Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [58]
The practice of better established, bigger farms gobbling up smaller ones is commonly defended on the grounds of more efficient production, yet already over half the value of all crops in the United States is produced on farms larger than can be justified on the ground of efficiency.7 Moreover, costs of production on small to moderate-sized farms are often lower than on the biggest farms, according to the Congressional Research Service.8
Greater production and growing markets have always been held out to farmers as keys to their prosperity, but the most straightforward facts of our agricultural history deny this promise:
Our agricultural output has almost doubled in the last 30 years,9 and agricultural exports have doubled just since 1970, yet the real purchasing power of an average farm family in 1978 was about the same as in the early 1960s.10 And even this average masks the economic devastation of many (those unable to expand) and the meteoric rise of a minority. Eighty thousand dollars is the average net income of the 3 percent at the top, those who now control almost half of U.S. farm sales. The tiny group of 6,000 farms that captures 20 percent of farm sales now enjoys an average annual net income of roughly half a million dollars.11 At the same time, if two-thirds of American farms tried to live off the sales of their crops alone, their income would fall below the poverty line. Their average income hovers close to the national median only because of increased nonfarm income.12 And that average hides the continuing reality of rural poverty.
Thus, production itself, and efforts to dispose of it through livestock and exports (or, most recently, gasohol), can no longer be accepted as a solution to the plight of the farmer. For we can see where this blind production imperative has taken us—away from values that Americans have always associated with democracy, and toward a “landed aristocracy;” away from dispersed control over the land, and toward a highly concentrated pattern of control; away from a system rewarding hard work and good management, and toward one rewarding size and wealth alone. As I suggested earlier, ours is becoming the kind of farm economy that I have seen at the root of so much injustice and misery in the third world.
Production Divorced from Human Need
We view our production system as rational, but what makes it go? It is motivated by this year’s profits to the individual producer. We proudly cite abundant production as proof of the system’s success. But “Does it produce?” cannot be the only question we ask. In judging our system, we must also ask, is it sustainable? Is it fair to its producers? I have already answered “No” to these questions. But the ultimate question which we must answer is, does it fulfill human needs? Production divorced from human need is not rational.
Our production is staggering: over four acres of cropland and pasture are producing food for each person in America. (That’s the equivalent of about four football fields just for you!) We produce so much food that although roughly one-fifth is wasted altogether—simply plowed under or thrown out—we are still able to export the output of every third acre harvested. In fact, our production has been so great that one of the biggest government headaches over the last four decades has been the mountains of costly “surpluses.”
Yet despite our abundance and the fact that our food prices do not reflect the true costs of production, middle-income families—$15,000 to $25,000 a year—must spend almost 29 percent of their income to eat a “liberal” food plan (as defined by the Department of