Agribusiness consolidation helps drive rural-urban polarization, writes ag econ columnist, citing Wendell Berry

Alan Guebert

In January 1999, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, urged colleagues to pass on consolidation of agribusiness, saying Cargill's offer to buy a competitor was a question for lawyers, not lawmakers.

That directive turned out to be prescient. "In fact, as a friend pointed out on Twitter shortly after Thanksgiving, 'Turkey is now the only meat in (U.S. flag emoji) right now not under investigation for price-fixing'," writes syndicated agriculture columnist Alan Guebert. "That should infuriate all Americans for two reasons: First for what it says about today’s largely dysfunctional livestock and poultry markets and, secondly, that it has taken 20 years for end users to confront Big Meat over how it uses its sledgehammer market power to suck unearned profits out of both livestock growers and meat buyers."

The increasing industrialization has hurt rural America, Guebert writes, citing recently published research for the Family Farm Action Alliance that says "Agrifood consolidation reduces farmer autonomy and redistributes costs and benefits across the food chain, squeezing farmer incomes."

Guebert notes, "Lugar’s edict for 'legislatures' to stay out of Big Agbiz’s biz has remained in effect despite mountains of evidence that the corporatization of key ag sectors has cost farmers, ranchers, rural America and consumers billions of dollars and an untold number of jobs And that’s on top of what boneheaded farm policies advocated by AgBiz — like 1996’s Freedom to Farm — cost taxpayers. (From 1997 to 2002, F2F cost taxpayers $122 billion, or three times its projected cost.) Many of these policies also took down antitrust fences and, shortly thereafter, consolidation in ag inputs, production, and processing went into overdrive."

Wendell Berry

Guebert implies that economic disparities brought on by Big Ag have helped drive rural-urban polarization, noting writer, farmer and activist Wendell Berry wrote in Another Turn of the Crank that "Political democracy can endure only as the guardian of economic democracy. A democratic government fails in failing to protect the integrity of ordinary lives and local communities."

"That wisdom bears repeating," Guebert writes. "We will continue to fail if we continue to fail 'to protect the integrity of ordinary lives and local communities.'"