Agroecology and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty ... - Yale University

voices from the north and south
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están viendo que realmente esto es posible, que podemos, de nosotros mismos,
generar un desarrollo que nos permita a hacernos mas autonomos en nuestras
decisiones, principalmente incorporando los métodos tradicionales a las prácticas
actuales de producción.”)
The Family Farmer Experience
George Naylor, president of the National Family Farm Coalition, which has groups in
about 30 U.S. states, represented the perspective of a North American family farmer.
He said farmers in the U.S. have much to learn from Latin American farmers about
how to organize themselves. Too many North American organizations claiming to
represent farmers tend to worship the free market and support the interests of multinational
corporate agribusiness, Naylor added.
Naylor spoke to the “common economic situation that farmers face all over the
world.” He described how in the U.S., farmers have also been leaving the land since
the 1950s because government policies did not allow for farm product prices to keep
pace with inflation. He also described the “poverty-resource degradation cycle”
affecting both the U.S. and developing countries: as farmers enter the market system,
abundance becomes not a blessing but a curse; abundant harvests drive prices for
crops down, prompting farmers to plant even more, leading to further price drops
and causing the ecological degradation of farmland. In order to produce more, U.S.
farmers felt forced to adopt whatever technology corporations offer them – first fertilizers
and pesticides, and now genetically modified seeds. Naylor and his family have
chosen not to raise genetically modified seeds.
The majority of corn and soybeans now planted by farmers becomes livestock
feed. This cheap food drives down the price of livestock, making it less profitable for
individual farmers to raise livestock, thereby causing family farms to become even less
biodiverse and the livestock industry to become even more centralized. Thus, Naylor
joked that when “people ask me what I do, I tell them I raise corn and soybeans for
the military-industrial complex.”
Naylor emphasized that U.S. farm policy could be changed to favor family farmers.
Subsidies to farmers are not the problem causing overproduction per se, he
argued. The real problem is that subsidies do not really stay with farmers; the savings
are passed on to corporations, which then are able to buy crops from farmers at cheap
prices below the cost of production. Naylor recommended that subsidies be replaced
with a price floor that would set a minimum price, adjusted for inflation, which buyers
must pay for crops. Such a policy, he explained, would signal that farmers’ products
truly have value.
Naylor elaborated as follows: A price floor is created by the government’s farm bill,
which offers farmers non-recourse loans. Under such a system, instead of being under
pressure to pay back bank loans when prices are low, the non-recourse loan allows
farmers to wait until they can get a fair price for their crops. If prices in a particular
area don’t go above this “loan rate,” the government will buy the grain for its reserve
system, thus forgoing repayment of the loan and interest. Grain from farmers in years
of abundance can then be used in years of short crops, rather than acting as a “sur-
“When you come to Iowa, all
you’ll see is corn and soybeans.
Almost every farmer raises corn
and soybeans, and that’s why I
say ‘I raise corn and soybeans
for the military-industrial complex.’
I’m not really raising
food; I’m really raising livestock
feed for industrial livestock
production and food production
like corn sweeteners, or
now ethanol for people to fuel
their SUVs. And needless to
say, the biodiversity in Iowa
now is nil, and decreasing day
by day.”
– George Naylor
U.S. government policy since
1996 has been “to completely
do away with the price floor,
and to substitute that with
income from the taxpayers in
the form of subsidy payments,
which is what corporate agriculture,
corporate America, the
food processors want. Because
then they get their food very
cheap, their corn, soybeans, and
livestock very cheap, and the
taxpayers pick up the difference,
and the farmers do exactly
what corporate America
wants, which is to plant
fencerow to fencerow because
they have no alternative. They
do what farmers do when
they’re under economic stress;
they put more pressure on
their land to produce more, and
take on new technology from
these very same corporations.”
– George Naylor
yale school of forestry & environmental studies