some of the
key developments further intensifying
corporate control over the food system. It is not, however, all bleak news.
Civil society groups are using everything from grassroots protest to opensource licensing to ensure that the enclosure and privatization of seeds
comes to an end.
Corporations Have
Consolidated Their Control of
Seeds and Agrochemicals
In 2011, just four transnational agribusinessesMonsanto, Dupont Pioneer,
Syngenta, and Vilmorin (Groupe
Limagrain)controlled 58% of the commercial seed market. FourSyngenta,
Bayer CropScience, BASF, and Dow
AgroSciencescontrolled 62% of agrochemicals worldwide. The top six companies controlled 75% of all private plant
breeding research, 60% of commercial

seed sales, and 76% of the global agrochemical market. This consolidation of
power has been aided by a large string
of mergers and acquisitions, leading the
Canada-based Action Group on Erosion,
Technology and Concentration (ETC
Group) to conclude that there just arent
many seed companies left to buy.
Our global food

system continues
to be dominated by
agribusiness giants, who
use their power to quash
legislation designed to
protect consumer and
farmer interests. But
resistance is growing.
The World Bank, too, has played a role
in this increased consolidation. In 2014, a
report from the Oakland Institute provided details on the World Banks efforts
to open African markets to private seed
companies. (Full disclosure: The authors
of this article both work at the Oakland
Institute.) The report, titled The World
Banks Bad Business with Seed and
Fertilizer in African Agriculture, paints a
stark picture of the possible consequences of these actions: removing
farmers rights to save seeds and implementing intellectual property claims
over seeds does not improve food security, but rather undermines farmers autonomy and further increases profits for
the existing seed oligopoly.
Supposed Benefits of
Genetically Modified (GM)
Seeds Have Not Materialized
Two arguments often put forward in
favor of GM seeds are the need to
feed the worlds burgeoning population and the potential for these new
seeds to reduce overall pesticide use.
Neither of these claims promulgated
by industry have proved true.
Globally, we are currently producing
more than enough food to adequately feed our population. However, that
food isnt being distributed fairly, and
malnutrition remains staggering805 million people worldwide.
As the Canadian Biodiversity Action
Network reminds us in its report Will
GM Crops Feed the World? hunger is
not usually a result of low food production, but rather a result of poverty.
This points to a greater need to address issues of inequality, distribution,
and access.
Arguments that genetically modified crops could reduce overall agrochemical use also remain unfounded,
with the rise of herbicide-resistant
weeds requiring more and more
chemical cocktails for the GM crops
to remain productive. A report from
Food and Water Watch, Superweeds:
How Biotech Crops Bolster the
Pesticide Industry, notes that herbicide use on GM crops in the United
States did initially fall in the late
1990s; however, once resistance in
GM crops to the herbicide glyphosate (marketed by Monsanto under
the trade name RoundUp) developed, total herbicide use skyrocketed, leading to greater net herbicide
use over time.
< Making Sense

Large Agribusinesses Have
Spent Millions to Defeat
Labelling Ballot Measures
In the past few years, large agribusinesses have worked to defeat numerous U.S. state ballot measures intended
to enforce the labelling of GM foods. Of
the $46 million spent to defeat an antiGM labelling campaign in the state of
California in 2013, over $8 million came
from Monsanto alone. Ballot measures
in Washington State (2012), Colorado
(2014), and Oregon (2014) met similar
fates, with large agribusinesses outspending pro-labelling campaigns by a
wide margin. In Vermont, state legislation to enforce GM labelling was approved in mid-2014 and is scheduled
to come into force in early 2016.
However, the Grocery Manufacturers
Association (supported by corporations
including Monsanto, Coca-Cola, and
Starbucks) is now suing the state, alleging that the law would violate the U.S.
Constitution in various ways. This further demonstrates the power wielded
by large agribusinesses, even in the
face of widespread consumer (and legislative) pressure.
Activists Are Developing New

Open Source Options for Seeds
One positive development is the April
2014 launch of the Open Source Seed
Initiative (OSSI), a group dedicated to
maintaining fair and open access to
plant genetic resources worldwide.
Jack Kloppenburg, a member of OSSIs
board of directors, has written extensively about the potential modification
of open-source licensing (which is
used widely in software development,
and led to the development of Linux,
the vastly popular operating system)
to seeds and other plant materials.
Kloppenburg advocates a new type
of plant licensing that makes plant materials a) widely available, b) modifiable by
any actor, and c) distributable provided
the same terms of the original license
carry forward. These principles mirror
those developed by the open-source
technology movement, and it is anticipated that these licenses will lead to the
creation of a protected commons
preventing the patenting of this material
in the future. While the group is far from
challenging the agribusiness seed cartel,
initiatives like this are beginning to provide a way to legally protect plant genetic material from corporate capture.
China has maintained a strong

stance against GM products, leading to
lawsuits against seed companies like
Syngenta, which released a GM seed
variety to farmers before it had been
approved in the country. While China
has recently begun approving more GM
seed and crop varieties, mandatory labelling laws also look likely to pass.
Resistance to GM Crops
Has Increased
What Do These Developments

Demonstrate?
The mobilization against the use of GM

crops has gained momentum in recent
years. In 2013, the global March
Against Monsanto was estimated to
have brought over two million citizens
to the streets, across six continents, 52
nations, and 48 states of the United
States. After an extended period of
protests, anti-GM protesters celebrated a victory in 2014, when the Chilean
government withdrew a bill that
would have allowed large agribusinesses like Monsanto to patent seeds
in the country. (With falling demand
for GM seeds in South America,
Monsantos profits fell 34%, according
to the companys most recent quarterly report. Whether the falling demand
was a result of global resistance, falling
corn prices, or both is unclear).
Mexico imposed a ban on genetically modified corn in 2013, days after
worldwide protests against Monsanto
and the whole genetically modified
organism (GMO) industry. This made
Mexico a key front in the global battle
against corporate giants that bring in
GMOs and genetic pollutionthe
transfer of GMO genetic codes into other
plants (as by cross-pollination). Last year,
a Mexican judge revoked Monsantos
planting permit, which had allowed the
company to sow more than 253,000
hectares of land across seven states.
The ruling followed complaints from
beekeepers in the state of Yucatn that
Monsantos planned planting of GM
soybeans, made to withstand RoundUp,
would decimate the bee population
and demolish the honey industry.
On one hand, our global food system

continues to be dominated by agribusiness giants, who use their power
to quash legislation designed to protect consumer and farmer interests,
with little demonstration of the benefits of their genetically modified products. At the same time, despite the
power wielded by corporations, resistance is growing. In many cases, agribusiness has met this resistance with
outspending and overwhelming legal
challenges. But in countries like Chile
and Mexico, victories have been won,
and promising new alternatives like
the Open Source Seed Initiative are
creating new ways of protecting plant
material going forward.
The growing awareness of and mobilization against the corporatization
of food cannot be denied. Movements
around organic standards, Fair Trade,
farmers markets, and community supported agriculture have made huge
gains over the last ten years. The next
ten years have to build on these successes to reclaim seed sovereignty, to
challenge the power of agribusinesses
over our land and food system, and to
increase popular engagement, advocating for the health of our planet and
our food. D&S
E L I Z A B E T H F R A S E R is an intern
scholar at the Oakland Institute.
A N U R A D H A M I T TA L is executive
director of the Oakland Institute.
S O U R C E S : Sources are available at
dollarsandsense.org.
< Making Sense
Community Supported Agriculture

A Chance to Revitalize Farming?
B Y M A R K PA U L A N D
E M I LY S T E P H E N S
ave you tried the locavore bahn mi

sandwich? How about that fantastic hakurei rabe pasta with organic heirloom beans and pasture-raised eggs?
For years, our community supported
agriculture (CSA) farm has been sending recipes encouraging us to incorporate our weekly vegetable pick-up,
ranging from tomatoes and potatoes to
kolrabi and okra, into home-cooked
meals and dinner conversations with
friends. CSA farms are in fashion, with a
near three-fold increase in their numbers across the nation over the past five
years. Theyre bucking the trend: during
the same time period, the total number
of U.S. farms has decreased by over
100,000, with the largest losses seen
among small farms. While the growth of
community supported agriculture is an
exciting development, the revitalization
of agriculture should not be equated
blindly with small, local, or family farms.
Rather, it has to incorporate a breadth
of goals to sustain the farmer, the worker, the eater, and the environment.
First off, what is community supported agriculture? Originally, CSA
farms set out to align the interests of
community membersseeking fresh,
sustainable, local foodwith farmersseeking to support themselves
by farming on small plots of land and
engaging in high-diversity, labor-intensive production. Given their available inputs, farmers decided how
many families they could provide sustenance for during the season, determined the cost of production (including a living wage for the farmer), and
then divided total farm costs among
the families who then became shareholders of the farm. Shareholders paid
for their portion of the farms operation prior to the start of the season,
providing working capital for the farms
to purchase inputs at the beginning of

the growing seasonthereby eliminating the farms dependency on credit from financial institutions.
In the original model, how much did
the produce cost the shareholder? Thats
a tricky question. Shareholders didnt
receive a fixed amount of produce for
their payment; rather, they received a
weekly share of the harvest. This innovative agreement between the farm and
the shareholder may have laid the fertile
groundwork necessary for revitalizing
farming in the United States, but is it
leading us in the right direction?
Although the phrase

community supported
agriculture is no
longer a guarantee
of environmental
stewardship or social
equity, one benefit
is that it encourages
real relationships and
understanding between
farmers and consumers.
In a capitalist economy, the market is
a force to be reckoned with, on par with
the droughts, hurricanes, and frosts that
often keep farmers up at night. While
U.S. farm policy has intentionally led to
the expulsion of farmers from agriculture, the 1984 Economic Report of the
President called the transition to industrial agriculture the most successful
example of agricultural development in
the world. But at what cost? Researchers
Leo Horrigan, Robert S. Lawrence, and
Polly Walker find that industrial agriculture is gobbling up fossil fuels, water,
and topsoil at rates far beyond the ca-
pacity of our planet to sustain.

Furthermore, industrial agriculture has
resulted in dangerous levels of biodiversity loss, while simultaneously being
associated with detrimental effects to
human health. A recent article in the
journal Science argues that under the
current system, [f]arm productivity and
economic viability are vulnerable to
resource scarcities, climate change, and
market volatility. This doesnt need to
be the case.
Alternatives are possible. CSA advocates, as part of the local food movement, are working to build consumer
demand for alternative agricultural systems by creating what New York Times
author Randy Kennedy calls deeperthan-commerce connection[s] between
people who make things and people
who buy them. From humble beginnings, CSA farms have aimed to meet
the needs of farmers, consumers, and
surrounding communities by incorporating issues such as environmental sustainability, workers rights, and food
justice. This contrasts greatly with the
industrial food system, which ignores
externalities, focusing solely on producing the most food at the lowest cost.
In theory, CSA farms are positioned
to overcome many of the challenges
faced by small, diversified farming operations that are striving to produce
food sustainably and equitably.
Through non-traditional agreements
with shareholders, the unique needs of
these farms can be met:
Access to land: community relations and a socially and environmentally just farming model can
help farms acquire land through
community land trusts.
Working capital: shareholder payment in advance of the growing
season ensures farms are provided with the necessary capital to
purchase inputs.
< Making Sense

A living wage: the complete cost
of production, including farmers
labor, is used to determine a fair
price for the share.
Guaranteed market: through the
purchase of shares, shareholders
provide the farm with a secure
market for their produce.
Risk hedging: shareholders purchase a share of the seasons harvest rather than a fixed amount of
food, ensuring that the farmer is
compensated at a fixed level regardless of shocks such as extreme
weather events or crop failure.
Additionally, the needs of consumers, or shareholders, are met through a
weekly supply of fresh, local produce
and the opportunity to know and support their farmer. Finally, community
supported agriculture can improve the
well-being of a community through
the preservation of open space, support of a healthy environment, and
provision of living-wage jobs.
EXCESS RESOURCES
In a 1962 report entitled
An Adaptive Program for
Agriculture, the Committee for
Economic Developmentan
influential business-led think
tankdeclared that we are
recommending here ... to
induce excess resources (primarily people) to move rapidly out of agriculture.
While this brief outline provides an
idealist vision of CSA farms, how are
things really working?
Upon conducting interviews and a
survey with CSA farmers in western
Massachusetts, it is clear that the model
is struggling to fulfill its original goals.
While for many, the original ideals are
still there, farmers seem to be stuck at a
crossroads. They simply cant sell their
shares for enough money to fulfill the
fundamental CSA goal of providing a

living wage to farmers. Encouragingly, a
previous study found CSA shares were
not only cheaper than buying organically grown produce at regional chains, but
also cheaper than buying conventionally
grown produce at any store. Despite the
cost-effectiveness of a CSA share, perhaps overall spending on produce has
an upper limit that farmers are encountering. Many of the farmers explained
that they couldnt raise prices any more,
as there is fierce competition between
CSA farms to both maintain and grow
their customer base. Additionally, farmers were frustrated that their CSA shares
were not accessible to low-income consumers, placing farmers and the entire
local food movement in a moral bind.
Yet the movement continues to grow.
Farmers, particularly young people and
womenwho have historically been
underrepresented among farmers
continue to flock to community supported agriculture. As the number of CSA
farms increases, the ideas encompassed
by community supported agriculture
have become more pliable. A recent NPR
report, entitled What Is Community
Supported Agriculture? The Answer
Keeps Changing, brings to light just how
varied the concept can be, resulting in
the dilution of its original meaning and a
decrease in its potential to revitalize agriculture. As with the organic movement,
CSA farms are undergoing a form of conventionalization. For many farms, community supported agriculture is little
more than a marketing ploy. While farms
engaged exclusively in community supported agriculture are protected from
market pressures, today many CSA farms
are hybrids, selling some produce
through their CSA but also relying on a
traditional capitalist market. These CSA
farms seem to be the most removed
from the original values such as risk sharing, community relations, and sustainability. Clearly, not all CSA farms are the
same, but for consumers arent labels like
CSA supposed to simplify their daily
purchases? As one CSA farmer put it,
people feel if it is a local farm then it has
got all this integrity. But there are local

farms around here that use GMO crops
and are spraying the crap out of their
fields. Its just not the same thing.
Although the phrase community
supported agriculture is no longer a
guarantee of environmental stewardship
or social equity, one benefit is that it encourages real relationships and understanding between farmers and consumers. Accountability is built into the
system; both farmers and consumers
feel a sense of responsibility for the others well-being. While shareholders cant
make assumptions about the values
supported by their farm, they have an
opportunity to directly ask the expert,
their farmer. Through the elimination of
distance, CSA bypasses the need for consistent labeling, providing the consumer
with the opportunity to understand far
more about how their food is grown
than any label can convey. There are no
easy solutions for the revitalization of
agriculture, but these conversations,
should people choose to have them, are
a step in the right direction. D&S
M A R K PA U L is a PhD candidate in
economics at the University of
Massachusetts-Amherst.
E L I Z A B E T H S T E P H E N S studies
global womens health and international
development at the University of
Massachusetts-Amherst.
S O U R C E S : USDA, 2012 Census of Agriculture
(agcensus.usda.gov); Committee for Economic
Development, An Adaptive Program for Agriculture,
1962; J. P. Cooley and D. A. Lass, Consumer benefits from
community supported agriculture membership, Review
of Agricultural Economics (1998); Local Harvest: Real Food,
Real Farmers, Real Community (localharvest.org); L.
Horrigan, et al., How sustainable agriculture can address
the environmental and human health harms of industrial
agriculture, Environmental Health Perspectives (2002); D.
Lass, et al., Community supported agriculture entering
the 21st century: Results from the 2001 national survey,
Department of Resource Economics, University of
Massachusetts (2003); J. Reganold, et al., Transforming
US agriculture, Science (2003); M. Ritchie and K. Ristau,
US farm policy, World Policy Journal (1986); Randy
Kennedy, Buy Local Gets Creative, New York Times, Aug.
4, 2013; Ted Burnham, What Is Community Supported
Agriculture? The Answer Keeps Changing, NPR, March
29, 2012 (npr.org).
MODERN
INDUSTRIAL
AGRICULTURE
By John Ikerd
mericans are being subjected to an ongoing

multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign
designed to increase confidence and trust in
todays agriculture. Food Dialogues, just one
example of this broader trend, is a campaign sponsored
by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliancean industry
organization whose funders and board members include
Monsanto, DuPont, and John Deere. The campaign features the faces of farming and ranchingarticulate,
attractive young farmers, obviously chosen to put the
best possible face on the increasingly ugly business of
industrial agriculture, which dominates our foodproduction system.
Genetically engineered crops, inhumane treatment of
farm animals, and routine feeding of antibiotics to confined animalsamong many other problemshave
eroded public trust in American agriculture. In response,
the defenders of so-called modern agriculture have
employed top public relations firms to try to clean up
their tarnished public image. Their campaigns emphasize
such issues as water quality, food safety, animal welfare,
and food prices and choices.
Mounting public concerns in each of these areas are
supported by a growing body of scientific evidence. For
example, a 1998 EPA study found 35,000 miles of
streams in 22 states polluted with biological wastes from
concentrated animal feeding operations. The number of
impaired waters in Iowa has tripled since the late
1980s, as industrial farming systems, such as factory
farms, have replaced traditional family farms.
On food safety, a recent U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention study reviewed dozens of studies
linking routine feeding of antibiotics in concentrated
livestock operations to people being infected with
antibiotic-resistant bacteria, such as MRSA. Use of antibiotics in food-producing animals allows antibioticresistant bacteria to thrive, they concluded. Resistant
bacteria can be transmitted from food-producing animals to humans through the food supply.
The big agricultural corporations claim that they
are committed to the humane treatment of animals
while advocating legislation to
Centerfire
criminalize unauthorized photogFeedyard,
raphy in concentrated animal feedUlysses,
ing operations. Numerous scienKansas, 2013.
tific studies over the past 50 years
Credit:
have documented inhumane treat Mishka Henner
(miskhahenner.
ment in these animal factories.
THE FAILURE OF
com/Feedlots).
I N D U S T R I A L A G R I C U LT U R E
The mistreatment is not only a result of inevitable

overcrowding in confinement operations, but also
results from routine management practices, transportation, and even from the genetic selection of
animals for maximum productivity.
The Food Dialogues campaign claims to advocate consumer choice by supporting all types of
farming. However, its language strongly suggests
that industrial agriculture is essential to keeping
food affordable. It considers organic agriculture
and other sustainable faming alternatives to be no
more than niche markets. In reality, the only
clear benefit of industrial agriculture is that it
requires fewer farmers. There is no indication that
industrial agriculture has produced more food than
could have been produced with more sustainable
methods, only that it has employed far fewer farmers. Any production-cost advantage has been more
than offset by higher margins, including profits,
elsewhere within the corporate food supply chain.
Over the past 20 years, an era of intensive agricultural industrialization, U.S. retail food prices have
risen faster than overall inflation rates.
The reality of agriculture is in conflict with

the worldview that supports industrialization.
We are currently seeing the disastrous
consequences of treating living ecosystems
as if they were inanimate mechanisms.
Agricultural industrialization has had a devastating effect on the quality of rural life. Industrial
agriculture has replaced independent family farmers with a far smaller number of farm workers,
most of whom are paid poorly. In 1960, farmers
were still more than 8% of the U.S. workforce.
They are less than 1% today. Rural communities
have suffered both economically and socially from
this loss of traditional farm families. More than
50 years of research demonstrates that communities supported by small to mid-size family farms
are better places to live, both economically and
socially, than are communities dependent on
large farming enterprises.
Perhaps most important, industrial agriculture

has failed in its most fundamental purpose: providing food security. The percentage of food insecure
people in the United States is greater today than
during the 1960searly in the current phase of
agricultural industrialization. (See Gerald Friedman,
Food Insecurity in Affluent America, pp. 41-42)
Furthermore, the industrial food system is linked to
a new kind of food insecurity: unhealthy foods. A
recent global report by 500 scientists from 50 countries suggested that obesity is [now] a bigger health
crisis than hunger. There is growing evidence that
Americas diet-related health problems are not limited to poor consumer food choices or processed
junk foods but begin with a lack of essential nutrients in food crops produced on industrial farms.
Its high time for fundamental change in American agriculture. The growing litany of farm/food
problems today cannot be solved by redesigning
the USDA food pyramid, placing warning labels
on junk foods, or imposing more stringent regulations on farmers. Todays problems are deep and
systemic. They are inherent in the worldview from
which industrial agriculture emerged and upon
which its evolution depends.
In economic terms, industrialization allows capital and technology to be substituted for workers
and managers. In other words, it allows raw materials or natural resources to be transformed into
more valuable products while employing fewer,
lower-skilled workersin both labor and management positions. In a world with an abundance of
natural resources and a scarcity of workers, industrialization seemed a logical strategy for economic
development. With increases in populations and
depletion of natural resources, the economic benefits of industrialization have declined while the
negative consequences of unemployment and environmental degradation have grown.
For agriculture, the benefits of industrialization
have been fewer and the costs have been greater.
The reality of agriculture is in conflict with the
worldview that supports industrialization. Industrialization is rooted in a mechanistic worldview: the
industrial world works like a big, complex machine
that can be manipulated by humans to extract natural resources and use them to meet our needs and
wants. In reality, the world is an extremely complex
living ecosystem, of which we humans are a part.
Our well-being ultimately depends on working
and living in harmony with nature rather than
conquering nature. We are currently seeing the

disastrous consequences of treating living ecosystems as if they were inanimate mechanisms.
Thankfully, a new kind of agriculture is emerging to meet these ecological, social, and economic
challenges. The new farmers may call their farms
organic, ecological, biological, holistic, or
biodynamic. Their farming methods may be called
agroecology, nature farming, or permaculture. They all fit under the conceptual umbrella of
sustainable agriculture. They are committed to
meeting the food needs of all in the present without diminishing opportunities for those who will
live in the future.
The strength of this movement is most visible in
the growth of the organic-foods market, although
some types of organic farms, especially those
mimicking industrial agriculture, may not be sustainable. Sales of organic foods grew by more than
20% per year during the 1990s and early 2000s,
before leveling off at around 10%12% annual
growth following the recession of 2008. Organic
foods now amount to around $35 billion in annual
sales, something less than 5% of total food sales.
The local food movement, as exemplified by farmers markets and community supported agriculture, has replaced organics as the most dynamic
sector of the food market, although it is only about
half as large in sales. (See Mark Paul and Emily Ste-
Tascosa Feedyard, Texas, 2013.

Credit: Miska Henner (miskhahenner.com/Feedlots).
phens, Community Supported Agriculture: A

Chance to Revitalize Farming? pp. 910.)
Some question whether organic or other sustainable farms can meet the food needs of a growing
global population. A comprehensive review in the
journal Nature compared organic and conventional
crop yields in developed countries, concluding:
Under certain conditionsthat is, with good management practices, particular crop types and growing
conditionsorganic systems can . . . nearly match conventional yields. The challenge in the United States
and the so-called developed world is to create a food
system that will meet the basic food needs of all without degrading its natural and human resources. Ecological and social sustainability, not just yields, is the
logical motivation for organic agriculture in the socalled developed world. Globally, industrial agriculture is not needed to feed the world. Small, diversified farms already provide food for least 70% of the
worlds population and could double or triple yields
without resorting to industrial production methods.
Everywhere we look, we can see the failure of the
grand experiment of industrial agriculture. Its time
for fundamental change. D&S
J O H N I K E R D is professor emeritus of agricultural
economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia
and author of several books, including The Essentials
of Economic Sustainability (Kumarian Press, 2012).
S O U R C E S : Available at dollarsandsense.org.
LAND-GRABBING
AROUND THE
WORLD
WALL STREETS
U.S. LAND GRAB

Credit: Oakland
Institute, from the
report Down on
the FarmWall
Street: Americas
New Farmer
(oaklandinstitute.
org/down-onthe-farm).
BY LUKAS ROSS
f you were told that the world was going to

become a drier, hungrier place, the first words to
come into your head probably wouldnt be investment opportunity. Then again, you probably
arent one of the financial-sector giants piling into
the global farmland market, gambling that as populations rise and climate change worsens, the owners of prime farmland will be rewarded handsomely
for their investments.
Across the developing world, millions of acres
have already changed hands. Diving in are buyers
as diverse as private corporations, state-owned
entities, and national elites. After deals cooked up
between outside investors and governments, local
communities are often left hungry so that cash
crops can be grown for export. The Land Matrix
database includes 500 million acres approved or
The Land Matrix project, which tracks largescale land acquisitions, defines a foreign land
grab as a transfer of 200 hectares (500 acres)
or more, via lease or sale, to a foreign entity
intending to put the land to a new use. The
project has compiled a database of such acquisitions since 2000, the vast majority of them
since the food-price spikes of 20072008.
The picture of land grabbing that
emerged in 2008 was of land or water-poor
countries, panicked about their future food
security, using sovereign wealth funds to
snap up land to produce food for their domestic markets. China came in for particular
scrutiny based on a series of highly publicized
planned acquisitions. Most never materialized, and todays profile of grabbed land, from
the Land Matrix project, looks quite different:
The majority of land grabs target lands in
Africa. Six of the top ten target countries are
South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of
Congo, Mozambique, the Republic of the
under negotiation worldwide between 2000 and

2011, an area eight times the size of the United
Kingdom and easily the biggest global land grab
since the heyday of European colonialism.
But the rush isnt just happening in faraway
places, greased along by corrupt business practices.
Driven by the same factors and even executed by
some of the same investors, a rush for U.S. land is
underway as welland the consequences for
everything from environmental sustainability to
food security could be immense.
The Canadian insurance company Manulife,
the Swiss bank UBS, and the pension fund
TIAA-CREF are only some of the most visible
names vying for a bigger stake in U.S. farmland.
According to a recent estimate in the industry
newspaper Pensions and Investments, institutional investors like these already own as much as
$810 billion worth of U.S. farmlandwith at
BY TIMOTHY A. WISE
introduced myself to Luis Sitoe, economic adviser to Mozambiques minister of agriculture,

and explained that Id spent the last two weeks in
his country researching the ProSAVANA project,
decried as the largest land grab in Africa. This
ambitious Brazil-Japan-Mozambique development
project was slated to turn 35 million hectares (over
85 million acres) of Mozambiques supposedly
unoccupied savannah lands into industrial-scale
soybean farms modeled onand with capital
fromBrazils savannah lands in its own southern
Cerrado region.
Mr. Sitoe smirked. Did you see ProSAVANA? I
hadnt, in fact. So far there is no investment in ProSavana, he said, with surprising satisfaction considering that the projects most ardent supporter had
been his boss, agriculture minister Jos Pacheco.
THE GREAT LAND
GIVEAWAY
IN MOZAMBIQUE
A firestorm of controversy had dogged the project since its Master Plan had been unceremoniously leaked in 2013. Farmers were actively resisting efforts by foreign investors and the government
to take away their land. And Brazilian investment
was almost nowhere to be found.
Had the land-grab boom gone bust? Was
ProSAVANAs stuttering start a sign that African
farmland had lost its luster? No, but it turns out to
be easier to get a government to give away a farmers land than it is to actually farm it.
Reality Asserts Itself
Data from the Land Matrix project suggest that
economic realities have begun to assert themselves.
Commodity prices are down, speculative capital
has returned to rebounding stock markets, low oil
prices have cut the profit margins on biofuels. Oil
and gas discoveries in some developing countries,
Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. But Papua

New Guinea, Indonesia, Brazil, and Ukraine
are also in the top ten.
The investors are not mostly sovereign
wealth funds from land-poor countries but
investors from rich countries. Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) countrieswhich include the United
States, most of western Europe, and most
other high-income countriesaccount for
more than half of the deals.
The top land grabberby farisnt
China but the United States, with 6.5 million
hectares under contract, more than twice the
level of the second-ranked investor country
(Malaysia). China is eleventh on the list.
Food crops represent only about onequarter of all acquired land. Biofuel crops or
flex crops such as sugarfor either sweetener or ethanolaccount for nearly as much
acquired land, as do forestry projects. In
Africa, only 13% of agricultural land-grab
projects are for food.
Perhaps most importantly, the land targeted is not unoccupied. For land on which
there are data about former use, the majority was in agriculturewith the majority of
that being cultivated by small-scale farmers.
Timothy A. Wise
Joo works in
his maize field
in Mozambique.
Credit: Bread for
the World/Kate
Raisz (Creative
Commons
AttributionNonCommercial
2.0 Generic).
WALL STREET CONTINUED
least another $5 billion allocated for future

investment.
Two of the biggest factors that began to drive
Wall Street into U.S. farmland emerged in 2007
and 2008. The first was a global spike in food prices, which sent the number of hungry people in the
world to over one billion, and made it clear to investors that there was money to be made from
commodity crops. (See Ben Collins, Hot Commodities, Stuffed Markets, and Empty Bellies,
D&S, July/August 2008.) The second was the subprime mortgage meltdown. Plummeting global financial markets led many investors to the perceived
stability of real assets like infrastructure, timber,
and precious metalswith farmland emerging as
one of the safest places to stash capital while the
economy recovered.
Some analysts also point to macro-level trends
such as a growing, meat-hungry global middle class
and government support for biofuels. Still others
are shockingly candid about climate change as a
business opportunity. The argument is that, as extreme weather puts added pressure on existing
land, the owners of well-placed, well-irrigated farm
properties will be able to cash in while the world

burns. Jeremy Grantham of GMO Capital basically said as much in a 2011 letter to investors: Good
land, in short supply, will rise in price, to the benefit of land owners.
In the United States, however, another factor is
in play: demographics. As the current generation
retires, more than half of all U.S. farmland is going
to change hands. This is a 400 million acre opportunity that has many in the financial sector openly
salivating. The aging U.S. farmer population, coupled
with too few in the younger generation to replace
them, translates into a golden opportunity for
buyers to expand and consolidate their holdings.
This is troubling news, if only because Wall
Street has yet to prove it can farm or care for the
land responsibly.
As an absentee investor, its instinct is to treat
farms as lines on a balance sheet and leave the actual business of agriculture to hired managers. This
can lead to problems. One case involves an apple
orchard in Washington owned by the Dallas Police
and Fire Pension System and managed by the Hancock Agricultural Investment Group, a subsidiary
of Canadas biggest insurer. The details came to
light as part of a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf
MOZAMBIQUE CONTINUED
meanwhile, have taken the wind out of the sails of

domestic alternative energy projects which were
fueling some land-grabbing.
As a result, the pace of large-scale land acquisitions has slowed, many projects have failed, and
those underway often operate on a fraction of the
land handed over to them.
National governmentsperhaps the most willing negotiating partners in this often-ugly processhave ceded the rights to large tracts of land
to foreign investors. As of mid-September 2014, Land
Matrix had recorded 956 transnational land deals
completed globally since 2000, with another 187 under negotiation. The completed agreements, most of
which have taken place since 2007, cover 61 million
hectares (about 150 million acres), with about half
of that land under formal contract. Interestingly, of
the 37 million hectares under contract, only 4.1 million (just 11%) are confirmed to be in production.
The much lower acreage contracted for production reflects how hard it can be to turn vague intentions, and government concessions into concrete
business plans. Hardest of all is putting those plans

into operation, which involves dealing with weak
regional markets, poor infrastructure, andmost
importantlyresistance from local residents currently using the land.
By all accounts, ProSAVANA stalled before it
could even register as a productive project in the
Land Matrix database. Mozambique is fifth among
all target countries in the projects ranking by
amount of land given away (behind Papua New
Guinea, Indonesia, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo), with 99 concluded
projects covering 2.2 million hectares. Threequarters of that is for forestry projects. Of the agriculture projects, one finds just a few comparatively
small soybean projects in the Nacala Corridor,
ProSAVANAs target region.
Tucked in the database, one finds a grand intended but not concluded 700,000-hectare project that lists Brazilians as the investors and the Brazilian, Japanese, and Mozambican governments as
partners. ProSAVANA. What happened to the 35
LAND GRABS
16
&&
SENSE
2015
16
DOLLARS
SENSE
MARCH/APRIL
2015
l lDOLLARS
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of farm workers. According to court documents,

the property was leased to one manager and then
sub-leased to another. The latter then reportedly
lied to workers about wages and working conditions and hired a foreman who carried a gun on the
job and fired it to intimidate workers.
If guaranteeing fair or even lawful labor standards as an absentee investor is hard, so is implementing sustainable practices. Eager to capitalize
on short-term gains, these investors have sometimes sought bonus sources of revenue. One example is a farm owned by the Alaska state pension system that was leased for oil and gas drilling in Weld
County, Colo., arguably one of the most heavily
fracked regions of the country.
Another concern is the rush to plant waterintensive crops like almonds and pistachios in Californias Central Valley, where institutional investors are among the biggest players on the scene.
Lax to non-existent rules for sinking new wells,
coupled with a booming global market for nuts,
are combining to make the perennially waterstrapped state even drier.
So as the financial sector hunkers down to buy
an even bigger stake in U.S. farmland, it is worth
asking a few questions about the future of food and
farming. How do we train a new generation of

farmers to take the torch from the old one? How
do we create new financing structures that secure
stable tenure for them? How do we make sure that
there are markets for local and sustainably produced
foods for everyone, and not only the wealthy?
Admittedly, much of this work has already begun. Groups like Food Commons are experimenting with ways to create regional food systems, pairing farmers with sources of credit and
cooperatively run food processing facilities, while
groups like California FarmLink match aspiring
farmers with the retiring generation.
No one denies that this is going to be a long
journey. We dont have all the solutions yet. Even
contemplating alternatives puts us at odds with the
corporate agriculture interests who gain the most from
the unsustainable way most of us are eating now.
But the discussion has to start somewhere, especially if the alternative is surrendering our agricultural heritage to Wall Street. D&S
L U K A S R O S S is a fellow at the Oakland Institute
and the author of Down on the FarmWall Street:
Americas New Farmer (Oakland Institute, 2014).
million hectares? That was the press release, the

sales pitch to Brazilian investors. Only a fraction of
that land is even suitable for agriculture; much is
forested or degraded. Or occupied.
that the soil and climate in the Nacala Corridor

were similar to those found in the Cerrado, so Brazilian technology could be easily adapted to tame
an uninhabited region inhospitable to agriculture.
Fundamentally Flawed
Frankly, I was surprised to find ProSAVANA to be
such a bust. This wasnt some fly-by-night venture
capitalist looking to grow a biofuel crop hed never
produced for a market that barely existed. Thats
what I saw in Tanzania, and such failed biofuel
land grabs litter the African landscape.
ProSAVANA at least knew its investors: Brazils
agribusiness giants. The planners knew their technology: soybeans adapted to the tropical conditions of Brazils Cerrado. And they knew their market: Japans and Chinas hog farms and their
insatiable appetite for feed, generally made with
soybeans. That was already more than a lot of these
grand schemes had going for them.
But ProSAVANA foundered because its premise
was fundamentally flawed. The Grand Idea was
It turns out to be easier to get a

government to give away a farmers land
than it is to actually farm it.
It turns out that the two regions differ dramatically. The Cerrado had poor soils, which is why it
had few farmers. Technology was available, however, to address soil quality. The Nacala Corridor, by
contrast, has good soils, which is precisely why the
region is the most densely populated part of rural
Mozambique. If there are good lands, you can
pretty well bet people have discovered them and
are farming them.
MOZAMBIQUE CONTINUED
LAND GRABS
Democracy and Resistance

Mozambique has one other thing Brazil didnt have
when it tamed the Cerrado: a democratic government forged in an independence movement rooted
in peasant farmers struggle for land rights. At the
time of Brazils soybean expansion in the mid1980s, a military dictatorship could impose its
Cerrado project. Mozambique has one of the
stronger land laws in Africa, which prevents private
ownership of land and grants use rights to farmers
who have been farming land for ten years or
morewhether they have a formal title or not.
Even if the government is now siding with foreign
investors, it has laws through which an increasingly
restive citizenry can hold it accountable.
What may end up dooming ProSAVANA is
farmers growing awareness of the threat to their
land, and their capacity to resist. Spearheaded by
Unio Nacional de Camponeses (UNAC), Mozambiques national farmers union, the campaign
to stop the project formed quickly, fueled by a Mozambican tour of the Cerrado organized with Brazilian farmer groups. The images of unending expanses of soybeans, without a small farmer in sight,
and the tales of environmental destruction spread
quickly through Mozambique.
Mozambique has a democratic government

forged in an independence movement rooted
in peasant farmers struggle for land rights.
What may end up dooming ProSAVANA is
farmers growing awareness of the threat
to their land, and their capacity to resist.
Within months of the release of the Master

Plan, a tri-national campaign in Japan, Brazil, and
Mozambique formed. An open letter to the heads
of government of the three countries caused a stir,
particularly in Japan where the countrys international development agency was accused of violating the long-standing separation of development
assistance from commercial interests.
Last year, the campaign adopted a firm No

to ProSAVANA stance until farmers and local
communities are consulted on development plans
for the region.
Local resistance to specific land deals may have
had an even greater impact. That certainly scared
off some of the largest Brazilian investors, who
complained not only that they couldnt own the
land outright, but that it took a negotiation with
the national government and then further negotiations with local governments just to get a lease.
Even then, that lease was for land that was anything but unoccupied. Most packed up their giant
combines and went home.
No End to Land Grabbing
I asked Mr. Sitoe in the Ministry of Agriculture
if the lesson of ProSAVANA was that agricultural development needed to be based on Mozambiques three million small-scale food producers.
He smirked again. No, he assured me, the government is committed to foreign investment,
with its capital and technology, as the path to
agricultural development.
He pulled out a two-inch-thick project proposal for a 200,000-hectare foreign-funded
scheme for irrigated agriculture along the Lurio
River, on the northern edge of the Nacala Corridor. Was this part of ProSAVANA? No, he reassured me with another smile. That brand was
clearly tarnished.
Had farmers and communities in the region been
consulted about the Lurio River project? Absolutely
not, said Vicente Adriano of UNAC. In the words
of the Mozambican independence movement, La
Luta Continuathe struggle continues. D&S
T I M O T H Y A . W I S E is director of the Research
and Policy Program at the Global Development and
Environment Institute, Tufts University. He also leads
the Institutes Globalization and Sustainable Development Program.
S O U R C E S : Land Coalition, Land Matrix Newsletter, January 2014,
October 2014 (landcoalition.org); Justia Ambiental! et al., Leaked
ProSAVANA Master Plan confirms worst fears, April 30, 2013 (grain.
org); Timothy A. Wise, Picking up the pieces from a failed land grab
project in Tanzania, Global Post, June 27, 2014; Unio Nacional de
Camponeses, No to ProSAVANA! Launch of national campaign, June
2, 2014 (unac.org.mz).
THESE I
THINGS
CAN
CHANGE
Photos by David Bacon
Text by David Bacon & Rosario Ventura
n 2013, Rosario Ventura and her husband

Isidro Silva were strikers at Sakuma Brothers
Farms in Burlington, Wash. In the course of
three months in 2013, over 250 workers
walked out of the fields several times, as their anger
grew over their wages and the conditions in the
labor camp where they lived.
Every year, the company hires between 700 and
800 people to pick strawberries, blueberries, and
blackberries. During World War II, the Sakumas
were interned by the U.S. government because of
their Japanese ancestry, and would have lost their
land, as many Japanese farmers did, had it not been
held in trust for them by another local rancher until
the war ended. Today, the business has grown far
beyond its immigrant roots, and is one of the largest
berry growers in Washington, where berries are big
business, with annual sales of $6.1 million, and big
corporate customers like Hagen Dazs ice cream.
P H O T O : To the barricades! Strikers put up a barrier on the road into the labor camp.
MIGRANT WORKERS
Sakuma Farms owns a retail outlet, a freezer and

processing plant, and a chain of nurseries in
California that grow rootstock.
By contrast, Sakuma workers have very few
resources. Some are local workers, but over half are
migrants from California, like Ventura and her
family. Both the local workers and the California
migrants are immigrants, coming from indigenous
towns in Oaxaca and southern Mexico where people speak languages like Mixteco and Triqui. While
all farm workers in the United States are poorly
paid, these new indigenous arrivals are at the bottom. One recent study in California found that
tens of thousands of indigenous farm workers
received less than minimum wage.
The irony of the expansion of the H-2A

Program in Washington State is that one group
of immigrant workers, recruited as guest
workers, is being pitted against another
groupthe migrants who have been coming
to work at the company for many years.
In 2013, Ventura and other angry workers

formed an independent union, Familias Unidas
por la JusticiaFamilies United for Justice. In fitful negotiations with the company, they discovered
that Sakuma Farms had been certified to bring in
160 H-2A guest workers. The H-2A program was
established in 1986, to allow U.S. agricultural
employers to hire workers in other countries and
bring them to the United States. In this program,
the company first must certify that it has tried to
hire workers locally. If it cant find workers at the
wage set by the state employment department, and
the department agrees that the company has
offered the jobs, the grower can then hire workers
from outside the country. The U.S. government
provides visas that allow guest workers to work
only for that employer, and only for a set period of
time, less than a year. Afterwards, they must return
to their home country. If theyre fired or lose their
job before the contract is over, they must leave
right away. Growers must apply for the program
each year. On hearing about the application, the

striking workers felt that the company was trying
to find a new workforce to replace them.
When I questioned someone from the company
about why it needed guest workers, he said they
couldnt find enough workers to pick their berries.
But the farm was also unwilling to raise wages to
attract more pickers. If we [do], it unscales it for
the other farmers, said owner Ryan Sakuma in an
interview. Were just robbing from the total [number of workers available]. And we couldnt attract
them without raising the price hugely to price
other growers out. That would just create a price
war. He pegged his farms wages to the H-2A program: Everyone at the company will get the H-2A
wage for this work.
The H-2A program limits whats possible for all
workers, says Rosalinda Guilln, director of
Community2Community, an organization that
helped the strikers. Community2Community,
based in Bellingham, Wash., advocates for farm
worker rights, especially those of women, in a sustainable food system. After the strikes, Sakuma
Farms applied for H-2A work visas for 438 workers, saying that the strikers werent available to work
because they had all been fired. Under worker and
community pressure, the U.S. Department of
Labor (USDoL) did not approve Sakumas application. Sakuma has still not recognized the union,
and many workers feel their jobs are still in danger.
A decade ago there were hardly any H-2A workers in Washington State. In 2013, the USDoL certified applications for 6,251 workers, double the
number in 2011. And the irony, of course, is that
one group of immigrant workers, recruited as guest
workers, is being pitted against another group
the migrants who have been coming to work at the
company for many years.
As she sat in her home in Madera, Calif.,
Rosario Ventura described the personal history
that led her to migrate yearly from California to
Washington, and then become a striker.
See page 22 for Rosario Venturas story.
D A V I D B A C O N is a journalist and photographer

covering labor, immigration, and the impact of the
global economy on workers. He is author of several books,
including Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2009).
Hard camp conditions.

Filemn Pineda, his wife Francisca Mendoza, and their children lived in a
cabin in the labor camp at Sakuma Farms during the picking season.
Who checks
the weights?
Rosalinda Guilln talks
with three young
women, who
demanded that the
company allow them to
do the work of
weighing and checking
the berries picked by
workers. Before the
strike, workers often
accused the companys
checkersmostly local
white people, not
Mexicansof cheating
them on the weight.
ROSARIO VENTURA: IN HER OWN WORDS
came from Oaxaca in 2001, from San Martn Itunyoso. It is

a Triqui town [where the indigenous language Trinqui is
spoken], and thats what I grew up speaking. My mother and
father were farmers, and worked on the land that belongs to
the town. It was just enough to grow what we ate, but sometimes
there was nothing to eat, and no money to buy food.
There wasnt much work in Oaxaca, so my parents would go to
Sinaloa [in northern Mexico]. I began to go with them when I was
young, I dont remember how old I was. It costs a lot of money to
go to school and my parents had no way to get it. In Mexico you
have to buy a uniform for every grade. You have to buy the pencils,
notebooks, things the children need. My brothers went to school,
though. I was the only one that didnt go, because I was a girl.
When I told my dad I wanted to come to the U.S., he tried
to convince me not to leave. When you leave, it is foreverthat
is what he said, because we never return. You wont even call,
he said. And it did turn out that way. Now I dont talk with him
because I know if I do, it will bring him sadness. Hell ask, when
are you coming back? What can I say?
I would like to return to live with him, since he is alone. But
I cant get the money to go back. There is no money, there is nothing to eat, in San Martn Itunyoso. I thought that I would save up
something here and return. But it is hard here too. Its the same
situation here in the U.S. We work to try to get ahead, but we
never do. Were always earning just enough to buy food and
pay rent. Everything gets used up.
It is easy to leave the U.S., but difficult to come back and
cross the border. When I came, it cost two thousand dollars to
cross, walking day and night in Arizona. We had to carry our
own water and food. Out there in the desert it is life and death
if you do not have any. It took a week and a half of pure walking.
We would rest a couple of hours and get up to walk again.
Those who bring children suffer the most because they
have to carry water and food for them, and sometimes carry the
children themselves. Thank God we all crossed and were OK.
But now that Im here Im always afraid because I dont have
papers. I can never relax or be at ease.
When I crossed the border I came alone, and then found
my brothers, who were already here in Madera. They took me to
Washington State to work at Sakuma Farms. I met Isidro when
I was working, and we got married in 2003. He speaks Mixteco
and I speak Triqui, but that did not matter to us. In those times
I hardly spoke Spanish, but now I know a little more.
When I came here, they were pruning the plants. That is
very hard work because you get cut and the branches hit your
face. When I was in Oaxaca, thinking of coming, I was expecting
a different type of work. But this is all there is. People who know
how to read and write or have papers can get easier jobs. The
rest of us work in the fields.
At Sakuma Farms the company was always hard on us. They
would tell us, you came to pick, and you have to make weight.
If you dont make weight they wont let you work for a few days.
If you still cant make weight, they pull you out of the field and fire
you. But when youre working, and you take what youve picked
to be weighed, they always cheat you of two or three pounds.
Ive always lived in the labor camp during the picking
season. We decided to continue living in Madera, and never
moved to Washington permanently. When it gets really hot in
the San Joaquin Valley in the summer we go to Washington,
22
&&
SENSE
2015
22
DOLLARS
SENSE
MARCH/APRIL
2015
l lDOLLARS
l lMARCH/APRIL
where its cooler. Then when it gets cold there and the work
runs out, we come back to Madera. We go every season.
When we go to Washington we have to rent someplace
in Madera to store our belongings, like our clothes. Then when
we return we have to search for a new home again. It is a hassle.
This year we left the house where wed been living with my
brother instead, because he didnt go to Washington. We all live
hereIsidro, my four children, my brothers and sisters, and
their children. The family pays two thousand a month for the
whole house, and Isidro and I pay three hundred as our share.
When were in Washington we have to save for the winter season, because theres no work until April. I dont work in Madera
because I cant find childcare. The trip to Washington is expensiveabout $250 in gas and food. If we dont have enough money, we have to ask for a loan. Thats what we normally do, since by
then weve used up what we saved from the previous year. There
is a food bank in Washington, which helps when we get there.
With the strikes last year in Washington we were out of
work for almost two months. We didnt save anything, so it was
very hard for us afterwards. We didnt have enough to pay the
bills, and we couldnt find work. The strikes started when the
company fired Federico [a coworker]. We wanted Sakuma to
raise the [piece rate] price, and the company refused. They told
us if we want to work, work. Then they accused Federico of
starting a protest. They went to his cabin, to kick him out of the
camp. Thats when we stopped work, to get his job back.
We were also upset about the conditions in the labor camp.
The mattress they gave us was torn and dirty, and the wire was
coming out and poked us. Were accustomed to sleeping with
the children, but the bed was so small we couldnt even fit on
it. There were cockroaches and rats. The roof leaked when it
rained. They just put bags in the holes and it still leaked. All
my childrens clothes were wet.
They told us they would change things, and the county
inspector would come check the cabin. But the company man
in charge of the camp told me: If the inspector comes, dont
show him your bed. Dont say anything or you will have a lot
of problems. So when the inspector came the company man
followed him and didnt let me say anything.
They always try to make us afraid to speak up. If you ask
for another five cents they fire you. They threatened to remove
us from the camp because of the strikes, and said theyd fire
us. They are always threatening us. They fired Ramn also [the
leader of the strike and union] because he talked back to them.
But thank God he had the courage to talk.
I think there will be strikes again this coming year, if the
company doesnt come to its senses, and as long as we have
support. We cant leave things like this. There is too much abuse.
We are making them rich and making ourselves poor. Its not fair.
I think these things can change if we all keep at it. We wont let
them keep on going like this. We have to change them. It is important that they raise wages, treat us right, and help the farmworkers. All the mistreatment, threats, everythingit isnt fair.
I want to work, to have money, to be in a better place. I want a
little house and to stay in one place with my kids. Thats all Im hoping for. Id like to see my children reach high school and maybe
college. If they dont, I want to go back to Mexico, if I can save
money. My kids can go to school there too. I want them to continue studying. I dont want my children to work for Sakuma. D&S
Back to work, for now.

The strike actually consisted of a number of separate work stoppages, and each time, when it seemed like the
company would resolve the main complaints, workers would return to the fields to pick. On this morning,
strikers walk into a blueberry field at sunrise, ready to start work.
The next
generation.
On the fence at the
gate into the labor
camp, the children of
some of the strikers
do what theyve seen
their parents and
friends doing. They
grab a sign, stand on
the fence, and begin
to chant and shout,
Qu queremos?
Justicia! Cundo?
Ahora!
NO FRIENDSHIP
IN TRADE
FARMERS FACE
MODERN-DAY ROBBER BARONS,
IN THE UNITED STATES
AND WORLDWIDE
BY SASHA BREGER BUSH
residing over monopolies in shipping and

railroads, U.S. robber baron Cornelius
Vanderbilt once said that there is no friendship in trade. During the 19th century, railroad
magnates like Vanderbilt used their concentrated
power to increase the price of freight, creating
financial hardships for farmers who needed to ship
their produce. Likewise, bankers like J.P. Morgan
squeezed farmers, who were reliant on credit to get
The small farmers and laborers who grow and

process most of the worlds foodwho provide
one of the few things we cannot live without
are themselves often hungry and poor.
through the growing season, with high interest

rates. By the latter part of the century, farmers
found the prices for their produce going down,
and the prices of transportation and loans going
up, wrote historian Howard Zinn, because the
individual farmer could not control the price of his
grain, while the monopolist railroad and the
monopolist banker could charge what they liked.
The market dynamics set in motion by the robber
barons ushered in decades of conflict between
farmers and the railroad magnates, motivating
populist movements and calls for government regulation of monopolies.
Biographer T.J. Stiles notes that a bloodchilling ruthlessness infused all [of Vanderbilts]
actions. He continues, Although Vanderbilt
habitually dressed in the simple black-and-white
outfit of a Protestant clergyman, his only religion
was economic power. This religion of economic
power is alive and well in todays global food system and farmers trade with the new robber barons
of the global food system at their peril.
The small farmers and laborers who grow and
process most of the worlds foodwho provide
one of the few things we cannot live withoutare
themselves often hungry and poor. That is the simple, central paradox of the global food system.
Much of the explanation for this state of affairs
focuses on processes of unequal exchange.
Unequal exchange results from trading relationships between parties with unequal levels of
power, between powerful monopolies on the one
hand and people who struggle in more competitive markets on the other. Unequal exchange is a
mechanism for exploitation in the food system;
that is, it siphons wealth away from farmers and
workers and enriches multinational food and
finance corporations.
Power, Inequality, and Unequal Exchange
Beginning in the 16th century, colonization,
industrialization, and globalization have worked
to undermine locally self-sufficient systems of

food production, gradually replacing them with a
system of global food interdependence. In this
new system, food production, processing, distribution, and consumption are divided up among
lots of different people and communities performing different food-related tasks, often in different parts of the world. In other words, there is
now a global division of labor in food, and the
people within this division of labor (who, these
days, represent most of the global population) are
dependent upon one another for the food they
need to survive.
This new system is hierarchically ordered, with
large multinational food and agriculture corporations controlling many aspects of production, processing, distribution, and consumption. Multinational corporations (MNCs) dominance over
the global food system owes in large part to their
market power. Market power refers to a firms
ability to influence the terms of tradesuch as
prices, but also quality and production standards
in a given market.
Todays food monopolies have consolidated
their power thanks both to changes in national and
international laws and regulations and to the policies of international institutions like the World
Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank, and
International Monetary Fund (IMF), among others. Of course, the capital- and technology-intensive nature of food processing, distribution, and
retail these daysa key part of the process of food
industrializationalso results in high barriers to
entry in these markets. These barriers reduce competition for companies in the food industry.
MONOPOLIES, MONOPSONIES,
OLIGOPOLIES, OLIGOPSONIES
A Note on Terminology
n a perfectly competitive marketplace, no single participant

can influence prices because there are so many buyers and
sellers, each of which represents only a very small portion of
the total marketplace. By contrast, a monopoly is a type of
uncompetitive market in which there is only one seller. The classic textbook example is the post-WWII diamond monopoly
held by the DeBeers company. A monopsony is a type of uncompetitive market in which there is only one buyer. The classic example is a labor market in a one-factory town; the relationship Walmart has with many of its suppliers is another
good example. An oligopoly is an uncompetitive market with
only a few sellers (like the U.S. markets for airline tickets), while
an oligopsony is an uncompetitive market with only a few
buyers (like the U.S. market for published books which is dominated by Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or the global market for
unroasted coffee beans). As a shorthand, I refer to all of types
of uncompetitive markets as monopolies, and those companies that enjoy market power as monopolists. Some economics textbooks technically define an oligopoly as a market in
which the 50% of the market is controlled by four or fewer
firms, while others employ the looser definition noted above.
The global food system is riddled with monopolistic markets, markets in which, on one side,
stand only one or a few multinational corporate
juggernauts, while on the other side there are many
HELD UP: THE LIFE OF A POULTRY FARMER

B Y C R A I G W AT T S
n December 1991, I signed a contract to raise chickens for one to the countrys largest integrators. I was three years
out of business school, where I had been introduced to the term economic holdup. Little did I know that when I
signed that contract I would begin to live this concept each and every day.
The term refers to a situation where two parties (in my case a farmer and an integrator) may be able to work most
efficiently by cooperating, but refrain from doing so due to concerns that they may give the other party increased bargaining power, and thereby reduce their own profits. In my contract with my integrator, I have no bargaining power.
To get started, I borrowed approximately $200,000 to construct two poultry houses, following the specifications
required by the integrator. Initially, all went well and in 1994 I borrowed another $200,000 to build two more houses.
At that time, I was also forced to borrow an additional $40,000 to bring my older houses up to the specs of the
UNEQUAL EXCHANGE
people jockeying for position. Inequalities in market power are magnified by geographical inequalities (e.g., between the global North and the global
South), gender inequalities, racial inequalities, and
inequalities in standards of living.
Credit: Alice Brennan
The U.S. Poultry Economy

The U.S. poultry chain, depicted opposite, is a
good example. In the United States, three companiesTyson, Perdue, and Pilgrims Pridecontrol
more than 50% of the market in broiler chickens.
These large, industrial poultry companies are
called integrators, a reference to the vertically
integrated poultry chain where big companies
own and control almost every stage of the poultry

production process. One recent commentator
notes: In fundamental ways, the meat business
has returned to the state where it was 100 years
ago, a time when just four companies controlled
the market with a shared monopoly.
Poultry producers working in Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, or Kentucky compete with one another like dogs for scraps from the integrators table,
and thus end up with low incomes, low standards
of living, and large debts. Poultry producers are
largely contract growers, meaning that they produce at the behest of the integrators and must
accept whatever price the integrators offer for their
chickens. In fact, the chickens themselves are actually owned by the integrator, with the integrated
new houses. The industry term is upgrades. Upgrades can be additional

equipment and/or changes to the
structures themselves, as required by
the integrator.
In the initial recruitment pitch, the
integrator presented a rosy picture:
that the poultry houses would provide
a steady and primary income. They
said Id have the chicken houses paid
off in ten years. None of these claims
have proven to be true. I see it time
and again: farmers are constantly
forced to upgrade their facilities,
with no rhyme or reason or any costbenefit documentation, just more and
more debt.
The snag is that if you dont upgrade, the company will terminate
your contract. The holdup problem
rears its head. Debt eliminates any
bargaining power for the farmer. When the first upgrades were pushed on my operation, I was $400,000 in debt
with one choice: lose my contract or make the upgrades and take on more debt.
In the fall of 2004, I actually paid my farm off. I had no mortgage payment for two years. But relief was short-lived:
in 2006, the company began a major push for upgrades. Rumor was they were giving their service techs bonuses
based on how much a farmer spent for upgrades. I had to borrow another $100,000.
Twenty-two years after I began as a contract poultry producer, my income is less than it was 15 years ago. Adjust
that for inflation and you quickly realize if your poultry operation is treading water, then youre one of the lucky ones.
Meanwhile, consumers are paying more at the grocery store and the industry is enjoying windfall profits.
C R A I G WAT T S is a chicken producer for Perdue in Fairmont, N.C.
Unequal Exchange in the Poultry Industry

The large integrators in the U.S. chicken economy are the companies that own or control virtually every stage of the production
process, from feed mills and breeder farms to slaughter and processing. The only operation involved in poultry production in the United
States that is not owned directly by the integrator is the growout stage, where chicken producers transform chicks into market-ready
broilers. The integrators nonetheless exert enormous control over the poultry producers who own and operate the growout houses.
Poultry producers are contract growers, meaning that they produce chickens under contract for only one integrator. Poultry producers
get their chicks from the integrators on one side and hand over market-ready broilers to the integrators on the other. Integrators dictate
prices to poultry producers as well as the technologies that must be used in production. In other words, farmers operating in a
competitive market environment are squeezed on either side by these large, monopolistic, industrial chicken companies.
Corn, Soybean
Meal, Other Feed
Ingredients
Feed Mill
Mixed Feed
Ration
Byproducts
Further
Processing
Distributor
Breeder
Chicks
Retail
Grocery
Breeder
Farm
Food Service
Institution
Rendering
Plant
Primary
Breeder Company
Export
Byproducts
Hatching
Eggs
Processing
Plant
Market-Ready
Broilers
Hatchery
Broiler
Chicks
Growout
House
TERMS
KEY
Allied industry of the
poultry industry
Facilities owned by vertically
integrated poultry firm
Facilities owned by contract
growers or integrator
SOURCE
Reproduction of the chicken commodity

chain adapted from a National Chicken Council
diagram (2015; nationalchickencouncil.org/
industryissues/vertical-integration).
Integrator: Vertically integrated agribusiness that owns most of the enterprises and operations involved
in poultry production in the United States, and controls the other enterprises it does not own.
Breeder farm: Fertilized eggs are produced by integrators or affiliated contractors.
Hatchery: Fertilized eggs mature into baby chicks in a hatchery owned by the integrator.
Growout House: Poultry producers contracted by the integrator raise chicks into market-ready broilers.
Processing Plant: Chickens are slaughtered at a facility owned by the integrator and processed into
chicken parts like breasts and thighs.
Further Processing: Bits and pieces of broilers are packaged and otherwise transformed by the
integrators into processed foods like chicken nuggets and chicken pot pies.
Rendering Plant: Perishable chicken byproducts from the processing plants are rendered into other
substances and products, like soap, toothpaste, pharmaceuticals, pet food, and livestock feed.
UNEQUAL EXCHANGE
out growers (poultry producers) owning only the

expensive chicken houses that chicks are raised in.
The chicken houses are often purchased from the
integrators on credit, burdening producers with
large debts. Poultry producers also risk injury on
the job, income losses associated with dead birds,
antibiotic resistance and allergy (stemming from
their regular contact with the antibiotics used to
treat sick birds), among other serious risks. While
the most risky and costly stage of the process
growing out the birdsis left to poultry producers, the integrators enjoy absolute control, massive
profits and minimal competition in virtually every
other stage of production. The integrators even
operate under a gentlemens agreement of sorts,
with each integrator agreeing not to employ the
growers contracted by the others, limiting competition among integrators and constraining poultry
producers even further.
The trading relationship in the industry

between monopolistic integrators on the one
hand and poultry producers facing high
competition, serious risk and large production
costs on the otheris a stark example of
unequal exchange and has concrete
implications for the well-being of producers.
This trading relationshipbetween monopolistic integrators on the one hand and poultry producers facing high competition, serious risk, and
large production costs on the otheris a stark
example of unequal exchange and has concrete
implications for the well-being of producers.
In an interview with the American Prospect magazine, Mike Weaver, who heads up a West Virginia
poultry producer association, describes the tenuous
financial position of producers in the United
States. Weaver notes that chicken farmers in his
area are settling for almost an entire cent less per
pound of meat than they did in 1975when the
median household income [in the United States]
was around $11,800. The number of companies buying livestock from farmers has declined,
and the surviving companies have grown bigger by
acquiring the smaller firms. For growers, that often
means doing business with only one firm.
The inequalities and injustices apparent in the
poultry chain are replicated within the corporate
hierarchy of integrators like Tyson: there is a dangerous division of labor between those who must
compete to survive and those who do not need to
do so. Highly paid executives, who are engaged in
management work and are secure in their positions, lord over low-paid, interchangeable employees who work with their hands capturing chickens
one-by-one at night in the chicken houses or performing dangerous work in slaughterhouses. Most
of these managers are white men, while many of
the workers that actually capture and slaughter the
chickens are people of color, often with insecure
immigration status. The Food Empowerment Project notes that workers in meat processing are
mostly people of color from low-income communities. Historically populated by African Americans, this workforce has recently witnessed an
influx of Latin American workers, with some 38%
of workers in meat processing today hailing from
outside of the United States.
The Global Coffee Economy
The power dynamics, inequalities and unequal
exchanges apparent in the U.S. poultry chain are
replicated in a variety of global food production
systems. Take, for example, the diagram opposite
of the global coffee economy, a chain connecting
different parts of the global division of coffee labor
to one another, taking us downstream from the
green coffees harvested in the field by farmers,
through various traders and processors, to the cups
of roasted coffee consumed by final consumers.
The diagram illustrates how the global coffee
economy operates and the severe inequalities that
characterize it. International traders and roasters
operate in a very uncompetitive market setting
they are monopolists. The six largest coffee trading
companies control over 50% of the marketplace at
the trading step along the coffee chain (Neumann
Kaffee Gruppe from Germany and ED&F Man
based in London are the largest international traders). The roasting stage of coffee production is even
more concentrated, with only two companies (Nestle
and Phillip Morris) controlling almost 50% of the
Distribution of Income in the

Global Coffee Economy (% of Income)
100%
Percentage of retail price
market. Market power gives these modern-day

robber barons influence over prices and other
terms of trade, allowing them to place downward
pressure on prices they pay to farmers, and upward
pressure on the prices they charge to consumers.
This inequality in market power introduces
inequalities in incomes and standards of living
between different actors in the coffee economy.
Unsurprisingly, farmers operating in the shadow of
the big traders and roasters have relatively low
incomes and standards of living. By contrast, owners, managers, and some workers at the big coffee
monopolies enjoy relatively high incomes and
standards of living. There are also race and gender
dimensions to consider: coffee farmers are disproportionately women of color, while owners and
managers in the big coffee monopolies are generally white men. There is also a strong North-South
dimension to this power inequalitycoffee farmers from Latin America, Africa, and Asia compete
fiercely with one another, their incomes undermined by the pricing power of monopolies headquartered in Europe and the United States.
Twenty-five million coffee farming families
from Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South
80%
Value added in
consuming countries
60%
Transport costs and

weight loss
40%
Value added in
producing countries
Paid to growers
20%
0%
1971 - 1980
1981-82 1988-89
1989-90 1994-95
Source: John M. Talbot, Where Does Your Coffee Dollar Go? The Division of Income and Surplus along the Coffee
Commodity Chain, Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 32, No. 1 (1997), Tables 1 and 2.
Note: Data for 19711980 are for calendar years. Data for 198182 to 198889 and for 198990 to 199495
are for coffee years (Oct. 1Sept. 30). Percentages of total retail price (reported by Talbot (1997)) for calendar
years (19711980) or coffee years (198182 to 198889 and 198990 to 199495) were used to calculate means
for intervals shown. Figures calculated did not add exactly to 100.0% due to rounding (in all cases between
99.9% and 100%). Bar graphs show each income category as percentage of sum of four income categories.
Asia, and Southeast Asia compete globally with

one another to sell coffee to a handful of international coffee trading companies. Similar to the situation of poultry producers, there are in practice
usually only one or two potential buyers for a farm-
The Global Coffee Economy

GLOBAL SOUTH
FARMERS
PETTY
TRADERS &
HURLERS
COMPETITIVE
GLOBAL NORTH
EXPORTERS
INTL.
TRADERS
ROASTERS
SUPERMARKETS
& CAFES
FINAL
CONSUMER
UNCOMPETITIVE
The global coffee economy is marked by severe inequalities in wealth and power. Coffee farmers along with small-scale
traders and processors, operate in a competitive market environment. Located primarily in the global South, they sell their
coffees onward, down the supply chain, to international traders and roasters. The traders and roasters operate in a relatively
uncompetitive market environment and are located primarily in the global North. These inequalities in market power result
in lower standards of living for coffee farmers and other marginalized actors in producing countries. Consumers (most of
whom are from the global North) also have little negotiating power, when it comes to purchasing coffee from big retailers
(supermarkets and corporate caf chains like Starbucks). By contrast, the northern monopolies in trading, roasting, and retail
earn high profits associated with their disproportionate market power. Monopolists thus push prices for growers down and
prices for consumers up, capturing the super-profits generated in between.
UNEQUAL EXCHANGE
ers coffee crop. Lacking the transport and information resources to effectively market their crops,
many coffee farmers sell to whoever comes to the
farm gate. Unsurprisingly, things do not usually go
well for our coffee farmers.
The graph (p. 29) illustrates the distribution of
income in the global coffee economy. Only a small
percentage of total income is retained by those
growers, small-scale traders who transport coffee
from the farm gate, and petty processors who
transform dried coffee cherries into green beans in
producing countrieswho operate in competitive
markets. Most of the income is appropriated in
consuming countries, mainly by the coffee monopolists in trading and roasting, but also by large
retailers (e.g., supermarkets and corporate caf
THE FARMER AND THE SUPPLIER
nequal exchange is also common for farmers looking to

purchase supplies for their businesses. In conventional
farming systems, farmers and livestock growers regularly purchase seeds, young animals, feed, pesticides, or fertilizers from
large multinational corporations like Tyson, Monsanto, and
Cargill. In this unequal exchange, multinational giants charge
farmers small fortunes for the supplies they need.
The farmers receive overpriced goods that often fail to
work as advertised. In the case of expensive genetically modified seeds, farmers often end up with lower-than-promised
yields and rising costs for fertilizers, pesticides, and water.
Fertilizers and pesticides, for their part, erode the long-term
health of the soil and increase irrigation requirements. Worse
still, as farmers rack up these huge input costs, the prices that
international traders offer them for their crop often fails to cover the rising costs of production. Farmers are thus squeezed
between two monopolies, with unequal exchange ensuring
that farmers pay too much for their inputs and receive too little
for their crop. This trading mechanism thus works to rob especially small and peasant farmers of wealth and redistributes it
to the monopolies.
The outcome for farmers is bleak and frequently results in
rising debt. In India, the debts that result from this financial
squeeze have led more than 200,000 peasant farmers to commit
suicide, according to author Vandana Shiva. Agricultural laborers
in rural areas also often suffer in this context, as temporary
workers are laid off by small farmers experiencing hardship.
chains like Starbucks). The position of coffee growers deteriorated between the 1970s and 1990s.
Expanded global trade in coffee since the late
1980s, with free trade increasing the market
leverage of multinational traders and roasters over
coffee farmers and final consumers, has led to
decreasing relative income of growers.
Promoting Justice and Equity
in the Global Food System
As the coffee and chicken examples suggest,
unequal exchange is commonplace between farmers and producers on the one hand, and multinational, monopolistic middlemen (food traders,
processors, and supermarkets) on the other. While
larger corporate coffee farms may have some leverage in negotiating prices with these big middlemen, smaller and peasant farms have virtually no
negotiating power. If a coffee farmer does not want
to sell to the Neumann Kaffee Gruppe (NKG) at
the price NKG offers, then NKG will simply move
on until it finds a farmer who will. Similarly, if a
poultry producer does not want to sell to Tyson at
the companys offered price, the producer risks
being cut out of the chain all together. Tyson will
just move on to the next farm. In both cases, the
market power of the monopolists also allows them
to set conditions such as product quality and the
specific technologies used in the production process. The same basic relationship holds for cattle
ranchers and cocoa farmers selling to Cargill, pork
producers selling to Smithfield (now owned by the
China-headquartered WH Group), soy farmers
selling to Archer Daniels Midland, vegetable producers selling to Walmart and Tesco, and orange
producers selling to Coca-Cola Co. (to make Fanta
Orange and Minute Maid juices), among many
other global examples.
Unequal exchange helps to explain inequalities
in wealth and power in the global food system, and
how trade relationships work to facilitate exploitationthe unjust redistribution of wealth from
people with less to people with more market power, from poor to rich, from black and brown to
white, from women to men, from the global South
to the global North. In answer to the question
posed at the outsethow is it that the people who
produce our food are themselves so often poor and
hungry?I answer simply: Because they engage in
unequal exchange with powerful food monopolies,
and there is no friendship in this trade.
A variety of policies, programs, and alternatives

could help to make the global food system more
equitable and fair. These include, but are certainly
not limited to, anti-trust enforcement, public commodity price management, and producer unionization. In 1890, the U.S. Congress passed the
Sherman Anti-Trust Act, a piece of legislation
aimed at breaking up some of the large monopolies
that dominated the U.S. economy at the time.
Among the targets of the new anti-trust enforcers
were the big meatpackers. The Supreme Courts
1905 decision in Swift & Co. v. United States found
the Chicago meat trust to be engaging in pricefixing for meat and shipping rates. The case set the
stage for more stringent government regulation of
monopolies. Since the early 1980s, starting with
the Reagan administration, anti-trust enforcement
in the U.S. has waned. According to Barry Lynn,
the author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, this is partly due to increasingly pro-big business ideologies
and political interests of public officials, like Reagan. Yet, the Sherman Act remains on the books
and could be revived as a tool to break up the new
meat trusts in the U.S. food system.
Historically, governments have also intervened
in food markets to set and stabilize prices. While
the system was not perfect, the International Coffee Agreement that regulated global coffee trading
from 1962 to 1989 did indeed help many coffee
farmers obtain better prices for their crops. A system
of import and export quotas at the international
level was complemented by public institutions at
the national level that were responsible for purchasing coffee from producers at fixed prices and then
exporting the coffee into the global market according to the quota arrangement. While the system
was a mechanism for exploiting farmers in some
cases (as in Uganda in the 1970s), in other cases
(like in Mexico) public commodity price management helped farmers earn more money and stabilize their incomes. With the eruption of the global
food crisis in 20067, global interest in such institutions has been revived, perhaps creating a political
opening for new public price management programs.
As with most economic cases in which individuals are overpowered by large companiesbe they
integrators, coffee roasters, or employersorganization and unionization can help them increase
their market leverage and bargaining power. In Colombia, some three quarters of the countrys coffee
farmers are organized under the umbrella of a single union. The union advocates for farmers in various political forums, and negotiates coffee prices
with exporters and traders, often securing higher
prices for farmers than they could obtain on their
own. Support for such organizations, as well as related farmer cooperatives and producer associations,
could help to empower and organize producers.
Unequal exchange is commonplace between

farmers and producers on the one hand,
and multinational, monopolistic middlemen
(food traders, processors, and supermarkets)
on the other.
Such policies and programs are not mutually
exclusive. Further, anti-trust enforcement, public
price management, and producer unionization
could be complemented by a wide variety of other
mechanisms for promoting justice and equity in
the global food system. For example, programs
that support national and local food selfsufficiency, crop and income diversification, and
organic farming techniques can potentially reduce producer reliance on global monopolists for
income, financing and production inputs, among
many other benefits. D&S
S A S H A B R E G E R B U S H is a lecturer at the
Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the
University of Denver and author of Derivatives and
Development: A Political Economy of Global Finance,
Farming, and Poverty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
S O U R C E S : Oscar Farfan, Understanding and Escaping Commodity Dependency: A Global Value Chain Perspective, World Bank,
2005; Food Empowerment Project, Slaughterhouse Workers, Food
Empowerment Project, 2015 (foodispower.org); Michael Kazin, Ruthless in Manhattan, New York Times, May 7, 2009; Christopher Leonard,
How the Meat Industry Keeps Chicken Prices High, March 3, 2014
(slate.com); Barry Lynn, Killing the Competition: How the New Monopolies are Destroying Open Markets, Harpers Magazine, February
2012; National Chicken Council, Vertical Integration, 2015 (nationalchickencouncil.org); Stefano Ponte, The Latte Revolution, World
Development, 2002; Monica Potts, The Serfs of Arkansas, The American Prospect, March 5, 2011; Vandana Shiva, From Seeds of Suicide to
Seeds of Hope, Huffington Post, May 29, 2009; Howard Zinn, A Peoples
History of the United States (Harper, 2005).
MAINE FARMERS
AND CLIMATE CHANGE
REACTIVE OR PROACTIVE?
By Stephanie Welcomer, Mark Haggerty & John Jemison
Laudholm Farm,
Wells, Maine.
Credit: Dak06,
Wikimedia
Commons
(public domain).
ince the dawn of agriculture, the things

farmers need from nature, like water and
sunlight, have varied only within a relatively
narrow, predictable range. This has changed in the
last few decades. Now, climate change is affecting
all farmers, increasing the risks they face and forcing them to adapt. The latest Assessment Report
from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) underlines the scope
and breadth of the problem: Human influence on
the climate system is clear .... The atmosphere and
ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice
have diminished, and sea level has risen. Climate
change affects all farmers regardless of their location; their farming approach, conventional or
alternative; their farm size, crop, or income. No
farmer is exempt.
Climate change reshuffles the landscape that we
count on to grow food. The shifts are accelerating
and unpredictable, and farmers are on the front
lines. How are they responding? Do they recognize
changes in weather patterns? Do they attribute
these shifts to climate change? Are they adapting
their own agricultural practices in response? And

are they advocating for policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissionsadopting a proactive stance,
as opposed to a purely reactive one?
Our work suggests that farmers have a complicated relationship to climate change, recognizing
its symptoms but not necessarily its causes. Yet, if
farmers were to recognize the causes, they would be
much more effective in adapting to climate change.
Without this recognition, they will miss the chance
to adjust their practices to protect land and water
resources, and to reduce their own contributions to
climate change. Agricultures challenge is that it
like other sectorshas to change fundamentally to
head off far more severe climate changes, which
would require much more costly adaptations, or
for which no adaptation is possible.
Maines New Climate Reality
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture
(USDA) 2012 census, Maine has about 1.45 million
acres of farmland, and agriculture is estimated to
generate over $750 million in annual sales. Maine
farmers grow a wide variety of crops, including potatoes, beans, tomatoes, grains, livestock, apples, and
blueberries, as well as aquaculture products (farmed
fish and shellfish). Producers include conventional
and alternative growers, and farm sizes range from
less than one acre to over 3,000.
Although there are many commonalities
between agriculture in Maine and the remainder
of the nation there are some important differences. Maine appears to be countering a national
trend of declining numbers of farmers. Between
2007 and 2012, the states number of farmers
aged less than 35 increased by over 60%, from
336 to 551. Additionally, according to the New
England Farmers Union, Maine has a higher percentage of farmers making direct sales. The state
ranks fifth in percentage of farmers selling directly
to the public, and third in percentage participating in community supported agriculture (CSA).
(See Mark Paul and Emily Stephens, Community Supported Agriculture: A Chance to Revitalize Farming? pp. 9-10) And Maine has a high
and growing percentage of female farmers, with
women accounting for 29% of principal farm
operators (compared to 14% nationwide). Maine
farms are also smaller, on average, 178 acres compared to the national average of 434.
The wide diversity in Maines agriculture sector
make the state an ideal laboratory for observing
farmers responses to climate change. According to
the 2014 National Climate Assessment by the U.S.
Global Change Research Program, Maine will
experience rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and increasing extreme weather
events. Indeed, temperatures in the northeast
United States are already increasing, by an average
of half a degree per decade for the last 40 years,
with bigger increases, over one degree per decade,
for average winter temperatures. Scientists project
increases in average temperatures between of 3F
and 10F over the next century, along with increases
in the total amount of precipitation, more rain
(though less snow), and greater variability in precipitation. Already, the Northeast has experienced
a greater recent increase in extreme precipitation,
according to the National Climate Assessment,
than any other region in the United States.
For farmers, rising temperatures do mean that
the number of frost-free days increase and growing seasons expand. That might sound advantageous. But there are also big downsides: Pest
varieties change, with the incursion of warmweather tolerant insects. Soil run-off is more
likely with more intense storms. Also, weather
becomes harder to predict. For example, for the
small northern Maine town of Caribou, the first
half of July 2013 was one of the driest on record
with just 3/100 inch of rain. In the second half of
the month, Caribou got enough rainover 7
inchesto make the month the second wettest
July in the towns history.
How Do Farmers See It?
Maines farmers are facing unprecedented challenges stemming from climate change, centered
on the two key ingredients in agriculturewater
and soil. Too much water can wash soil away,
while too little limits crop production and dries
the soil out. According to the University of Maine
report Maines Climate Future, the high-intensity
rainfall events that are expected to accompany
climate change are less effective at replenishing
soil water supplies and more likely to erode soil.
Meanwhile, higher average temperatures mean
that, for a given level of precipitation, less water
will actually be available to crops, due to higher
rates of moisture loss from the ground and from
the plants themselves.
As part of the 2011 Assessing Maines Agriculture Future study, we interviewed around
200 Maine farmers about changes in the climate
and their expectations for the future of farming.
We asked representatives and opinion leaders
from a wide sampling of the states farming sectors about their reasons for farming, their concerns, and their hopes for the future, as well as
ASSESSING MAINES AGRICULTURE FUTURE:

ABOUT THE STUDY
The people interviewed included:
A total of 199 Maine farmers and agricultural advisors
Commodities farmers (apple, beef, blueberry, dairy, potato,
and large vegetable producers)
Small diversified farmers (farmers market producers,
organic farmers and gardeners, small vegetable producers)
Tribal farmers (Micmac Nation)
Agricultural consultants (extension-agency and industry
crop advisors)
C L I M AT E C H A N G E
changes in weather patterns and their related

adaptations.
During the interviews, most farmers did not
acknowledge that climate change was happening,
only that weather was unpredictable. In the words
of one farmer:
Well, talk about climate change. You have an
early spring; you usually have an early fall. You
have a late spring; the fall carries on three weeks,
maybe sometimes even a fourth week. And, Ive
seen that happen time and time again, and thats,
you know, that climate is changing all the time.
Another farmer said:
I think weve been fighting weather forever and
we always will. And theres never been two seasons
alike and its how you manage that weather.
These farmers appear to argue that changing
weather is nothing new, and that finding ways to
manage the effects of the uncontrollable weather
has always been inherent to agriculture. Still
another farmer combines the recognition that
adaptations are necessary with skepticism that

there is actual human-caused climate change, or
that it is a bad thing:
Yeah, Ive read that and seen that. As far as what
do we do? I order an extra pallet of plastic so I
can put up more silage if its a real rainy year.
If its a dry year, we make dry hay. Its all we can
do. You aint gonna change the weather.
Then he continues:
If they say that the climate is changing due to
whats the big word?global warming. If this is
global warming, I love every minute of it.
This view suggests that at least some farmers see
benefits to climate change. The additional carbon
dioxide, indeed, positively impacts plant growth.
The longer growing seasons and higher temperatures make additional crops and varieties viable.
Yet most farmers express concern about how to
manage changing and increasingly volatile
weather patterns.
In the Assessing Maines Agricultural Future
study, we found that farmers are using an array of
adaptation strategies. Farmers are planting crops
PRIMER
CLIMATE CHANGE:
WHAT IS IT? WHAT CAUSES IT? WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
BY ALE JANDRO REUSS
e expect the weather to change from day to day. One day its sunny; the next, rainy. The temperature one
summer day might be 80F; the next day, 95. We also expect weather to change with the change in seasons.
The average temperature in July in the northern hemisphere, for example, is much higher than the average temperature in January.
Climate change is different. Changes in day-to-day weather conditions, so long as these still vary around the same
averages for that particular place at that time of year, year after year, do not indicate climate change. Nor do particular
weather conditions in a particular placelike unseasonable cold or unusual snowfalltell us much about climate
change, one way or another. Rather, climate change is the long-run shift in underlying weather patterns (including
temperature, precipitation, etc.).
Average surface temperatures have been trending up over the last century. This doesnt mean that,
every single year, average temperatures are necessarily higher than the year before, still less that we
will never see unusually cold weather. The upward drift in temperatures is confirmed by the fact that
were setting record highs more often, and record lows less often, now compared to the past.
Also, we can observe receding surface ice, including the polar ice caps and other major ice
sheets. The polar ice caps cover more area during the winter than during the summer. However, they do not cover
as large an area at any given time of year as they used to. The Greenland ice sheet, too, has exhibited higher-thannormal summer melting in recent years.
What are the key

indications that
the climate is actually changing?
earlier, to take advantage of the shorter frost season, planting new crops, and even using genetically modified organisms to adapt to the new
growing season. They are building structures to
buffer crops from head-on exposure to the outside environment.
One farmer says:
Were definitely going in the direction of doing
more and more different things, building more
hoop houses and greenhouses to have more control
of the growing environment.
As farmers discussed adaptation, they often
acknowledged that weather was inextricably linked
to soil structure, and to the lack of or over-abundance of water. They are turning to constructed
ponds, irrigation, and new drainage systems to
maintain crop and soil health. As one apple grower
puts it:
Anything we can do to move Mother Nature out
of the picture benefits us in the end.
Not surprisingly, controlling the environment is a
key part of dealing with climate changes related
outcomes. One agriculture consultant explains:
I think whether people are doing it on a conscious

level or its just something that they have to deal
with., The farmers I am working with are looking
to have more control over different parts of their
operations. They are definitely being impacted by it,
whether or not they say, Yes, this is climate change.
Farmers are using an array of adaptation

strategies: planting crops earlier to take
advantage of the shorter frost season,
planting new crops, and even using
genetically modified organisms.
A Sustainable Future?
Farmers interviewed in this study seem to be making adaptations to address day-to-day challenges
they see in the fielddrawing on techniques familiar to them, attempting to adapt their methods
at the margins rather than at the deep structure.
These adaptations prioritize maintaining short-
Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, trap energy from the sun, letting it get
to the planets surface but not letting it just reflect off back into outer spacemuch as the glass walls
and roof of a greenhouse let heat in and trap it inside. Without the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, the earth would be much colder.
There have certainly been large-scale climate changes over time, before human behavior could possibly have had
a meaningful impact on the climate. Over the last couple of centuries, however, human activitiesespecially the burning of fossil fuels for heat, electricity, and transportationhave dramatically increased the atmospheric concentration
of carbon dioxide. What we are concerned about today is anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.
Plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen, trapping the carbon. This is known as carbon
sequestration. Over millions of years, the organic material from long-dead plants and animals have been turned into
chemicals called hydrocarbonsfound in coal, petroleum, and natural gas. When we burn these fuels, we join the carbon
with oxygen, and produce carbon dioxide. In other words, in a very short time we are undoing millions of years worth of
carbon sequestration.
Human emissions of greenhouse gases not only have a direct effect in increasing surface temperatures, but can also
set off other processes that accelerate climate change. Rising temperatures, for example, result in higher atmospheric
concentrations of water vapor, which can also act as a greenhouse gas. The melting of surface ice, meanwhile, means that
the earth reflects less energy back into outer space. These are known as positive feedback loopsnot because they are
desirable, but because they amplify the climate change that is already under way. Human economic activity, in addition,
contributes to climate change not just through greenhouse gas emissions, but also through actions, like deforestation,
that reduce carbon sequestration. (Deforestation actually results in both emissions and reduced sequestration.)
What are the

causes of climate
change?
term profitability and are not linked to a call for

policies that could address the root causes of climate
change. When asked about government policies or
initiatives that they would like to see, none of the
farmers argued for policies aimed at climate mitigation or supporting farmers climate adaptations.
When asked about government policies or

initiatives that they would like to see, none of
the farmers argued for policies aimed at climate
mitigation or supporting farmers climate
adaptations. Yet farmers were not reluctant
to advocate policy changes generally.
Yet farmers were not reluctant to advocate policy changes generally. They expressed a strong desire for policy to recalibrate agricultural regulations, and to influence other peoples behavior.
They argued for regulatory changesreducing
the regulatory burden and tailoring regulations according to farm size. They advocated for policy to
create a cultural shift regarding food and the food
system. They argued that the public is largely un-
aware of where its food comes from, and focuses

on food prices rather than looking at the real costs
to communities and farmers.
They expressed a desire for policy that helps
Maine farmers market and brand their products,
and that opens new markets for their goods. They
urged a significant overhaul of the food processing
and transportation infrastructure, advocating for
more local and regional processing centers for meat
and other foods; food hubs for distribution and
direct marketing; and more efficient transportation,
including large trucks (for long and mid-distance
routes) and light rail. (Currently, farmers use their
own vehicles to haul their crops, often crossing
scores and even hundreds of miles, within the state.)
Additionally, farmers stressed the importance of research efforts from the USDA and Maine Extension
to explore new effective farming methods.
Overall, farmers emphasized public support to
boost demand for their crops and lower processing
and distribution costseach of which aims to
support the farming industry economically, but
without addressing climate change. Environmental sustainability, including on climate, is scarcely
on farmers policy radar.
Though few farmers are thinking about policies
to address climate change, clues to farmers future
practical approaches surfaced as they discussed their
hopes for farming in 2025. Commodity-based
farmerslarge-scale, single-crop producerstended to see farming in 2025 as based on ties to large
PRIMER
Higher surface temperatures may seem desirable for various reasonswarmer weather can be
more pleasant, it can lead to longer growing seasons for agriculture, and so on. However, there
are major reasons for concern about climate change.
Even small increases in temperature can disrupt ecosystems and human activities that rely
on them. In agriculture, for example, it may make a particular locale inhospitable to the kinds of crops that farmers are
accustomed to planting, or result in changing pest populations, requiring a change in methods of pest control.
Rising ocean temperatures and melting of surface ice leads to a rise in sea level, which will lead to flooding
of coastal areas. The flatter a coastal area, the more of the lands surface will flood, for any given rise in sea level.
Already, it appears inevitable that some small island nations will be completely submerged within a short span.
Countries like Bangladesh, with a long coastline and very flat terrain, are especially vulnerable to rising sea levels. A one-meter rise could flood one-fifth of the countrys territory, according to the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change.
Another negative effect could be increased frequency of extreme weather events. While its not possible to say
that any particular storm is caused by climate change, climate scientists are concerned that climate change will make
severe storms more frequent. For example, increased ocean temperatures could mean more energy to feed cyclones,
resulting in more Category 5 hurricanes.
Why is climate
change cause for
concern?
corporate systems. The two largest groups of commodity producers in Maine, potato and blueberry
growers, imagined a future characterized by fewer
and larger farms, more food exported to non-Maine
markets, and more genetically modified organisms
(GMOs). In contrast, farmers in most of the other
sectors imagined a more local and diversified food
system, characterized by diversified farms, a mix of
small and large farms, more farmers, increased interest in local foods, and more direct markets.
Because the farmers differ on the role of industrial technology, especially reliance on capitalintensive methods and synthetic (fossil-fuel based)
fertilizers, their adaptation strategies diverge. More
industrial approaches, such as petroleum-based
fertilizers and GMO crops, will make farmers more
vulnerable to the suppliers of these products, generally a few giant companies dominating entire industries. The smaller diversified farmers, in contrast, tend to advocate a farmer-controlled model
that can adapt to the changes in soil and water associated with climate change. With their focus on
building up the soil by non-synthetic means and
on using human, animal, and alternative energy in
place of petroleum-based inputs, these farmers will
have more local control over their strategies.
Says one small diversified farmer:
You know, all the long-term ecological studies that
are comparing conventional soil management
with organic [or] for lack of a better word,
ecological, really show that ecological soil management is really much less vulnerable to climate
variability and unpredictability . So I think
thats really the best hedge that all of us can have.
For the most part, farmers support practices and
policies re-embedding the farm into the surrounding
social communities. They are enthusiastic about
farm-to-institution policies (linking farms directly to
food programs in schools, colleges, prisons, and hospitals), about policies that allow the use of the Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
benefits at farmers markets, about teaching community members how farming works and where food
comes from. On the social and economic relationships in the food system, they are developing a clear
policy agenda. On climate change, however, the understanding and policy advocacy are barely visible.
System Change
Systems theorists, who study how organizations
and systems change, offer some insight into farmers minimal recognition of climate change, and
their lack of advocacy for climate-mitigation policy. Management scholar Connie Gersick describes
systemssuch as the farming sectoras being in
equilibrium until fundamental factors change.
One key factor can be environmental changes that
threaten the systems ability to obtain resources.
As the systems actors are faced with persistent, sys-
Responses to climate change fall into two broad categoriesclimate adaptation and climate mitigation. Climate adaptation means changing our behavior to deal with climate change. For example,
we might build seawalls and other coastal flood-control systems. These dont prevent climate
change, but can prevent the coastal flooding that would otherwise come with it. Farmers might
change the kinds of crops they grow to cope with changes in average temperatures, or might apply different kinds of
pesticides to cope with changes in the local pest population.
Climate mitigation means taking action that prevents climate change, whether by reducing greenhouse gas emissions or
increasing carbon sequestration. We can reduce emissions in three main waysby reducing our total production of goods and
services, by reducing the amount of energy we use per unit of production (increased energy efficiency), or by reducing the
amount of carbon dioxide we emit per unit of energy (reduced carbon intensity). For example, we could increase the energy
efficiency of industrial production (as businesses find ways to do when energy prices are high), shift toward less carbonintensive energy sources for electrical-power generation (for example, away from coal and towards wind and solar energy), reduce our use of petroleum for transportation (shifting toward more fuel-efficient vehicles or alternative modes of transportation), or reduce our energy use in heating and air conditioning our buildings (building better-insulated structures, or retrofitting
existing buildings). People can also increase the rate of carbon sequestration, for example, by promoting reforestation.
What are some

possible responses
to climate change?
temic problems, they experience mounting discomfort. Once key actors recognize that the system
has become dysfunctional, they begin to search for
new information about the sources of the problems
and possible new steps. Newcomers enter the system and are enlisted or inspired to search for solutions. The entrenched understandings, relationships, and power dynamics of the system, finally,
can be dismantled. Revolutionary change can happen and a new system can be created.
Farmers acting on individual interests,

without policies incorporating common climaterelated goals, may adapt to climate changes
in ways that worsen the problem.
Climate scientists from all over the world are

doing their best to raise the alarm that climate
change is happening, that it will change our natural systems irrevocably, and that these changes are
accelerating. Author Rebecca Solnit calls this a
slow-motion calamity. Climate change is everything, a story and a calamity bigger than any other,
she writes. Its the whole planet for the whole foreseeable future, the entire atmosphere, all the
oceans, the poles; its weather and crop failure and

famine and tropical diseases heading north and
desertification and the uncertain fate of a great
majority of species on earth.
A few of the farmers we interviewed do recognize the threat that climate change already poses. A
blueberry grower commented:
I think that the weather patterns are changing
and I do believe global warming is going to have
a very severe impact on the blueberry industry;
even with irrigation because the heat in August
has become so intense that they [blueberries] literally will cook in hours in the field. So I do think
that that environmental aspect of global warming
is something were going to be dealing with in 20
or 30 years.
Another farmer stated:
Back to back, with these weather changes you saw
probably our toughest year [in history] two years
ago, the best growing year last year, and when you
start getting a hundred year storms every four
years, you begin to wonder, you know, that perhaps there is something to this sort of thing.
An apple grower said:
The problem with weather and growing food is
that theres a very narrow window of stability
there. I mean, we get outside that window very
far and everything falls apart. And so yeah, I
mean its a real serious concern.
PRIMER
What we know now is that some climate change is already happening, and some future changes to
our climate are now unavoidable, so we will have to make some adaptations. It is not too late, however, to commit to serious climate mitigation, which may be the only way to prevent even more severe climate change. In fact, it is crucial that we do as much as we can as soon as we can. We should be
worried that were steering towards a climate cliff, unleashing irreversible effects to which we really have no good way
to adaptfor example, dramatically rising sea levels, frequent extreme storms, or severe disruptions to agriculture.
Some people scoff at the possibility that we puny human beings can really do much damage to the earth.
Whatever we do, the earth will go on. Whether it goes on in a way that is hospitable to the planets inhabitants, however, is another matter. Both rich and poor cluster near the worlds coastlines. As sea levels rise and extreme storms
become more common, the rich will retreat to higher groundat some cost, but at little risk of losing everything. The
worlds poor lack the resources to move easily. The rich will manage, whatever the disruptions to agriculture, to get
plenty to eat. Small farmers in the developing world, in contrast, will bear the brunt of climate disruptions. The rich, of
course, consume more than the poor and so benefit the most from activities that give rise to climate change.
Meanwhile, they have the greatest capacity to adapt, so they have the least stake in mitigation.
In other words, business as usual on climate change embodies the worst aspects of our unequal world.
What kind of
future can we
anticipate?
Farmers, on the front lines of climate change,

respond within their financial and knowledge constraints. Financial constraints dictate the ability to
install greenhouses, wind power, irrigation, drains,
etc. Knowledge constraints include limited access
to the latest research on farming practices and climate adaptation, or on the relationship between
micro-level season-to-season weather and macrolevel climate change. That prevents the development of a long-term policy to address everincreasing climate changes.
It is not that farmers are generally short-sighted,
categorically resisting policies that deliver longterm benefits at the expense of short-term profits.
Farmers support long-sighted policies like public
spending for farmland availability and regulations
that ensure food quality for consumers. But few
have arrived at a consciousness of climate change
like the farmers quoted above. Without a major
shift in thought to acknowledge climate change,
the farming community continues to suffer from
an advocacy gap, putting mid- and long-term farm
viability at risk.
The lack of a systematic approach to agriculture
and climate change also risks exacerbating the problem. Agriculture is not just a passive victim of others
actions; it is a significant contributor of greenhouse
gases. Globally, deforestation for farmland, conventional tillage, and the use of petroleum-based fertilizers, for example, are major sources of carbon dioxide emissions, while other agricultural practices are
to blame for large methane and nitrous oxide emissions. All told, agriculture is itself responsible for an
estimated one third of climate change, according to
the Climate Institute.
Farmers acting on individual interests, without
policies incorporating common climate-related
goals, may adapt to climate changes in ways that
worsen the problem. They may till more, reducing
carbon sequestration, and may turn to crops that
increase greenhouse gas emissions. For instance,
the northern U.S. grasslands are being converted
to corn for ethanol production, even though this
puts the soil at risk and releases more carbon into
the atmosphere. An article in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences concludes that grassland conversion to corn/soy across a significant
portion of the U.S. Western Corn Belt are comparable to deforestation rates in Brazil, Malaysia, and
Indonesia. Not only can farmers benefit from
acknowledging, studying, and responding to cli-
mate change, they can also reduce the negative

impacts of agriculture on broader social and natural systems. For instance, converting a percentage
of Midwestern corn production for ethanol into
grass-based pasture systems could be a first step in
carbon-emissions reduction.
As Rebecca Solnit points out, addressing climate change involves not only reworking the way
we do things but also changing our understandingsour storiesabout the weather, the soil
and water, and our food, as well as our responsibilities to each other, future generations, and the
earths ecology. Responding to a failing system
involves remaking existing relationships and formulating new narratives. By ignoring the reality
of climate change and simply reacting, farmers
are denying their own contribution to the problem. They are also ignoring the key role they have
to play in solving it. D&S
S T E P H A N I E W E L C O M E R is an associate
professor of management at the University of Maine.
M A R K H A G G E R T Y is an associate professor in
the Honors College at the University of Maine and a
member of its Sustainable Food Systems Research
Collaborative. J O H N M . J E M I S O N , J R . ,
is an extension professor of soil and water quality
at the University of Maine.
S O U R C E S : David Abel, In Maine, Scientists See Signs of Climate
Change, Boston Globe, Sept. 21, 2014 (bostonglobe.com); Michael Jahi
Chappell and Liliana A. LaValle, Food Security and Biodiversity: Can
We Have Both? Agriculture and Human Values, 2011; Climate Institute
(climate.org); Abigail Curtis, USDA farming census: Maine has more
young farmers, more land in farms 2014, Bangor Daily News, Feb. 23,
2014 (bangordailynews.com); P.C. Frumhoff, et al., Confronting Climate
Change in the U.S. Northeast: Science, Impacts, and Solutions, Northeast
Climate Impacts Assessment (NECIA), Union of Concerned Scientists
(UCS), 2007; Connie J. G. Gersick, Revolutionary change theories: A
multilevel exploration of the punctuated equilibrium paradigm,
Academy of Management Review, 1991; T. Griffin, et al., eds., Maines
Climate Future: An Initial Assessment, University of Maine, 2009 (climatechange.umaine.edu); Rajendra K. Pachauri, et al., eds., Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2014 Synthesis
Report: Summary for Policy Makers; Jerry M. Melillo, et al., eds., Highlights of Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National
Climate Assessment, U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2014;
National Weather Service, July 2013 Climate Summary Caribou, Maine:
Northern and eastern Maine Monthly Climate Narrative. (weather.
gov); New England Farmers Union, 2015, (newenglandfarmersunion.
org); Rebecca Solnit, Are We Missing the Big Picture on Climate
Change? New York Times Magazine, Dec. 2, 2014 (nytimes.com); USDA
NASS (2012), 2012 Census of Agriculture (agcensus.usda.gov); Christopher K. Wright and Michael C. Wimberley, Recent Land Use Change in
the Western Corn Belt Threatens Grasslands and Wetlands, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013.
< In Review
Fowl Play
The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of

Americas Food Business, by Christopher
Leonard. Simon & Schuster, 2014.
BY STEVEN PRESSMAN
n his 1952 book American Capitalism,

John Kenneth Galbraith conjectured
that labor unions and large suppliers
would arise to counter the market
power of oligopolistic companies.
Later, he realized that countervailing
power might not arise and government action was necessary to curtail
the economic power of large firms.
The Meat Racket by journalist
Christopher Leonard shows why
Galbraith was forced to change his
mind. It is partly a history of Tyson
Foods and partly a splendid account
of Tysons impact on poultry farmers
and the meat-producing industry.
After the Great Depression, Tyson
developed a strategy of vertical integration, systematically buying firms up
and down the chicken supply
chainpoultry breeders, slaughterhouses, food-processing plants, and
trucking lines. This enabled Tyson to
grow and prosper while many of its
competitors went bankrupt during
difficult economic times.
Economies of scale and high startup costs made it difficult for new firms
to enter the industry. By the mid1990s, Tyson controlled one-quarter of
the U.S. poultry market, supplying gro-
cery stores, fast food establishments,

and other restaurants.
As hog and cattle production copied
Tyson, and as Tyson expanded into
these sectors, they became chickenized. Low chicken prices, which reduced demand and prices for other animal protein, led to vertical integration in
these industries as a way to maintain
profits. Tyson and a few other firms
soon came to determine how meat was
processed, how animals were raised and
fed, and how farmers were paid.
One key to Tysons success was unloading the risky, unprofitable side of
chicken production (raising chicks to
adult, slaughter-ready birds) to contracted farmers lacking market power.
When demand slowed, farmers incomes fell. If the chicks they were given died, for any reason, the farmers
absorbed most of the loss.
Farmer pay depends on a tournament developed by Tyson; those fattening their chicks most, while using
the least feed, get paid the most.
Those doing worse get paid less. With
pay based on relative performance,
one farmer gains at the expense of
others. Any farmer not constantly
modernizing his or her facilities (which
would benefit Tyson) wont be in business for long. Farm modernization, in
turn, has been aided by governmentbacked loansan indirect subsidy to
the large firms.
The tournament system also
keeps contract farmers in line. Tyson
selects the set of farmers competing
in each tournament and can affect
the results by picking up chickens
from any farmer a bit early, before
they reach peak weight.
After The Meat Racket was published, many agricultural economists
attacked it, arguing that the tournament system increased efficiency. In
one sense this claim is correct; it has
given us cheap chicken. But this comes
with many costs. Chickens are not
raised humanely, consumers remain
uninformed about what is fed to

the animals they consume, and taxpayers (even those not consuming
low-cost chicken) foot the bill when
government-backed loans go bad.
More important, contract farmers
suffer in order to provide consumers
with cheap food and Tyson shareholders with large profits. They are forced
to work long, hard hours with no control over their own businesses. They
get no vacation or sick days, and have
no pension plans. As individual contractors, they lack protection from U.S.
labor laws. And they bear the risk of
changing demand and of other farmers efficiency upgrades.
The Meat Racket shines brightest
when depicting the human toll on contract farmers. Many moving passages
reminded me of Steinbecks depiction
of migrant farm workers in The Grapes
of Wrath and Zolas description of struggling French coal miners in Germinal.
Leonard makes a powerful case that we
need to help these farmers whose lives
resemble those of medieval serfs.
Early on, Leonard wonders where
our Teddy Roosevelt issomeone willing to take on large trusts. He ends on
an optimistic note, praising producer
co-ops and locally grown food.
Surprisingly, he does not (following
Galbraith) call for unionizing contract
farmers to counter the power of Tyson.
Despite his optimism, Leonard realizes that established institutions are
hard to change and that Tyson has
created a new business model for agriculture. This model describes many
other industriescable TV, airlines,
pharmaceuticals, etc. In all these cases, oligopolistic snakes have developed enormous economic power
over workers, consumers, suppliers,
and the government. D&S
S T E V E N P R E S S M A N is a
professor of economics and finance at
Monmouth University and author of Fifty
Major Economists (Routledge, 2013).
< Economy in Numbers
Food Insecurity in Affluent America

BY GERALD FRIEDMAN
he United States is wealthy enough that everyone could have enough to eat. Nonetheless, millions of Americans go hungry
each day, subsist on an unhealthy diet because they cannot afford healthier foods, or would go hungry except for social assistance, notably the Food Stamp program, now known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). Rising average
income has done little to reduce the problem of food insecurity, and cutbacks in effective social welfare programs have added to
the problems of hunger and malnutrition. SNAP and other safety-net programs are far too small to end hunger in America. D&S
G E R A L D F R I E D M A N is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
S O U R C E S : United States Department of Agriculture, Household Food Security in the United States (ers.usda.gov); Bureau of Economic Analysis (bea.gov); Federal
Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) (research.stlouisfed.org); Hilary W. Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Douglas Almond, Long Run Impacts of Childhood Access
to the Safety Net, National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER), November 2012.
Millions of Americans cannot afford adequate

nutrition. Nearly 50 million Americans are in food
insecure households, which lack access to enough
food for an active, healthy life for all household
members. Food insecurity is most common in
households under the federal poverty line. Insecurity is
also more common in households with many children.
While the urban poor dominate our images of hunger,
rural residents actually have a slightly higher rate of
food insecurity. (Data on food insecurity are based on
an annual survey by the Current Population Survey.
U.S. Department of Agriculture studies based on these
data distinguish between low food security households
(reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet) and
very low food security households (disrupted eating
patterns and reduced food intake).)
Figure 1: Poverty and Food Insecurity, 2013
15.0
10.0
5.0
0.0
Below FPL 100-130% 130-185% Over 185% Income not
of FPL
of FPL
of FPL
known
Household income relative to federal poverty line (FPL)
Figure 2: Economic Growth and Food Insecurity
14.0
$50,000
12.0
$45,000
10.0
8.0
$40,000
6.0
4.0
$35,000
2.0
Percent of households food insecure (left axis)
2013
2011
2009
2007
2005
2003
2001
$30,000
1999
0.0
1995
Percent of households food insecure
16.0
Per capita GDP (2009 $)
Economic growth does not solve the

problem of food insecurity. Food insecurity
has increased since the 1990s despite rising
average income. A small decline in food
insecurity during the boom of the late 1990s
was largely reversed even before the Great
Recession. Insecurity then soared with the
economic crisis, beginning in 2007. High
unemployment rates and stagnant or falling
wages for working Americans have left
millions hungry; cutbacks in social welfare
programs have added to the burden of
poverty. A dramatic increase in the size of the
SNAP program, however, has helped prevent
the problem from growing worse since 2009.
1997
Individuals in food insecure

households (millions)
20.0
Per capita GDP (right axis)
Figure 3: People in Food-Insecure Households, 2013

Adults in
households with
no children
17.3 million
(35%)
Adults in
households with
no children
17.3 million
(35%)
Children
15.8 million
(32%)
Children and their care-givers account for the

majority of people in food-insecure households.
Of the 49 million people in food-insecure
households, nearly 16 million are children. Another
16 million are their caregivers, including 4 million
single mothers. The remaining 17 million people in
food-insecure householdsadults in households
without childreninclude not only many who
are unemployed or working sporadically, but also
many full-time workers whose wages are too low
for them to afford adequate food.
Children
15.8 million
(32%)
Adults in
households with
children
16.0 million
(33%)
Figure 4: Food Deprivation

in Very Low Food Security Households, 2013
Food-insecure people go hungry, eat badly, and

try to save food for their children. Food insecurity
means anxiety, stress, sacrifice, and real hunger for
millions of Americans. Almost all very low food security
householdsincluding more than 17 million people
run out of food sometimes, even though they rely on
low-cost foods, skimp on portion size, or skip meals.
Adults in these households sacrifice so their children
can eat. Almost all reported skipping meals, and over a
quarter skipped eating for a whole day. Despite these
sacrifices, children in over half the households at least
sometimes did not get enough to eat. In over 400,000
very low food security households, at least one child did
not eat at all for at least one day in the previous month,
because the household did not have food.
Percentage-point
difference
inin
outcome
Percentage-point
difference
outcome
Figure 5: Differences in Adult Outcomes, Children

Who Received SNAP Compared to Those Who Did Not
30%
20%
10%
0%
-10%
-20%
Stunted growth
Heart disease
Obesity
High School
completion
Outcome as adult
Note: From sample of individuals born 1956-1981 into disadvantaged families

(household head had less than a high-school education).
Percent of very low food security households
Adults in
100%
75%
50%
25%
0%
Food
Relied on
bought
few kinds
didn't last of low-cost
and didn't
food to
have
feed
money to child(ren)
get more
Adults
reduced
size of
meals or
skipped
Adult did
not eat for
whole day
Child(ren) Child(ren)
not eating did not eat
enough
for whole
day
Type of food deprivation reported
SNAP (Food Stamps) increases food security and has

lasting beneficial effects. While 26% of food-insecure
households report using food pantries and 3% use
soup kitchens, the federal Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest source
of food assistance. Even SNAPs $70 billion is only
enough to provide $125 in food assistance per person
per month, barely $1.30 per meal. SNAP reduces the
incidence of food insecurity, but it still leaves 49 million
people in food-insecure households. Despite these
limitations, SNAP has both immediate and lasting
benefits. Households that receive SNAP benefits eat
better and have better health than similar households
that do not. When aid is provided to households with
young children, these benefits persist throughout the
lifetimes of recipients. Those who receive assistance
are healthier as adults and are more likely to finish high
school, compared to those who do not.
< Ask Dr. Dollar
$?
Eminent Domain and the Keystone XL Pipeline

Dear Dr. Dollar:
What right does TransCanada have to take away farmers landtheir private
propertyto build its Keystone XL Pipeline?
Anonymous, via email
B Y A R T H U R M ACE WA N
n 2012, TransCanada, the company

building the Keystone XL pipeline,
was given the power of eminent domain by the Nebraska state government in law LB1161. This law also
transferred authority over the pipelines from the Nebraska Public Service
Commission to the governor.
Eminent domain is commonly defined as the right of government to
take private property for public use.
For public use generally means for a
road, for a school, or for some other
government activity. The Fifth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
recognizes the governments right to
take private property. The government
must provide just compensation, but
it can take the property even if the
owner doesnt want to sell. Generally,
eminent domain is exercised by the
government itself, but eminent domain authority can be turned over to a
private entity.
There is room for dispute over how
much compensation is just. But there
is a bigger issue that arises in the
pipeline situation: What does public
use mean? Can a private company,
such as TransCanada, take land by
claiming that Keystone XL will be a
public use?
In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled
by a five-to-four decision in the case of
Kelo v. City of New London (Conn.) that
the city and a private corporation
could exercise eminent domain for
economic development, taking a 90acre parcel of land in the Fort Trumbull
section of the city. Families whose
homes were taken sued, but the court
ruled that a taking for economic development was a taking for public
use. In effect, the ruling allowed a private corporation to seize property of
people (homeowners) to pursue activity that would generate economic developmentand provide a profit to
private developers.
The Courts decision against the
homeowners had a long historical
foundation. The Court majority wrote
that over a century of our case law
interpreting [the Fifth Amendment]
dictates that the homeowners be denied the relief that they seek. As it
turned out, though the private developers won in the courts, the project
went bust. Today, the Fort Turnbull
area lies emptynone of the office
buildings, luxury apartments, and a
new marina, which were supposed to
bring economic development, exist.
The case law affirming that economic development serves a public
use emerged from disputes over the
use of water power in early 19thcentury New England. For example, if
person A builds a mill on a stream, can
person B build another mill just down
the stream from person As mill, which
would raise the water level and destroy As water power? Both A and B
built on their own property. So whose
property rights prevail? Over the early
decades of the 19th century, the
courts came to decide questions like
these by asking which side in the dispute would make the greater contribution to economic development. Thus,
according to the legal historian
Morton Horwitz, there emerged an
economic development concept of the
law, in which judges held a great deal
of authority in economic disputes. Not
surprisingly, the outcomes in disputes
over the use of water power often favored the large cotton mills, which
were becoming so important to the
U.S. economy at that time, over smaller
mills using the water power for various
purposes.
This economic development concept

of the law is used to justify giving eminent domain power to TransCanada. It is,
however, also a concept which, as
Horwitz has pointed out, gives priority to
a certain conception of economic efficiency over other social goalssuch as
equality, or, in the current context, the
preservation of the environment.
The fundamental issue of what constitutes a public use lies behind the
efforts to challenge TransCanadas exercise of eminent domain. Yet the decisions of the courts so far have hinged
on technicalities. The opponents of
Keystone XL argue that LB1161 violates the state constitution by taking
authority away from the Public Service
Commission.
In January, 2015, the Nebraska
Supreme Court denied the Keystone
opponents claim that LB1161 violated
the states constitution. (Four judges
favored the opponents, but in this
court a super majority, five out of seven, is required to rule a state law unconstitutional.) But then, in February,
in a major victory for the opponents,
another state judge put a hold on
TransCanadas exercise of eminent domain while the case works its way
through higher courts.
Ultimately, the issue is likely to go
to the U.S. Supreme Court. Regardless
of the Courts action, however, the opposition to Keystone XL is much bigger
than court decisions. Like the Turnbull
section of New London, the proposed
path of the pipeline may lie vacant
regardless of eminent domain. D&S
A R T H U R M A C E W A N is professor
emeritus of economics at UMass-Boston
and a Dollars & Sense Associate.
Questions about the economy?
Ask Dr. Dollar!
Submit questions by email (dollars@
dollarsandsense.org) or U.S. mail
(c/o Dollars & Sense, One Milk Street,
Boston, MA 02109).
LEFT FORUM 2015

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Dollars &amp; Sense - Farms Today

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REAL

Land Grabs, Here and There

Farmers and Climate Change

Keystone XL and Eminent Domain

Plus: The Assault on Retirement

U.S. & CAN: $4.50

Seeds and Struggle

Dollars & Sense magazine explains the workings of

< From the Editors

NUMBER 317 | MARCH/APRIL 2015

4 the short run

11 The Failure of Modern Industrial Agriculture

14 Land Grabbing Around the World

The Great Land Giveaway in Mozambique

19 These Things Can Change

Willie Nelson on the Wealth of the Land

Seeds of Change | Community

Food Insecurity in Affluent America

43 ask dr. dollar

Keystone XL and Eminent Domain

SASHA BREGER BUSH

32 Maine Farmers and Climate Change

MARCH/APRIL 2015 l DOLLARS & SENSE l 3

< The Short Run

Staples in the Job Market

Business Insider, stated: Staples

All About the Workers

the middle of transactions with customers. (Presumably, this happened

The Most Sacred Trust

4 l DOLLARS & SENSE l MARCH/APRIL 2015

Apparently, 2015 is all about increasing worker morale. According to CNN,

All About the Workers, II

MARCH/APRIL 2015 l DOLLARS & SENSE l 5

The Wealth of the Land and the Power of the People

ast year at the annual Farm Aid

Our greatest challenge is in

6 l DOLLARS & SENSE l MARCH/APRIL 2015

gauged by the commodities it returns to usin gallons of oil and

< Making Sense

or most of history, farmers have

breeding research, 60% of commercial

Our global food

MARCH/APRIL 2015 l DOLLARS & SENSE l 7

< Making Sense

Activists Are Developing New

China has maintained a strong

What Do These Developments

The mobilization against the use of GM

8 l DOLLARS & SENSE l MARCH/APRIL 2015

On one hand, our global food system

< Making Sense

Community Supported Agriculture

ave you tried the locavore bahn mi

to purchase inputs at the beginning of

Although the phrase

pacity of our planet to sustain.

MARCH/APRIL 2015 l DOLLARS & SENSE l 9

< Making Sense

fundamental CSA goal of providing a

10 l DOLLARS & SENSE l MARCH/APRIL 2015

got all this integrity. But there are local

mericans are being subjected to an ongoing

MARCH/APRIL 2015 l DOLLARS & SENSE l 11

The mistreatment is not only a result of inevitable

Dollars & Sense - Farms Today

Dollars & Sense - Farms Today