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Published on Friday, December 19, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
by Jody Aliesan
American farmers in the English colonies were expected to produce for the colonizers. They endured low prices, inadequate credit, high taxes, large debts, and the dumping of excess English foodstuffs on their local market.
Agrarian insurrections began in 1676 and culminated in the "Great Rebellion" in New York in 1766. British troops routed the insurgent farmers. Landlords evicted them and destroyed their property.
By April 1775 many colonial farmers were furious that while they lived on American soil, planted it and built on it, the wealth produced was going to enrich England -- particularly the aristocracy and mercantile speculators.
Emerson's stanza honors the moment when the people who worked the land in seed and harvest stood up to the most powerful political, economic and military power in the world.
The new colonizers
Two centuries later, a handful of agriculture conglomerates work to drive small farmers off their land by paying them less for their produce than it costs to grow, moving them into a cycle of loans, mortgages, foreclosures, repossessions and the sale of land to corporate-controlled agribusiness.
In 1962, a committee of the most powerful corporate executives in the United States issued "An Adaptive Program for Agriculture," a plan to eliminate farmers and farms.
Called the Committee for Economic Development, this group represented oil and gas, insurance, investment and retail concerns as well as the food industry. Industry giants such as Campbell Soup, General Foods, Pillsbury and Swift lobbied Congress with the message that the biggest problem in agriculture was too many farmers. The U.S. government encouraged farmers to move off their farms and retrain, allowing their land to be consolidated in the ownership of fewer and fewer corporations.
In the 1970s, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz called on farmers to "Plant fence row to fence row." Giant grain companies were selling U.S.-grown food to Europe, the former U.S.S.R. and the Third World. Prices were up; farmers experienced their most profitable years in history.
But Secretary Butz also said, "Get big or get out." There was no reason not to trust him. Farmers began to buy all the available land they could find. To pay the rapidly rising prices, they mortgaged their farms and equipment. Inflation was driving up land values faster than interest rates were rising; loan experts claimed that those who didn't take advantage of that were fools.
But those who made their fortunes on interest were losing ground. Inflation was eroding their wealth, and they blamed the Federal Reserve. The Fed's only recourse was to apply the brakes, pull money out of the system, drive up interest rates and push the economy into a deep recession.
"Severe injustice"
On October 8, 1979, Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, gave the banks and financiers what they wanted. The nation's wealthy were the winners; the nation's middle and lower classes -- particularly those in rural America -- watched themselves lose.
Farmland values fell sharply while interest rates on farm loans shot through the roof. Diminished land value left mortgages under-collateralized and loans were called in. Interest rates as high as 15 percent pushed farm families into foreclosure. After denying them refinancing, the banks resold their farms with lower-interest loans.
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