Workers Of The World - 2

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.