Text of Radio Piece
Aired on Touchstone Radio, KEOS 89.1
First aired July 6, 2004
Listen online at: http://www.rtis.com/touchstone/tsradio/static/cd40-02.html
These days it seems you can't pass a newsstand without seeing a story on the evils of agriculture or the decline of rural communities. Harpers has run three in a row dealing in turn with the benefits of local food, the environmental cost of industrial agriculture, and the economic wreckage of the United States' agricultural heartland. National Geographic recently chimed in on that last thought. With the U.S. in such bad shape, it makes you want to see how the rest of the world is doing.
In fact, that's exactly what National Geographic does. A few pages over from its somber elegy to the vanishing population of the rural Plains, there's an article on the expansion of the European Union. Here, the otherwise bubbly tone goes grim long enough to remind the reader that in new member countries like Poland, where the 38 % of the population is rural and 22 % of the work force is engaged in farming, reforming agriculture will be "difficult and expensive."
As in the case of welfare programs and Social Security, that word – "reform" – is code for the elimination of policies that help those most in need. So it is in the phrase "reforming agriculture," which falls more pleasingly on the ear, than, say, "industrializing farming," or "corporatizing the food supply." In the intersection of rural communities and agricultural policy, the dominant assumption is the same from Poland to Ponca City: the loss of family farms is an inevitable outcome of economic development.
In the U.S., the rural population hasn't been as high as Poland's since 1940, and decades of policy favoring large agribusiness corporations, to the tune of "get big or get out," have drowned out the steadily fainter farm vote. Literally overnight, the EU accomplished a political and demographic shift that took decades in the U.S. Take the existing members, with a population of 381 million that's 79 % urban, and add the new ones' 74 million people, 36 % of whom are rural. It's a perfect recipe for reducing the political power of the countryside.
The original EU members are considerably happier to bring in the new countries' farms than the farmers. It's the same old story: free trade opens borders to capital, but not to people. The resulting immigration restrictions would seem familiar to an illegal Mexican farmhand poisoned by pesticides or sweating out his last stifling minutes in a locked semi trailer on the Arizona border.
Meanwhile, in China, national policymakers recently stopped basing village officials' performance incentives on their farmers' contribution to GNP, and tied them instead to increases in farmers' income. China, with thousands of years of history of peasant revolutions, 66 % of the population farming, and no industrial neighbors to annex, knows the importance of keeping its farmers on the land and happy. In the U.S. and Europe, where farmers are too few to protect their own interests, the job falls to those of us – happily still a majority – who eat. Keeping small farmers on the land won't gurarantee that our food will be affordable and healthy – but handing corporations the sole responsibility for producing it will guarantee that it isn't.