Agribusiness, Food, Wages

AGRIBUSINESS

"every fiscal conservative is hiding their copy of Ayn Rand and is lining up for benefits from the nanny state"

Ricardo Salvador:

“Emancipation never really came to agriculture, in the sense that we still don’t pay the full value of the labor that’s required to make the entire system work.

There’s a phenomenon that all of us are observing at the moment that…. We could make this a political conversation, and I will try to steer away from that. But the fact is that policy is involved, and the phenomenon that I’m referring to is the phenomenon that’s known typically as the fog of war. When you have a major crisis that is absorbing the public’s attention, this is a prime time to try to push through policy goals that normally would just be completely intolerable, unpalatable, to the public.

So what you have is the top of this pyramid that I described earlier, which is essentially the highly concentrated agribusiness sector, attempting to exploit the moment to cut as many costs as possible, and one of those costs is the cost of farm labor. And they’re cravenly taking advantage of the fact that, for all the reasons that I just described, these are people that are politically invisible; they don’t have muscle. Many of them are domestic guest workers in the country; they signed paperwork that says they’re only here to work in fields, that’s all, and when they’re done, they return home. Or else they’re not documented, and so what are they going to do when they’re exploited? Sue? They have no standing, and so that’s being cravenly exploited.

We need a food system that is fungible, that has redundancy built in. The so-called efficiencies that have been built into the highly specialized industrial model that we have right now, we are now learning, do not serve us when you have a situation where a single thing that is unpredicted takes out one pillar of the food system, and then the whole thing comes crumbling down. That’s not the kind of food system that we need. We need one that is more distributed, meaning that there are more nodes within the food system that can respond in the volumes and quantities and the formats that are necessary for where people are going to be using this food.

Now, a very good example of that is that the farmers that are doing well right now are the so-called small-scale family farmers. These are folks that produce in volumes, and who redistribute in local and regional networks, where they can respond very quickly, to where the schools are now becoming redistribution points for SNAP, for instance, or for school food that needs to be picked up by students that otherwise might not have access to that food, because they’re not coming to school every day, and so on. Or through farmers markets, another very important redistribution method which is very fungible. So we’re learning that that’s actually what works; we need to invest more in these kinds of highly distributed systems, and less in the highly concentrated systems.

Probably the single most influential agricultural lobby is the American Farm Bureau Federation. They say they represent farmers, but they actually represent agribusiness.

And by the way, I’ll remind everyone that we’re living in a time where, to quote Noam Chomsky a couple of weeks ago, every fiscal conservative is hiding their copy of Ayn Rand and is lining up for benefits from the nanny state. There’s a lot of hypocrisy that we need to throw in these people’s faces, because that’s the urgency that the degree of exploitation and dysfunction that we’re living through demands."

We all have different takes on wages. Farming is tougher than most occupations … shall we say

"Harvest is seasonal, wages are every week.

You see the problem. It is, for example, one of the problems with permacture: whereas a wool producer knows when s/he will shear, and more or less when and what s/he will be paid, there are few permaculture applications allowing predictable income. It is not impossible to plan, just rare to see permaculture entities that do ‘plan for the bank’. If you want to loan money from a bank, something that most farmers need to do to pay wages while waiting for money, you have to know and say when you will honour the debt.