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US Food Partnerships and its Chaotic History
“When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.” Carl Sandburg
In the early 1900 until the 1950s, most people in the United States lived in rural communities. The core values of our nation, liberty, hard work, social cooperation and fairness, technology, family and community values, commerce, and education stems from agrarian values. For example, in the late 1880s, while most Americans sought a buggy and a pair, the American Farmer was plowing his fields with steam tractors. Another example, in order to dispel the walls of multi cultural division the first Hispanic school was created in a small rural community in Minnesota in the 1930s. Again, to quote Sandburg, "Nothing happens unless first a dream.”
Today, rural communities are still transparent in governance and in society. It is very difficult to deceive when faced with a town population under 6000. Rather than paying for a newspaper to get the local news, it was better to go watch the kids play Little League or work for some charitable organization such as Kiwanis or the Church picnics and share information. This unique form of communication is termed consensus. It is the basis of our constitutional government, and although our political system today often avoids consensus in favor of special interests, the rural and smaller suburbs play out this Lockean Social contract on a day to day basis. The remarkable dynamics of consensus is that it finds commonalities, and reduces risk .
In what the East Coast and West Coast media term in disparaging tone the “Rust Belt”, life has value for the entire community and hierarchy is accorded by intellect, hard work and heart, not by income, privilege and social ranking. A person may own the biggest home in town, but it doesn’t make him/her better than the least. At the same time, the least is no greater than the most. For example, in Illinois, Indiana and and Iowa, teens earn money for college or home by detasseling corn or rogueing corn plants out of bean fields.It is the community and commerce way of assuring that their youth will have the opportunity to go to college without immense debts on the youth or his/her family. A son or daughter of the richest farmer or banker in the area gets up at 4 o’clock in the morning to milk a hundred head of diary cattle, muck out stalls, and lay feed for the livestock. They do this 365 days a year, twice a day and it doesn’t impact on their studies, sports, or social clubs/activities. Some of American greatest scholars and entrepreneurs come from the rural communities.
“It is not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank, that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success.” George Washington Carver
In the 1860s, during the American Civil War, one of America’s most bloodiest and divisive war, the avenues of peace and prosperity went unnoticed by many. “On July 2, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law what is generally referred to as the Land Grant Act. The new piece of legislation… introduced to each state 30,000 acres of public land for each Senator and Representative under apportionment based on the 1860 census. Proceeds from the sale of these lands were to be invested in a perpetual endowment fund which would provide support for colleges of agriculture and mechanical arts in each of the states. 1 Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa, and a host of other states joined in the beginning of public higher education. It was the dream of the prairie and was bi-partisan in nature. It was developed based upon three criteria
A protest against the dominance of the classics and privacy in higher education; A desire to develop at the college level instruction relating to the practical realities of an agricultural and industrial society; An attempt to offer to those belonging to the industrial classes preparation for the "professions of life." 2
The Act passed including a vision of equity and the hopes to sustain the American dream and identity.
While the east and west coast explored its riches in oil and gold, a young blacksmith, John Deere created a new steel plow in order to break through the foot of embedded prairie grass of the plains. What the steel plow revealed was an earth so rich that in the prairie it was called black gold. This nutrient rich soil evolved to support an industry that anchored the American Dream. This nation could sustain itself (and still can) and export its excess. Today, what props up our economy and trade deficit is soybeans, cotton, wheat and Boeing planes. Without those commodities, our economies would collapse and our dollar fall weaker than current. Throughout history, governments partner, or in the extreme, control agriculture. Unity begins with feeding the people. For example, although Popes and Presidents, Dictators and Prime Ministers like to think they brought down the USSR, it was the Solidarity Movement in Poland who refused to supply the cities with grain and meat that created the instability necessary to end the communist oppression. America politicians too has sought to exploit the agrarian wealth of this nation.
During World War 1, farmers met the call to support our nation and our soldiers in Europe. They plowed and planted from doorstep to road and made money When the war ended, the 1920s lived the high life on reparation money from Germany and our allies repayment of debt. Our soldiers returned. There was little or no thought to the contribution of agriculture during that time. Fields denuded of tree breaks combined with the Jet Stream created havoc in US agriculture. The Dust Storms began, and the price of food went up during the 1920s. Abandoned and forgotten, while suburbs were developed outside of cities, commodities plummeted. Under Hoover and Roosevelt the call went out to educators at our public universities to correct the demise of American agriculture. Innovations and economics within the agricultural community resolved much of the issues. World War II created another demand, but Truman, a farmer himself, was savvy.
Under Truman an agreement between US agriculture and government was achieved. USDA was given a mandate that production and cost of food to the American consumer would not exceed more than 12% of disposable income. Eisenhower refined this agreement with a policy of reform
The long and short of this argument is does government control the excess of American food as stipulated by the Democratic advocates or shall the excess be exported and sold in a free market as advocated by the Republicans?
Arguably, Truman wanted to end much of the subsidies and enter a free market, however, he wanted farmers to benefit by a support price which would serve as a barometer of economic conditions, a fail safe system that would keep US agrculture on an even keel and did not impair the US Consumer access to cheap and nutricious food . At the same time, American ingenuity and the Marshall Plan created the economics and markets that would feed Europe and Asia after World War II during their reconstruction. Within ten years after WWII, free democratic economies Europe and Asia were restored. American agri-business flourished in a free market. That came to an end during the Kennedy to Reagan adminsitration.
Excess food was seized by both party adminstrations and used as a political and diplomatic wedge in political manipulations of foreign governments as well as our own. Farm incomes, which was moderate in the least since the New Deal, remained moderate to insubstantial while “America Feeds the World”. Arguably, farmers were proud to do their part. The reality is that Food aid to emerging third world countries only increased those governments demands for more free aid. By the 1970s, the rural environments began to decline., It doesn’t take an Eistein to understand that if an industry main economics is driven to support free global consumption of food that the price(s) would not only remain inelastic but drop.
Did these politicans and diplomats care about the floor falling from under the feet of the US agricultural industry? No. Did their corresponding media care? No. When every network spoke of the “rust bowl of the Midwest” or “Ol’ MacDonald”, they expressed an urban bias of the true nature of agriculture. They also professed an ignorance that was shocking. I once asked an announcer of CBS what was the GNP of agriculural products? He answered “less than 2%”. The reality it is around 26% with a workforce in the millions.
Combined with the 1972 energy/oil shocks and Nixon’s agricultural policy to plant commodity crops like corn "from fencerow to fencerow” further depressed prices. Jimmy Carter’s immense food aide commitment to the United Nations and his Crusade Against World Hunger lliterarily bankrputed the American Farmer and corresponding agri-business by 1979. Inflation and high interests due to higher oil costs exacerbated the conditions of American farmers and consumers alike. Chicken went from $0.19 a pound to $0.89 a pound overnight, but at the farmgate a farmer was going in the red producing chickens, as was beef, pork, or other livestock. Herds of cattle were euthanized because ranchers could not support the costs of raising cattle or dairy cattle. Government insisted on oversupply, and mandated that over supply by one farm policy after another. This promoted them as heroes on the world stage. The Kennedy and Nixon programs illustrate this folly of free food aid as a political and diplomatic tool. In short, by 1979, the US agricultural industry was nearly bankrupt, millions of jobs had been lost, rural communities were abandoned, and our trade deficits, with little or no agricultural commodities being reflected, was in the critical red zone due to oil price increases and inflation. However, in the halls of Congress, in the gray stone buildings of bureaucrats in the State Department, etc. were sporting thick passports to hundreds of countries clamoring for free food aid. Everyone cashed in on the free food aid and became considerate world travelers all at the cost of the US taxpayer. Kennedy’s world popularity was due to his large shipments of free food to almost every nation in the world Isn’t that almost as bad as Nixon’s free shipments of arms and food to all allies and emerging alliances of the US? Both Presidents dealt in tactical short term goals rather than long term vision.
In the late 1970s, the American Agricultural industry crashed, proceeding one of America’s longest and most disturbing economic recessions. Farmer’s and their supporting industry organized and descended upon Congress and the President Carter and Reagan respectively. Bankruptcy for the American farm was at its highest, with suicide rates in the agricultural industry ranking at the top. Then in 1981, the Farm Credit Service failed.
In 1982 farm advocates descended upon state and federal legislation with one voice – no more manipulations of markets to benefit the world and self grandeur which results in bankrupting an American industry. The struggling Green Revolution came to dominance by advancing global human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world, not food aid. They proposed a radical idea – a partnership between producer, industry and government without government control. It has been successful, so successful that it is agriculture that is propping up our exports.
Thus, under Reagan and Clinton, rather than food aid, the partnerships of innovation, technology, and best practices in agriculture were exported to democratically free nations. Aquaculture, diversity in rice, corn, wheat seeds, vitamin enriched commodities, improved herbicides and pesticides has led a world to seek its own abilities to feed their own people. Today, the results of partnership have revealed globally most countries have the ability to feed itself, except in those nation of political strife such as Africa, Asia and the Georgian states of Russia.
“Reasons cited include widespread corruption, insecurity, a lack of infrastructure, and a general lack of will on the part of the governments…A recent program in western Africa is attempting to introduce a new high-yield variety of rice known as "Nericas". Nericas yields about 30% more rice under normal conditions, and can double yields with small amounts of fertilizer and very basic irrigation. However the program has been beset by problems getting the rice into the hands of farmers, and to date the only success has been in Guinea where it currently accounts for 16% of rice cultivation.” Wikepedia 5 .
The New Dealers still exist, and have re-emerged in the 2008 election cycle, however, their voices are more Mathusians than optimistic. They find fault with the Green Revoluton and its often obsequious criticism of the Green Revolution; some criticisms generally involve some variation of the Malthusian principle of population. Such concerns often revolve around the idea that the Green Revolution “is unsustainable[15][16][17], and argue that humanity is currently in a state of overpopulation with regards to the sustainable carrying capacity of the earth”.
Malthusianism has been evident throughout the history of the Green Revolution. The team sent to survey Mexican agriculture in 1941 for the Rockefeller Foundation cited the high birth rate and relative inadequacy of its agriculture as a cause for concern.[18] In 1959, the Ford Foundation carried out a study in India that stated the nation’s population would outstrip its food supply by 1966, although the validity of its methodology was a subject of criticism.[19] At Borlaug's Nobel acceptance speech he stated, "...we are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction."6
In the recent election campaigns of 2008, resurgence of the 1960s global food aid policies recently by liberals support the above Malthusian criticism. They want a return to the New Deal policies of free food aid to secure diplomatic successes. Centrists argue that to show the people how to incorporate good agricultural practices is a more reasonable and successful route as well as premising partnerships between producers-government- industry maximizes food production. However, liberals and socialists tend to reject the concept of partnerships For example, in the United States, 2008, one Presidential candidate suggested free food to China as an incentive to restore autonomy to Tibet. China can buy their food by the profits they are making via the American consumer. Another example is cited by CARE, who prefers money to free food, as the food is usually ignored and left rotting in the warehouses, or stolen by rebels or corrupt party officials and sold. It is the argument of many that even FDR and Harry Truman would not countenance such further extension of New Deal policies in current conditions. The NGOs demand that food be a socialistic vision is based on the premise that all producers be under the control of a global organization and all work to support humanity’s need for food. Thus the farmer in Nebraska must be made part of the bureaucracy of world food consumption and grow his/her commodities for no profit but for hungry people throughout the world irregardless of sovereignty, political corruption, or manipulation. NGOs reject the advancement of science. Their solution is to expound that humanity has a right to food (correct) and thus a right to demand free aid from those nation who are abundant in food (the United States, Ukraine, Argentina, Australia).1
“We affirm first and foremost the basic human Right to Food. Everyone has the right to secure access at all times to safe and nutritious food and water adequate to sustain an active and healthy life with dignity.”
NGOs create fear by over-exaggeration of world poverty and food consumption. Their assumption of the one billion individuals that face day to day poverty, food aid from well adjusted nations is a right in order to feed the impoverished. Well governed nations diminish poverty, poorly governed nations increase poverty. Interestingly enough, many of the leadership of the NGOs are former USSR leaders, communists and socialists who oppose democracy and free market capitalism. It is needful to remind the public that the fall of the USSR was due to inabilities to feed their own people even though they held some of the major breadbaskets of Europe and Russia, that being Poland and the Ukraine. It is certain that this call for free food by all those nations’ support their return to a socialized state.
“Neither food nor famine can be used as a national or international political weapon. Access to food cannot be denied to any nation, ethnic or social group for political, economic, religious or other reasons. Economic embargoes or international sanctions affecting populations are incompatible with food security. Those currently in place must be terminated.´ NGO statements at WTO.
According to the above declaration, the right to seize food is outlined. The fact is food is simply an extension of the poverty issue, not the main impetus. In fact, even in poor nations, the technology imparted by the Green Revolution advocates have stabilized food consumption.
“A new technical interim report from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concludes that the long-term food security outlook for developing countries is good. While the world population is expected to reach eight billion by 2030, growth in global agriculture should be more than sufficient to meet world demand.
The FAO study, using recent United Nations (UN) estimates of world population growth, assesses future developments in world food production, demand, and consumption. The base year for this study is a three-year average of 1995-1997 and projections are made for the years 2015 and 2030. The growth in crop and livestock production, forestry and fisheries, the deceleration of the world population growth rate and the rise in, and subsequent leveling of food consumption will contribute to a slow down in the demand for food and for food production. The study does warn that while the predicted global trends over the next 30 years are cause for optimism, poverty and poor food distribution will continue to limit access to food in some countries. “
The above statement by the FAO supports the vision of the Green Revolution. Add the continuing successes in the technologies of food, advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world, the Malthusian option looks tinier with every passing year. India and China feeds itself with its food markets busy and thriving. Nobody is starving unless caught in the political maelstrom of evil and unjust governments, or lack of governments such as Africa. Currently, what is in demand is more advanced and westernized food options, such as luxury food, value added food, etc. Another fallacious issue cited by the NGOs is diminished tillable lands due to global warming. The facts simply do not bear to this NGO claim. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to determine that global warming widens the window of opportunity for growing crops by creating several windows of growing season per year, than just one. Also, for those soils that are least nutritious, diversification of tillage is available. For example, “no till” farming is advantageous in soils that contain too much metals. In Africa alone, no till farming increases production on poor soils as it conserves and builds up compost as the soil itself is not plowed. The basic core identity of the US conscience is rooted in our agrarian society. Our agricultural markets in the world are healthy and keep our trade alive and vibrant. To allow our politicians and media advocates to succumb to the demands of NGOs and punitive governments such as the Sudan, Somalia, etc. for free food aid is not the answer. Nothing is free in this world, but hard work and results are earned qualities much admired in society. Our US agrarian society is highly respected (and taken advantage) globally. Let’s keep our head above the fray, not fractured by the politics both here and abroad, nor used by leadership who want tactical solutions (quick solutions to improve their polling position) rather than long term vision and benefit to all humanity.
1 Morrill Act of 1862. http://www.higher-ed.org/resources/morrill_acts.htm 2 http://www.wvu.edu/~exten/about/land.htm 3) http://www.jstor.org/pss/3487385 4) http://www.worldfoodprize.org/ 5) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Economic and Social Department. 2000. Agriculture: Towards 2015/30, Technical Interim Report, April 2000. 249 pp. 6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
1 7 7 6 L I B E R T Y F L A G and ‘I N D E P E N D E N T s‘
Per Library of Congress archives: the “Fort Moultrie Flag, rectangular, a royal blue field with a crescent moon in the ‘north west’ quadrant & capitol block letters L I B E R T Y centered in the lower third of the body.”
In 1776, Rebel Colonial Colonel William Moultrie commanded the defenses of Charleston, South Carolina. He ordered and supervised the construction of a fortification on (then) ‘Sulivans Island’. This facility was located at the entrance of Charleston harbor and would later bear Colonel Moultrie’s name. Later yet, it would the site of the failed infantry charge by the all black Union Civil War Unit as depicted in the major motion picture ‘Glory’.
On June 28th, 1776, British Naval and German Hussein ‘shock troop’ units attacked the peoples’ army. While the colonial elites argued over commas and semi colons in Philadelphia more average, every day folks repulsed the globe’s premiere sea and land combat units.
The primitive installation was mostly constructed of palmetto trees* and sand berms. The Royalist - Loyalist take over attempt ended in a crushing defeat. This populist victory helped to keep the English out of South Carolina until 1780. Until General Washington’s December 1776 victories in New Jersey, this stubborn resistance was the high light of the colonial effort for independence.”
President Andy Jackson silently toils for the Democratic Party on the twenty dollar bill and ‘Honest Abe’ represents the GOP on every penny--- Jefferson is a more ubiquitous emblem ---originally for the Dems and, more of late, for the Libertarians.
But during the last decade the independent minded Citizens For A Better Veterans Home in California has also been bothered about the lack of usage of the Fort Moultrie Flag as a banner for any official or serious alternative group or independent political movement. [Partisan examples include the Union Party of 1864, the Bull Moose movement of 1912, either Perot effort.]
As early as 1776 there has existed this free, no cost, uncopyrighted, no fee, public domain completely unexploited by reformists of any stripe. The Fort Moultrie icon even has the word ‘Liberty’ prominently displayed.
Much more than the circle of stars or the ‘Don’t Tred On Me’ snake banner, the Fort Moultrie emblem is tailor made for non Dems and non GOP fighting against the two party duopoly.
And here it is, over half a decade into the 21st Century and over 230 years since that historic battle in Dixie, and this lost opportunity just stares back, unblinkingly, from the long, long wall of American History. Many ‘Independent’ types sign off their correspondence with ‘for Liberty’. Maybe they should wave the LIBERTY flag also! Could someone please explain this gross dicotomy to us?
Doctor Paul Wayne Snyder [PhD], John Dennis Coffey [JD], Mary “Tish” Firmiss, Philip Sawyer, Ivann Greene, lynn Ramos [sic], Harry Martin, Jane Wagner and over a hundred other independent anti establishment patriots and veterans’ advocates have been fighting the corrupt elites of the sullied ‘Veterans Industry’ since May 1998. Citizens For A Better Veterans Home sincerely promotes the use of the Fort Moultrie Flag, the 21st Century Peace Symbol [the three bladed wind powered electric energy generator], Direct Democracy guru California Governor Hiram ‘Bull Moose’ Johnson, his 1912 running mate President Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Bear stuff toys, and the before mentioned Bull Moose as icons for the 21st Century American Populist /Progressive /Reform /Centrist /Liberty groups . In fighting against the global imperial fascist American Empire and for the original Constitutional values, we every day folk need easily identifiable historic symbols [how ever imperfect] to spread news of the resistance here in the Duopolist States of American. Citizens For A Better Veterans Home welcomes correspondence, comments [and even criticism] from other liberty loving, partisan wary residents of this once great nation.
Feel free to log on www.calvets.blogspot.com. Feel free to call at 619.420.0209 or 619.852.1481 or voice /fax 760.253.2371. [Call ahead for fax transmissions.] Feel free to mail at 263 Eucalyptus Court, Chula Vista, CAlifornia 91910-3030, DonLake@sbcglobal.net
