Don't Be Down On The Farm.

• Author: Dorgan, Byron L.
• Position: Regulations work against American family farmers

What we can do to preserve a national treasure

A TRAVELER THROUGH WESTERN Europe these days observes something unusual to American eyes. Family-based agriculture is thriving there. The countryside is dotted with small, prosperous farms, and the communities these support are generally prosperous as well. The reason, of course, is that Europe encourages its family-scale agriculture, while America basically doesn't care. The difference was apparent at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. The European representatives were talking about families and communities, while the Americans talked about markets. You listen to the speeches, as I did, and a question looms up in your mind. If American trade representatives think these European values represent the problem, just what do they think represents the solution? If prosperous rural economies are not a worthy goal, then what is?

The question is of great urgency among U.S. farmers these days. Out beyond the prosperity of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, the producers in America's food economy are struggling for survival. The weather has been miserable. Prices for some commodities are at Depression-era levels. Imports are soaring, and giant agribusiness firms are squeezing out farmers for a bigger share of the food dollar. In this setting, farm auctions have become a grim daily counterpoint to the Wall Street boom.

The stories are wrenching beyond description. I received a letter from a woman whose son refused to get out of bed the day the family farm was auctioned off. His dream was to become a farmer like his dad, and he couldn't bear to watch that dream get sold off by a bank. Suicides among farmers are now three times the rate of the nation as a whole. One Iowa farmer left a note that said, "Everything is gone, wore out or shot, just like me."

Many in the opinion class offer an obligatory regret and then wonder why we should care. Family farmers are just poignant footnotes to the bright new economy, they say, like the little diners that got left behind on Route 1 when the interstates came in. "The U.S. no longer needs agriculture and is rapidly outgrowing it," said Steven Blank, an economist at the University of California at Davis. In this view, farms, like steel mills and television factories, can move to low-cost climes abroad, and should. "It is the improvement in the efficiency of the American economy?"

Most express themselves in more diplomatic terms. But that's basically the expert view. An economy is just a mathematical equation and efficiency, narrowly defined, is the ultimate value. If family-based agriculture disappears, so be it. This view isn't just distasteful. It is shortsighted and wrong.

The fact is, family-based agriculture is not unproductive or inefficient, even by the narrow calculus of the economics profession. (I'll go into that a little later.) First off, if we care about food, we will not welcome an economy in which control of the food chain lies in a few corporate hands. Monsanto-in-the-Fields is not everyone's idea of the food economy they want. But the basic issue here goes far beyond food. It speaks to us as citizens rather than just as shoppers; ultimately it concerns the kind of country we are going to be. The family farm today is a sort of canary in the mine shaft of the global economy. It shows in stark terms what happens to our lives, our communities, and our values when we prostrate ourselves before the narrow and myopic calculus of international finance. So doing, it raises what is probably the single most important economic question America faces: What is an economy for?

For decades the nation has listened to a policy establishment that views the economy as a kind of "Stuff Olympics?" The gold medal goes to the nation that accumulates the most stuff and racks up the biggest GDP. Enterprise is valued only to the extent it serves this end. But what happens when we produce more stuff than we need but less of other things, such as community, that we need just as much? Do we continue our efforts to produce more of what we already have a glut of? Or do we ask a different question? If Americans say we need stronger families and better communities, then we need to question whether our economic arrangements are contributing to those ends. If we really believe in traditional family values, then should we not support the form of agriculture--and business generally--based upon those values?

There's a way to save our family-based agriculture. Harry Truman had the answer more than fifty years ago. Put simply, Truman wanted to confine the agricultural support system to the family-sized unit. This would promote a modern and productive farm economy and healthy rural communities too. It would begin to align our economic policies with our traditional family values and social ideals. But in order to see the value of this approach, we have to put off the mythologies and ideological blinders that dominate the debate today.

Over the Edge

...