By Lem Harris and Mark Froemke
People's Weekly World
WORTHINGTON, Minn. - Two hundred farmers packed the auditorium of the community college here Aug. 4 for one in a series of public hearings called by Minnesota's Democratic Sens. Paul Wellstone and Mark Dayton.
The purpose of the hearing was to get on record the most urgent measures the farmers wish included in the new five-year Farm Bill, scheduled to be debated in Congress in September. Family farmers know that this bill will do much to determine their future.
A keynote to the meeting was presented by a well-known and well-liked farm woman, Ann Kanren, a former deputy commissioner of agriculture under former Governor Rudy Perpich.
"I am old. I am tired. I am angry," she said.
"Farmers should lobby for a new farm bill that is being put forth by farmers across the counry," she continued, referring to the Farm Bill that Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) will place before the Senate Committee on Agriculture when Congress reconvenes in September. It is reported that Harkin's bill includes a plan to ensure a fair price from companies and processors that buy the commodities farmers produce.
She added that farmers from Montana to Indiana helped write the bill. "They say price first and foremost. But they also talk about conservation, dairy, livestock, credit, marketing concentration and security."
Various speakers at the Worthington hearing called for a stop to the corporate acquisitions and mergers that have given a stranglehold on food production to a handful of giants like Cargill, ADM and Monsanto. The farmers charged that these giants have driven the prices they give farmers far below the cost of production while charging consumers high prices at the supermarket. "They are killing family farms," charged Wellstone.
According to The Minneapolis Star Tribune, 1,000 farms in Minnesota shut down last year, bringing the state's total to only 79,000. Paul Garve, a farmer from Hendricks, Minn., said that unless policy is changed, not one of his nine children and seventeen grandchildren will be able to go into farming.
Hog farmers protested that the National Pork Producers Association, to which they all belong, continues to impose a hefty "check-off," or assessment, on every pound of pork, which pays for advertising pork products, the "other white meat."
The only winner from this check-off are the gigantic agribusiness hog farms with tens of thousands of pigs that produce lakes of foul-smelling hog manure that pollute the atmosphere, ground water and rivers.
The hog farmers last year collected 14,000 signatures on a petition demanding a referendum to end the check-off. Then Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman reluctantly agreed to the referendum and, when the votes were counted, a clear majority favored termination of the check-off. But as soon as George W. Bush took office, he reversed Glickman's steps to terminate the check-off.
The National Farmers Union and other farmer organizations are following up on the Worthington meeting by scheduling a mass "fly-in" of farmers to Washington on Sept. 10-11 to lobby for a "family farmer friendly" farm bill.
Concern has been expressed in farming circles that the Republican-controlled House may pull another fast one by blocking any consideration of the Senate-sponsored Farm Bill and push through their version, which earmarks many billions in taxpayer subsidies for the biggest and wealthiest farms instead of targeting the assistance to the small and independent farmers who need it the most.
Already, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) is hammering George W. Bush and the Republican House leaders for slashing farm aid by more than $2 billion in the recently enacted emergency farm assistance bill.