Who Is The Real Enemy?
Here is a much condensed tale of
farmers, family farmers growing soy beans, from the US and Brazil.
It's taken from a long chapter in Raj Patel's 'Stuffed and Starved'
about the many questions pertaining to a very contentious issue,
that of agribusiness's role in the production of soy and the
manufacture and distribution of the resultant products.
One family farmer from the US, Emelie
Peine, who farms 400 acres in Up State New York took time out to
visit farmers of similar or smaller sized farms in Brazil and
subsequently discussed her findings with Patel. He summarises her
observations thus 'the misconceptions of realities on both sides
of the Panama Canal, north and south, seem systematic. US farmers
find it easy to believe that all Brazilians are socially and
ecologically corrupt slave drivers and Brazilian farmers believe
their US counterparts to be suckled on taxpayer dollars' drawing
attention to 'countless articles in farming periodicals of
the US Midwest and Great Plains - - -and likewise fuelled in Brazil.'
The
chapter reveals differences in approach in Brazil between the small
family farmers who care about their land and want to have something
to leave their children and the mega farms run by giant corporations.
But, to home in on the Brazilian misconception about US farmers
reaping big payouts from government subsidies, 'since the
1996 farm bill, rich farmers and corporations systematically received
more than the majority of US farmers. The trend has continued: from
1996 to 2010 the top 10% of farms received 75% of total farm subsidy
payments. The average annual payment to the top 10% is $30,751,
while the bottom 80% receive only $587 per year and nearly two thirds
of American farmers collected no subsidy payments at all in 2010.
Emelie Peine: 'It's
not just that there are some farmers who need to understand each
other better. But farmers need to understand why they're competing
with each other. The thing that made me realize this most is that
Cargill is not only the largest exporter of US soybeans but also the
biggest exporter of Brazilian soybeans. So then what's the conflict
of trade rules about? Farmers need to understand that every
independent producer of tradable commodities in every country is
being squeezed by the same companies – and that the root of the
problem is the corporate structure of the global agricultural
economy, not one country's subsidies or another's environmental
practices.'
Some salient soy
facts:
- Brazil's biggest soy producer is Blairo Maggi, former governor of Mato Grosso, with a 'family farm' of 350,000 acres, half of it under soy and with plans to triple its size by now.
- ILO estimates numbers of workers in conditions of slavery in Brazil as between 25,000-40,000, (Maggi's farm having been found to be one of them)
- Cargill, ADM and Bunge finance 60% of Brazilian soy production and own ¾ of all European processing facilities for whole bean exports from Brazil.
Although we recognise the realities
of the huge problems faced by workers and the public in general from
the enormous power wielded by multinational corporations, this is only one of many ongoing world problems and regular
readers will be fully aware of SOYMB's position on who the real
enemy is
and that is the capitalist system itself.
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