FWD: A RALPH NADER LETTER TO FAMILY FARMERS --- PLEASE CIRCULATE WIDELY

[Robert Cohen <70412.3303@compuserve.com>]

Dear Colleague,

FYI.  This document was distributed by Al Krebs to the recipients of his
weekly newsletter, The Agribusiness Examiner.  Some of the punctuation
arrived garbled, so I repaired it the best I could.

Regards,

        Bob


<r.cohen@ieee.org>


-------------------- Begin Forwarded Message --------------------

From: INTERNET:avkrebs@earthlink.net
Date: 2000 Aug 29 Tue 11:55:05 PM

RE: A RALPH NADER LETTER TO FAMILY FARMERS --- PLEASE CIRCULATE WIDELY

 
Dear Friends,

No one sector of our economic system has felt
the disastrous affects of corporate
concentration, power and control more than
our nationís family farmers.

Family farmers have been at the mercy of an
ever-growing corporate behemoth, from the
devastating financial debt crisis of the
1980s to the ruinous Freedom to Farm
legislation of the 1990s; legislation enacted
and signed by a Republicrat Congress and a
Republicrat President.

Big corporations and their billionaire owners
and executives have not only taken daily
control of our agriculture and food system,
but also our work, pay, housing, health,
pension funds, bank and saving deposits,
public lands, airwaves, elections and our
very government.

Rather than challenge this rule by Big
Business and Big Government, our political
leadership and our two major political
parties have surrendered themselves to such
corporate power.

As a candidate for the presidency in this
election year, I believe there is nothing
inevitable about misery or squalor, or the
concentration of wealth and corporate power;
nothing is sacrosanct about the status quo,
or about the power structures that safeguard
that status quo. As rural citizens concerned
about the survival of family farmers I
believe you can make a difference and I am
writing this letter to ask you to join with
me in helping to make that difference.

In this regard, family farmers have a rich
tradition. There is nothing to compare to the
farmersí drive in Texas during the late 1880s
which signed up 250,000 farmers and led to
the early stage of the 30-year populist
revolt, still the country's most fundamental
political and economic reform movement since
the Constitution was ratified. And these
farmers did it largely on foot and with
pamphlets.

How, without today's communications and
transportation facilities, did the farmers
manage to cover so much ground, create so
many lasting institutions, and elect so many
state legislators, governors, members of
Congress, and almost the president of the
United States? Because they owned what they
controlled: the land. And they controlled
what they owned: the land.  And they
aggregated their vote around specific agendas
designed to limit the power of the railroads,
banks and absentee "Eastern financial
moguls."

Now we see our two-party system is crumbling.
They are hollowed out and don't have much
basic grass-roots support. They're basically
two parties with a lot of money fighting
against each other with 30-second electric
combat ads on television. The only way we are
going to regain control of our political
institutions is to help build a progressive
political movement that will break up the
concentration of wealth and power: this
plutocracy that reigns over our democracy.

Most Americans are not aware today that were
it not for off-farm income our family farmers
would closely resemble a farm economy in
depression: impoverished and enslaved to an
ever-increasingly large globalized
transnationally-owned and controlled food
manufacturing system. USDA figures for the
1990s show that "average farm operator
household earnings" from farming activities
as percent of average household income was an
alarming 11.8%.

Today, farm gate prices of the big five
commodities: corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton,
and rice, have collapsed to near record or
record all-time inflation-adjusted lows.  The
average national market price comparison
between 1996 and 1999 of major farm program
crops tells a tragic story.  The average
national market price of corn has fallen 30%,
soybeans 35%, wheat 41%, cotton 35%, and rice
40%.

For nearly a century now, the inability of
most farmers to receive a consistently fair
and equitable return on their investment has
left them with basically only three options:
selling their land and exiting from
agriculture altogether, attempting to borrow
money from public and private lenders in an
attempt to remain in farming, or seeking
employment off the farm in an effort to
economically survive and hopefully retain
their family's farm.

Their inability, however, to receive a fair
and equitable return on their investment (to
say nothing of simply being able to meet
their production expenses) has little to do
today with the fact that they are ìefficientî
producers, but more to the question of what
they are being paid for what they produce.

In 1984, former Texas Agricultural
Commissioner and one of the co-chairs of our
Citizens Committee for Nader/LaDuke chaired a
series of eight nationwide farm policy forums
on agriculture. In his final report he
concluded:

"When all was said and done, it came down to
one word: price. Other important issues were
discussed at the forums . . . during the past
six months, but the overwhelming consensus
among participating farmers was that the
other concerns: overproduction, soil and
water conservation, high interest rates, lack
of credit, entry by young farmers, the
depressed farm service industry, and the farm
programís high cost, to name a few, could and
would be solved when farmers received a fair
price for their products."

Near record harvests, Congressional bailouts,
so-called "free trade" -- and don't let anyone
ever use that phrase "free trade," it's
corporate managed trade -- are not going to
solve the basic problems that our nationís
family farmers face today.

I support policies that enable farmers to
realize a fair price for what they produce;
open and competitive markets where they can
sell their products; anti-trust laws that
prohibit the kind of mergers and acquisitions
that are currently ruining family-farm
agriculture and a Department of Justice that
will effectively enforce such existing and
new laws; and a trade policy that is designed
to benefit the crop producer, and not simply
become a giant government subsidy for the
likes of the Cargills, the ADMs, the
ConAgras, the IBPs, the Tysons, the Chiquitas
and the Smithfields.

It is no coincidence that these same giant
corporations are also the same corporate
paymasters that have subverted our two major
political parties with their vast amounts of
cash and in turn been the recipients of
government largess. A striking example of
such corporate welfare was recently noted by
national farm columnist Alan Guebert.

In the July 27 Federal Register, the USDA
proposed to pay ag processors up to $450
million to make ethanol from America's
ever-growing piles of grain. Under the
quietly offered plan, USDA hopes to make
quarterly payments to some 50-plus bio-energy
makers over the next three years to make
fuel. If adopted, USDA could end up paying
Archer Daniels Midland, the admitted
price-fixer that produces 42% of the nationís
ethanol, $189 million. When Guebert explained
that to one farmer-caller recently, the
farmer's only reply was, "So ADM gets back
its $100 million price fixing fine with
interest."

As you may know over the years I have spoken
out on such family-farm issues as food safety
standards, the misuse and overuse of chemical
poisons, the exploitation of farm workers,
the USDAís decades-old discrimination of
black and minority farmers, usury interest
rates charged by an increasingly
consolidating banking industry, and excessive
and unnecessary subsidies to giant
agribusiness corporations.

In addition, for years I have frequently
called for local, state and federal
government assistance in promoting self-help
programs to assist family farm agriculture in
building a sound alternative economic base
through community supported agriculture
programs, organic farming practices, the
raising of industrial hemp, and the use of
solar energy and other appropriate
technologies and sustainable agricultural
practices in addition to opposing the
planting of inadequately tested genetically
engineered crops.

I have also voiced repeated opposition to the
exploitative policies of the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and have
opposed the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade
Organization (WTO), which I feel are
subversive of democratic processes and are
push-down, not pull-up, trade agreements.

When it comes to the question of trade,
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Jay in
1809, said it well:

"Manufactures, sufficient for our own
consumption, of what we raise the raw
material (and no more). Commerce sufficient
to carry the surplus produce of agriculture,
beyond our own consumption, to a market for
exchanging it for articles we cannot raise
(and no more). These are the true limits of
manufactures and commerce. To go beyond them
is to increase our dependence on foreign
nations, and our liability to war. These
three important branches of human industry
will then grow together, and be really
handmaidens to each other."

These family farm issues: fair price, open
markets, enforcements of anti-trust law, fair
trade policies -- are the issues that need to
be put before the American public, not only
because they are issues that get to the heart
of the axiom that you cannot have political
democracy without economic democracy, but
because they are vital to our every day
livelihood: the availability, quality,
quantity, price and safety of the food we
eat.

In this Presidential campaign that we are
currently engaged in, I believe that these
issues along with the many other economic,
social, health, labor and environmental
issues that we face today as a nation should
be addressed and debated by the candidates in
open dialogue. We are starting a broad-based,
progressive political movement to end once
and for all the limited choice Americans have
between Tweedle Dum Republican and Tweedle
Dee Democrat, both in hock to big corporate
interests and money.

Unfortunately, at the present time I am being
denied that opportunity to engage in debating
such issues this October, principally by the
two major parties and their corporate
patrons. The Federal Election Commission says
only candidates with an average of 15% or
more in five leading national polls will be
allowed to participate.  That threshold is
virtually unattainable without the national
exposure of a televised debate. At the same
time I need only 5% to qualify for federal
matching funds. Obviously, this is an
injustice and citizens who care about
preserving democratic elections need to write
to the FEC urging them to drop such a
restriction.

Write Paul Kirk and Frank Fahrenkopf,
co-chairmen of the Commission on Presidential
Debates, and ask them to change their rules
and allow presidential candidates with 5%
voting support in national polls or more than
50% opinion support in national polls to
participate in the debates.

Mail should be sent to:
Frank J. Fahrenkopf and Paul G. Kirk
Commission on Presidential Debates
1200 New Hampshire, NW Box 445
Washington, DC 20036

In the meantime, I am hoping that I can count
on the support of rural America and family
farmers throughout the nation who share the
same ideals and goals to help me be included
in the national debates prior to our November
Presidential elections. Together we can make
a difference for rural agricultural justice.

Signed:
Ralph Nader

P.S. A member of our Citizens Committee for
Nader/LaDuke is currently seeking to organize
a national Family Farmers Committee for
Nader/LaDuke. If you would like to join such
a committee I urge you to contact Al Krebs,
P.O. Box 2201, Everett, Washington 98203-0201
avkrebs@earthlink.net

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