Public Radio: In-depth ... or Head-in-Sand?

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Farming communities in Canada

On August 4, I tuned in to the public radio program "Marketplace," just in time to hear a report on the decline of farming communities in Canada. The report noted that small farms have been going out of business across the continent, but it focused on the small community of Sperling, Manitoba. As introduced by anchor David Brancaccio, the gist of the story seemed to be that in Canada, which is competitive and individualistic and does not protect its farm communities with subsidies the way the welfare-state Europeans do, small farms everywhere are being swallowed up by larger ones. It's a big, tough, farm-eat-farm world out there.

I had just finished proofreading Brian Halweil's article, "Where Have All the Farmers Gone?" in preparation for the September/October issue of WORLD WATCH, and was aware that this is not just a Canadian problem: small farms all over the world are being gobbled up by larger ones. But Brian's article also explains, in a way I never quite understood before, just why this attrition is happening. As you may recall, he describes how large corporate conglomerates such as Con-Agra/DuPont, Cargill/Monsanto, and Novartis/ADM have taken control of agriculture in most industrialized countries, and how these conglomerates have become so vertically integrated that they can now take for themselves the lion's share of every food dollar spent by a consumers--leaving only 5 cents for the farmer. Typically, the traditional family farmer finds himself having no choice but to buy seed, fertilizer, and other inputs from the conglomerate, then sell the harvested crop back to the same conglomerate, or a subsidiary of it. Unsurprisi ngly, the farmer has to buy his inputs at painfully high prices, then sell the harvested crop cheap. Caught in a vise-like squeeze, the farmer can survive only by selling larger and larger volumes at smaller and smaller margins. And that's why large farmers buy out their smaller neighbors--and why farm communities lose their populations, board up their stores, and close their churches and schools.

I would never have guessed any of this by listening to the Marketplace piece, in which reporter Erin Galbally mentioned nothing about the conglomerates who take the bulk of the profit but share none of the farmers' heavily publicized burden. I found myself skeptically wondering whether this curious oversight had occurred because (1) these big agribusinesses provide major funding support to public radio (I have often...