US Food & Farm Campaign
While encouraging the modernization of farming practices, Oxfam believes that small, sustainable farms are essential to food security, preservation of the environment, and economic development.
by Marika Alena McCauley
Today, people are beginning to ask difficult questions about where their food comes from, how their food is grown, and who benefits from food sales. Consumers want to know if intensive meat production pollutes the air and soil, if they should worry about pesticides on their lettuce, and how far their banana traveled before it got to their breakfast table. The globalization of the world’s most vital productive sector – agriculture – raises questions for all of us.
Oxfam America is also asking these questions about the globalization of agriculture, and is examining the effects that this transformation will have on the world’s poor and voiceless. Our search for answers has uncovered some shocking inequities in global agricultural markets, which are dramatically skewed in favor of multinational corporations at the expense of all people. Farmers worldwide are becoming increasingly marginalized in food markets, and are driven into deepening poverty as a result.
Organic Foods: Safer for You and the Land
Racism and Small Farmers in the US
Small Farms: the Optimum Sustainable Agriculture Model
Take Action to Protect Small Farms and the Environment
Agribusiness Concentration
Buying Local Food: the Smart Alternative
Environmental Impacts of Industrial Farming
Corporate Agriculture and Environmental Degradation
Links to More Information
Food and Farm Toolkit
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| Small farms are becoming increasingly more rare in the United States. By: Nancy Delaney/Oxfam |
As an essential part of Oxfam America’s work against inequity and injustice worldwide, we are working with partner organizations to keep small, sustainable farms on the land, as the centerpieces of vibrant rural economies. For millennia, small farms have fed the world and preserved the land, and kept rural communities strong. While encouraging the modernization of farming practices, we believe that small, sustainable farms are essential to food security, preservation of the environment, and economic development.
In both the Global North and South, rural landscapes are being transformed, and farm families are being forced to give up their homes and livelihoods in the face of shocking levels of corporate concentration. Corporations are consolidating control of the world’s agriculture system and rapidly accumulating wealth, taking advantage of national and global policies and structures that perpetuate the demise of rural livelihoods. Consider these facts:
In the United States today, just four firms handle more than 80% of all beef production. Four firms control over half of all hog production.
The number of farms in America decreased from 6.8 million in 1935 to less than 2 million in 1998. Of the remaining farms, large and very large farms make up just 8 percent of all farms, but produce 53 percent of all output. There are now more full-time prisoners in the US than there are full-time farmers.
What are the dynamics that have led to this shocking degree of concentration and inequity? Agribusinesses (corporations working in agriculture) use their considerable wealth and political influence to promote domestic farm policies and international trade laws that open global markets to corporate players. The resulting policies give unfair advantages to agribusinesses, and as a result, small farms are taking an almost fatal blow. Multinational conglomerates such as Mosanto, Cargill, Continental Grain, and Archer Daniels Midland continue to buy up farmland and consolidate market control. While anti-trust legislation is not enforced, corporations engage in mergers and acquisitions that give them almost complete control over farm prices.
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| Independent farmers are finding it more and more difficult to compete. By: Laura Inouye/Oxfam |
These unfair practices push small producers out of the market. While IBP/Tyson and Smithfield – the nation’s two largest pork processors – report record-high earnings, American hog farmers suffer from Depression-era prices, and consumer prices remain virtually unchanged. Farmers are going out of business at unprecedented rates, which puts rural land and economies in jeopardy, while corporations reap the economic benefits.
Economists and social scientist are amassing an increasing body of evidence proving that small farms play a vital role in rural economies. These findings contradict widely held beliefs that massive-scale agriculture represents modernity and progress, and that small farms aren’t efficient enough to meet global food needs. Small farms are, in fact, more efficient and productive overall than large farms, and they also act as the glue that holds together rural social, political, and economic life. While industrial agricultural can appear to be highly productive, it actually generates negative external costs for society. Corporate production facilities drain local economies of jobs, decrease local economic activity, and contribute to the destruction of community social structures and culture.
In addition to the negative economic impacts of large farms, they are also causing unprecedented depletion and damage to the world’s natural resources. In the last 40 years, for example, the US has lost nearly half of its topsoil heritage, due to extractive agricultural practices including pesticide and fertilizer use. Factory farming of hogs, chicken, and beef produces 1.3 billion tons of manure each year, which further taints the soil with chemicals from the animal feed, and contaminates water. In North Carolina, a recent manure spill killed 10 million fish and closed 364,000 acres of coastal wetlands. These statistics illustrate the alarming levels of pollution caused throughout the world by production-intensive industrial farms.
To counter these trends, Oxfam America is supporting grassroots networks giving a voice to small farmers in the United States. At the community-level, farmers are achieving economic viability by organizing cooperatives, which allow them to work collectively to process and market their products. Through cooperatives, individual farmers can come together to sell their goods in local markets. Farm advocacy groups are also working tirelessly to promote sustainable agriculture on a national scale. Three of our partners - the Rural Coalition, the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives – are working to influence policymakers on Capitol Hill during the drafting of national farm legislation.
Oxfam America’s partners in the United States are supported by increasing numbers of consumers from both rural and urban areas. These supporters constitute a growing, vocal portion of the American public that is expressing concern about industrial agriculture, opposing the concentration of wealth and power by agribusiness, and recognizing the value of small farms in preserving rural communities, producing safe food, and as preservers of the nation’s natural resources.