Though I love nearly all of what you write, the French are achieving the
goal of a landscape of viable family farms and viable rural communities much
better than we are. Of course, those entranced by the rigorous free market
religion of ag economics cannot question their basic assumptions.
Since others on this list will likely expose once again those faulty
assumptions, let me instead try to illuminate why some love the French
approach. It seems to go like this.
What would you like rural America to look like?
What portion of the world looks most like that?
Ergo, we should try to emulate the policies and approach of that part of the
world.
Now what's wrong with that? Three guesses, first two don't count.
Jim
----- Original Message -----
From: Bluestem Associates <bluestem@webserf.net>
To: <sanet-mg@ces.ncsu.edu>
Sent: Monday, October 25, 1999 5:05 PM
Subject: RE: French farmers feeding human sewage to livestock
> On Mon, 25 Oct 1999 16:12:42 -0400, Hal Hamilton wrote:
>
> >operations. Please get your logic straight before you take pokes at one
of
> >the few groups successfully challenging the macdonaldization of the
world's
>
> It appears you didn't read my last paragraph.
>
> The hormone ban is governmental policy throughout the EU, and was not
> particularly spearheaded by the French, to say nothing of their
> farmers. The credibility of EU "food purity" policies suffers with
> incidents such as this, just as the US FDA's credibility suffers when
> for seven years they knowingly allow a leading baby food manufacturer
> to continue selling a completely synthetic substitute as 100% puree
> apple juice. French farmers dumping manure in front of the Assemblee
> Nationale in support of continued (expanded, even) subsidies is a
> different issue entirely.
>
> *Now,* I'll stir up the real hornet's nest, so don't anybody think I
> accidentally whacked it, somehow believing it was a pin~ata .... (-:
>
> I do not believe we have any hope of agricultural sustainability as
> long as one nickel of direct government subsidy still flows to either
> farmers or to agribusiness. Most indirect subsidies and preferential
> treatment will need to go, too. Three examples, amongst many possible.
>
> Sustainable vegetable production in the US will not really be possible
> so long as California growers retain access to subsidised irrigation
> water at a miniscule fraction of its market price, to say nothing of
> true cost.
>
> Sustainable cash crop production will not really be possible so long as
> farmers can over-produce and then run to a government Sugar Daddy for
> "emergency" aid to compensate for low prices. Nor can they continue to
> rely on "deficiency payments" (US), or similar regimes.
>
> Sustainable agriculture in general will not really be possible so long
> as corporate agribusiness continues to receive massive tax advantages,
> such as the ability to deduct interest paid on moneys used to gobble up
> an existing company, as opposed to moneys actually invested in new
> *productive* assets.
>
> The French farmers you so enthusiastically laud are in essence
> advocating a system of subsidies that would effectively relegate them
> to the status of exhibits in some kind of a social zoo, forever paid to
> produce mountains of butter, cheese, wine, meat and pastry wheat that
> cannot be sold, except to perpetually expanding government storehouses.
>
>
> Please tell me how such a system is any more sustainable than an
> agribusiness concentration fueled and maintained by corporate welfare
> and tax advantages.
>
> I, for one, am tired of the last 30 years' power struggle at the public
> trough. The French wonderfully describe such struggles as a "tiraillage
> de couverts" --- the grabbing of covers back and forth on a bed. It is
> obviously not working. It's long since time to put an end to all of it,
> and apply the money to something more productive.
>
> Fat chance, eh? I'm looking at the long-term agronomic needs of the
> land, and there is a lot of land farmed only because it opens the door
> to more subsidies. I also believe that centralised decision-making is
> innately un-sustainable. The Soviet experience clearly indicated not
> only the inherent weakness of (state) corporate concentration and
> centralisation, it also demonstrated the bankruptcy of the type of
> socialism designed to prevent success.
>
> I doubt that we in the west can effectively develop sustainable
> agricultural systems until we, too, have allowed / enabled the
> dismantling of not only our system of subsidised (private) corporate
> concentration and centralisation, but also of the western system of
> socialism, designed to prevent *failure.*
>
> Until we get those distortions out of the way, at both the corporate
> and the producer level, I suspect that much of what I and others try to
> do agronomically for sustainability will frequently remain a rear-guard
> action, too often a case of pissing into a strong wind.
>
>
> Bart
>
>
>
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