I come from a generational lineage of farmers. For as long as my family can remember, for the past 60-70+ years, my family has owned a small family homestead in Thornville, Ohio. The farm has turned into a livelihood for the Bashore family for at least 4 generations. However, with failed policies coming from Washington and corrupt trade laws, this livelihood is becoming harder and harder to maintain.
Family farmers are in danger in the United States. The largest threat to family farmers are big business and corporate farming. Agriculture plays an important part in the securing of the maximum satisfaction of the constantly growing material and cultural needs of the whole of society. It is the food base, supplying the population with foodstuffs, and the raw materials base for the light and food industries, which produce objects of mass consumption.
Corporate farming eliminates the livelihoods of small producers in the U.S. and developing countries, using government subsidies and monopoly power to price sustainable products out of the market. The corporate farmers use their government subsidies to even further drive down grain prices. This causes poor family farmers in Africa and Asia who sell their crops to the international market in turn to lower prices, continuing their poverty and undercutting profits.
Corporate farms in the U.S. also exploit migrant farm workers whose labor rights are not protected, and uses their artificially cheap labor to undercut domestic small and medium producers and destroys the fabric of rural communities.
We need to protect family farms from the dangers of corporate farming. Family farms are being bought and sold to the highest bidder and Americans are losing their family traditions. Corporate farming concentrates market share among a small handful of firms, removing price discipline along the supply chain through vertical integration, resulting in uncompetitive markets that ultimately hurt consumers and producers alike. They also share profits with a handful of elites instead of the profits going to a collective or a family.
Corporate farming also creates environmental disaster through excessive pesticide use, soil erosion, genetic engineering, monoculture, and concentration of animal waste. They get away with this due to the lobbying interests in Washington D.C. they can afford.
The political and economic power of big agribusiness needs to be checked and balanced by responsive governments and civil society to create a socially, environmentally and democratically balanced food production and distribution system around the world. We must protect family farms.
-- Austin Bashore, Green Party candidate for Ohio District 75 (8/7/2018)