The tightening farm belt: Corporate greed and government neglect threaten to starve the folks "who feed us all."

Steve and Donna Linder have been raising wheat, barley, oats, sunflower and corn on their 1,100 acre farm near Oklee, Minn., for many years. The farm has been in the family for three generations and like most farmers the Linders would like to pass it on to their children.

Yet like a dark tornado, the forces that are destroying family farming are looming. This year, the price of wheat at $5.80 per bushel is relatively high, Steve Linder told the World in a telephone interview. "But the spring was cold and wet. We got a late start so we weren't able to plant about 30 or 40 percent of our acreage. The prospect is not good."

While they were facing an abnormally wet spring, grain farmers a few hundred miles south in Oklahoma faced a drought that scorched their crops so severely that it brought back dustbowl memories when thousands of Oklahoma farmers were driven from the ruined land.

To compound the natural disasters, the 104th Congress, dominated by Republican extremists, pushed through a farm bill, the Agricultural Market Transition Act, this session that will terminate the system of federal crop price supports over the next seven years. This system of "deficiency payments" has existed in one form or another since the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933.

The new farm bill, signed by President Clinton, is House Speaker Newt Gingrich's "Contract on family farmers." It came wrapped in demagogic appeals to the "free market," a hoax since all prices for farm commodities are controlled by powerful agribusiness corporations.

Steve Linder declared, "What this farm bill does is remove any floor or safety net from underneath farmers. It will totally eliminate farm price supports over the next seven years."

Producing food is a risky enterprise, yet nothing is more vital to the survival of the human race, Linder said. "If the market won't provide enough to keep farmers in production then it must come from government programs. If all of us family farmers are driven out, production will be concentrated in the hands of a few large agribusiness producers. They can charge any price they please - even more than the market will bear."

Under the previous farm bill, federal subsidies were reduced when the price of their crops rose. In the new farm bill, the payments from the federal government are set. It is designed to lull farmers into the illusion that they are reaping a double bonanza. But each year for the next seven years, these price supports will be slashed 15 percent until they are terminated completely in 2002.

Furthermore, the Republican controlled House Appropriations Committee, Linder pointed out, recently voted to cut funding for the price support programs even below the scheduled 15 percent reduction.

Unlike the previous farm bill, this one also terminates all disaster assistance for farmers hit by floods or droughts. "In normal times, before these rabid right-wingers took over Congress," said Linder, "It would have been a certainty that those drought-stricken farmers in Oklahoma would have received government disaster relief. But not now. Now they are on their own."

Natural calamities are one thing, but there is nothing natural about the economic system that forces farmers into semi-peonage to enrich a handful of grain monopolies based in Minneapolis or Chicago. These days farmers toil long hours at minimum pay for agribusiness giants like Continental, Bunge, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Cargill, Conagra, and Pillsbury. They are among the very richest monopoly corporations in the world. They control the market, including the Chicago Board of Trade, and dictate the price they pay to the farmers as well as the price consumers pay for a loaf of bread or a box of cornflakes. They buy cheap and sell dear.

U.S. agriculture is the most capital intensive in the world. Farmers pay top prices - dictated, again, by the monopolies - for equipment, seed, fertilizer,Jfuel. The sticker price of a John Deere combine is now $170,000. The independent farmer is caught in a ruthless squeeze between stagnant or declining prices for his crops and soaring costs of production. Linder was struggling with an aging John Deere tractor the day I interviewed him. He told me that like most farmers in his region, most of his farm machinery is worn out and constantly breaking down.

The cost-price squeeze has driven millions of farmers off the land, Farmers who have managed to hold on scramble to produce more just to stay even. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that only 2,198,000 farms remain in the U.S., and farmers are now only 2.2 percent of the population. None have been harder hit than Black sharecroppers in the South. Only a handful remain.In 1910, each farmer fed 7.1 persons. An American farmer today feeds 128 people. Farmers are now a key link in the highly integrated food processing industry with tens of thousands of farmworkers, most of them non-union. It is an industry dominated by agribusiness which reaps an estimated $60 billion in combined annual profits.

Independent farmers know that standing alone they will always be at the mercy of the monopolies just as surely as wage workers are. The Linders are members of the National Farmers Union, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO. They strongly favor independent political action. This year, they are supporting Sen. Paul Wellstone who represents the best tradition of Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party in fighting the entrenched monopolies.

Wellstone is in a tough reelection rematch with the GOP's former Senator Rudy Boschwitz whom Wellstone narrowly defeated six years ago. Boschwitz is an open agent of agribusiness which is pouring millions of dollars into his election campaign. Agribusiness ranks high in bankrolling the extremist GOP majority in Congress. Soybean King, Dwayne O. Andreas, Chief Executive of ADM is one of Bob Dole's biggest moneybags along with Phillip Morris, R.J. Reynolds and other tobacco interests.

Donna Linder spoke warmly of Wellstone. "Paul came through this county in his green school bus six years ago and Steve went up and met with him," she said. "The farmers support him. He's spoken at Farmer Union conventions. He's really progressive. He gets fired up! He's a good guy to have in the Senate."

Since 1972, the main program to stabilize crop prices has been a system of deficiency payments. The USDA sets a target price for a certain crop. The farmer then is eligible for a federal loan on his crop. If market prices do not reach the loan price, the farmer usually lets the government take the grain as payment for the loan. At the end of the year, the government will pay the farmer the difference between the target price and the actual market price in the form of a "deficiency payment."

Farmers have always objected to these deficiency payments since it forces taxpayers to, in effect, subsidize low grain prices for the grain monopolies. Sen. John Melcher (D-Mont.) demanded, "Why do we have a program that pays farmers in lieu of getting a price from the marketplace?" That is what happened under the Steagall Amendment of 1942 (see sidebar) The grain monopolies were forced to pay farmers a fair price - 100 percent of parity.

Yet bad as the deficiency payment system is, it has been better than nothing. Now farmers are to have nothing! "Our goal as farmers is the same as all other working people," said Linder. "To get everybody well organized and demand what we need. In our case it is a fair government farm program.We have to start by removing these extremists from the House and Senate.There is no need for the government to make the taxpayer pay for farm subsidies. The federal government can make Kellogg, General Mills, Pillsbury and Cargill pay us a fair price."

Farm Bill "a bust" for family farms

Merle Hansen, a Newman Grove, Nebraska farmer and member of the National Farmers Union, told the World that the new farm bill "turns power totally over to the biggest agribusiness corporations. It returns us to the casino type farm economy of one hundred years ago. It will be boom and bust. For most farmers it was a bust."

Since time immemorial, said Hansen, farmers have been fighting for simple justice - a fair price for the crops they produce, "parity prices, high enough to cover their costs of production and to provide a livable income," he said. "Parity prices for farmers are like a fair minimum wage for workers." It is based on an index for the years 1910-1914 when farm commodity prices and farm costs were in balance and the purchasing power of farmers equaled that of urban, industrial workers.

In 1942, in response to the war emergency, Congress passed the Steagall Amendment which set farm commodity prices at 90 percent of parity - which actually produced 100 percent of parity in the market. Lem Harris, a veteran farm economist and a frequent contributor to the People's Weekly World explained how it worked: On their farms, farmers stored their crops in silos which were sealed by the government. The federal government then lent farmers money with the grain as collateral.

"It enabled farmers to withhold their crops from the market until the grain companies agreed to parity prices. The farmers then repaid the government loans with modest interest - a deal that actually made $13 million for the federal treasury during that period while sharply increasing farm income."

During this period (1939-1944), farmer's net annual cash income went from $3.2 billion to $11 billion, much of it used to retire a mountain of farm debt. Parity prices coupled with Office of Price Administration price controls also meant stable prices for consumers and a dramatic improvement in the diet of working people.

Only giant agribusiness was unhappy. After the war, and ever since, they have waged war against any federal program designed to insure parity prices. In 1962, a blue-ribbon panel of corporate CEOs, bankers, and a group of agribusiness executives called the Committee for Economic Development released a report, "An Adaptive Program for Agriculture" which argued for elimination of the "persistent excess of resources, particularly labor, in agriculture ..."

The report continued, "If the farm labor force were to be, five years hence, no more than two-thirds as large as its present size of approximately 5.5 millions, the program would involve moving off the farm about two million of the present farm labor force ..."

Congress gutted the Steagall Amendment and farm commodity prices plummeted. Within a decade, more than one million farmers were driven out of business. The prices farmers have received have been chronically below the cost of production up until the present.Obviously, it has been a bonanza for the grain trusts and other agribusiness food processors who are getting their raw material at bargain basement prices.

In his encyclopedic book "The Corporate Reapers: The Book of Agribusiness," A.V. Krebs shows that one aim of federal agricultural policy was to use food as a weapon of U.S. imperialist domination.This policy was implemented with a vengeance by President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz.

During Nixon's tenure, parity prices dropped to 73 percent, the lowest since 1932. The CIA produced a report, leaked to the media titled "Food as a Weapon." The strategy was to actively intervene to ruin the agriculture of other nations by every foul means including use of germ warfare. The CIA infected Cuba's swine herds with a deadly bacteria- literally an attempt to starve the Cuban people into submission. Equally pernicious, was the drive to ruin farmers in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa by deliberately underselling them with "cheap" U.S. grain.

Japan, Europe and other countries have been forced to adopt strict protectionist measures to defend their agriculture from the flood of American exports. The goal was to use U.S. grain surpluses to force nations into a colonial dependency upon the United States.

From Butz' standpoint, the larger the grain surpluses and the lower the prices paid to American farmers the better. His main program was to exhort farmers to plant "fence-row to fence-row" and to pour on the chemical fertilizer regardless of the damage it inflicted on the land. It was part of the Cold War anti-Communist drive that also included the brutal attack on the U.S. labor movement.