Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

Let the Presidential Candidates Show They Can Help

Brand new year! Same old you-know-what! nnSame old pro-corporate, anti-independent Farm Bill. Same old market manipulations by the same old geezers — fooling with commodities, petroleum, and stock. Same old industrialized food system stealing consumer money for sub-standard processed food and stealing farmer money through checkoff dollars, then putting that money into expansion and acquisitions to make us think there are healthy choices, even though one big wheeler dealer owns most of the brands in the store.

Last week, I ran into a friend with bins of soybeans from the last two years that he can’t sell because commodity prices are below production costs. And I talked to a dairy farmer from Pennsylvania who is going to quit. The milk market has been buying below farmer costs for years. Competition from new products — soy milk, almond milk, coconut milk and the like — is part of the problem. But so is the competition from giant dairy concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) where thousands of cows mosey into robo-milkers, stand to be milked, then mosey back to the feeding area to munch away their sorry lives. The production of those cows has created a glut putting independent family farms in even greater jeopardy.

Even organic dairies use the CAFO system, probably cheating consumers along the way. Dairy man Jim Goodman wonders if USDA organic standards are being met, saying, “USDA inspectors insist these farms … are meeting the standards despite investigations by the Washington Post and Cornucopia Institute showing only a few hundred cows at most, out of a herd of 15,000, on pasture at any given time.”

Corporations bending the rules? Ho hum.

But wait! There — on the horizon — it’s something new! It’s the Democratic Party! With CANDIDATES! Real candidates. After seasons of apathy, the Dems are mounting a horse race!

Beginning in June, they will be in promotion mode. And while I’d love to see a strong third party in this land, 2020 is not the time. There’s too much at stake and we all know it. The troubles and suspicions about POTUS keep piling up and even if Fox News refuses to see it, the rest of us are concerned.

But, in July, the Democrats are going to start hosting debates, town meetings, forums and cattle calls. They plan 12 televised debates, six of them this year. We’ll hear about potentials from Arth (urban designer and public policy wonk) to Zuckerberg (technology entrepreneur), Sanders, Warren, and everything in-between, and wouldn’t you just love to see Angelina Jolie up on that stage and hear what she’s thinking?

Just scrolling through the names and ages is an adventure in diversity and new ideas. Ken Nwadike, Jr., documentary filmmaker and peace activist, is just 37 years old! That’s why you haven’t heard of him, but he’s the kid that started the Free Hugs project, giving, uh, free hugs, to random people at concerts, in parks, on the street, saying that we don’t embrace each other enough and that’s what we need. So, hey, go out and hug someone! Well, OK, even if that doesn’t work for you it’s a new idea in this nation where there’s a mighty big budget to send free bombs to people we don’t agree with.

A lot of the candidates, or potential candidates, are more typical. Many of them have been around politics for a while, but that doesn’t mean they’re out of ideas. Corey Booker, Democratic Senator from Newark, New Jersey, has traveled the nation trying to learn what’s going on in non-New Jersey areas. He’s been criticized for showboating, being a publicity hound, but he came to my neighborhood in Missouri and met with a dozen of us for more than an hour. He had specifically requested no media be present because he just wanted to find out what’s going on.

We told him about the CAFOs coming into mid-Missouri and what that means to the community that will be forced to share water, air, resources with 10,000 mother hogs and their 250,000 babies. He went back to Washington and filed S.3404, The Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act. In filing, he said, “Today, a small number of giant companies control every link of our food chain,” Booker said. “Consolidation has now reached a point where the top four firms in almost every sector of the food and agriculture economy have acquired abusive levels of market power. As a result, the US is losing farmers at an alarming rate, agricultural jobs and wages are drying up, and rural communities are disappearing … These challenges can be mitigated by more active use of our antitrust laws, and allowing an opportunity for US farmers and ranchers to compete in fair and open markets.”

With all the other excitement in the administration, S.3404 hasn’t gone anywhere yet. But the point, see, is that Booker picked up on our problems and came up with an idea that could help.

And that, bottom line, is what we’re looking for in 2020.

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. Her latest book is The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History. Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2019

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