Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [35]
The meat industry is no exception to these trends. Just three decades ago, cattle were fed in thousands of small feedlots (fenced areas where cattle are fattened for market). During the 1960s, 7,500 feedlots folded each year. By 1977, half of the 25 million cattle fed in the United States passed through only 400 feedlots.12
At the next stage of production—beef packing—four corporations control one-third of the market. One of these, Iowa Beef Processors, was just grabbed up by Occidental Petroleum. Having made a killing through its control of one scarce commodity—fossil fuel—Oxy is hoping to do the same with another. Its board chairman told Business Week shortly before the 1981 merger: “Food shortages will be to the 1990’s what energy shortages have been to the 1970’s and 1980’s.”13
While nationally four beef packers control about a third of the market for cattle, what’s worrying cattle feeders is how few corporations are in their vicinity to bid for their herd; for, regionally, control is even more tightly concentrated. Just three packers, for example, now purchase 70 percent of the feedlot cattle in a major Southwest beef producing area.14 Cattlemen are sure that such concentrated power depresses the prices they can get for their cattle.
Cattle-feeding, meatpacking, and grain-trading operations used to be owned by separate interests. But today 13 of the 25 biggest feedlot operations are owned or controlled by either meatpacking or grain-trading corporations.15 Their interest is in keeping the price of feedlot cattle down. Conveniently, these “integrated” firms also control a critically large share of the cattle futures market (trading in contracts for delivery of feedlot cattle), which they can use to depress the price of cattle, helping to drive out of business the smaller feedlots not connected to beef packers. Officers of packing, meat-processing, grain-trading, and feedlot companies also use their insider knowledge to reap incredible personal gain. A 1980 Congressional study revealed that over a 16-month period in 1978 and 1979, those who came out on top in cattle futures trading were a handful of officers in these companies who each profited by an average of $2.5 million.16
Such concentration of economic power is what I had learned to associate with third world economies.
IMAGES OF THE THIRD WORLD
Miles and miles of coffee or banana trees. Endless fields of sugar cane. Dependency on raw-material production—and dependency on only one or two crops for export. The marketing of these exports through corporations with no accountability, no loyalty to the well-being of the people of the country.
Since these are my images of third world agriculture, you can imagine my alarm as I learned about the parallels in U. S. agriculture.
I began to study the U. S. government’s big farm-export push, which began in the early 1970s. Some have called the massive increase in agricultural exports the greatest shock to hit American agriculture since the tractor, and they may be right. In just ten years farm export volume doubled, and in the Corn Belt states almost 30 percent more land came under cultivation—much of it marginal land, highly susceptible to erosion.
Directly related to the export push are two other trends—a reduction in the number of crops produced and the increasing dependence of farmers on foreign markets. In fact, that dependence doubled in only ten years, so that by 1980 almost one-third of farmers’ sales went overseas.
What is the significance of these trends for fanners? And for all of us?
Dependence on foreign markets immediately resulted in more volatile commodity prices. The variation in prices farmers received after 1972 was five times greater than during the late 1960s. Boom and bust was the result. While farmers’ incomes hit record highs in 1973-74, by 1978 an average farm family’s real purchasing power was no greater