Distrust and Anti-Trust

December 16, 2022

A fully rational understanding of the American food system would have to begin by acknowledging that the modern system has produced a new role, the secretive managers of the farm apparatus. The corporatization of the agricultural inputs and refining systems, along with New Deal programs, have nearly-totally restructured the landscape of the food system in America. Corporate action has directly contributed to the financialization of the farm and the precarious existence many farmers currently live. The largest seed manufacturers have a near-monopoly and the largest beef-packers have a near-monopsony. A majority of livestock farming is done on a contract system where the farmers lose almost all of their effective right of property. Although many New Deal era farming ideas had their origins in giving farmers collective bargaining power, many have evolved into corporate control over farmers that goes hand-in-glove to Big Agribusiness. I'm writing again about the American farm because few other parts of society have been left more behind since the 1980's. 

At issue in American agrarian politics since the New Deal is not control over the means of production but control of the residuals essential to the refining and processing of production. 

There is too little public memory of a time when federal anti-trust actions protected the small farmer, by giving him (or her) more options of where to sell. More confusion still could be said to exist over seed monopolies. What the still-current furor over GMO crops misses is that the main incentive to produce GMO seed is not increased quality per se, but because of fairly recent laws allowing corporations to patent lifeforms. Thus large seed companies can exert total control over seed types, and through a vicious circle, control more of the market for seeds to farmers. GMO crops give large seed companies intellectual property rights over seed types in addition to the market monopolies they already had, reducing farmers' freedom and the choice consumers once had more of: and that's why they're bad. At issue with the seed companies is control of the residuals ancillary to production. 

It's fair to say that the regulatory apparatus overseeing American agriculture is in shambles. But what needs to be said is why it is. And it starts with anti-trust enforcement, which is not what it once was. Although we are taking the first steps to reinvigorating anti-trust, many people at many different levels in the system are reticent to take action. It goes back to at least the Reagan years. Prioritization of consumer benefits in anti-trust actions has resulted in the preference for mercantilism leaking into the anti-trust regulatory apparatus for the farm, replacing the physiocracy that protects farmers. Farmers' wages have been falling since Bork and the Reagan era. 

What non-enforcement of anti-trust also did was egg capitalists on to do what capitalists do. Financializing the food system and making anti-competitive trades to the detriment of farmers' wages and food prices was a consequence of Bork. 

The spirit of revolt animating rural areas right now describes the existing problem but misplaces the blame. The Obama administration gave the most extra attention to the farm that the farm had gotten in decades, but Republicans sold out those reforms, sacrificing farmers to usher in the Tea Party reaction in 2010. Since then, the rural economy has been a place to harvest political resentment. As a generation of younger farmers is taking the reins, the most solid hope is to capture the imagination of the public about climate change and how the farm can play a major role in counter-acting it.