Anniversaries
As individuals and as a society, we recognize - and often celebrate - anniversaries. These dates help us remember important moments in our lives, and also mark the passage of time. By looking back, we can gauge progress or growth or accomplishments.
One anniversary was two years ago this week when my op-ed about the stress farmers face, which can too often lead to family tensions, drug abuse, and even suicide, was published in the Des Moines Register. The reality of the dire situation of our farm economy had hit me so strong that I wrote this piece quickly, out of a sense of compassion and urgency. It was published to coincide with National Suicide Prevention Week.
It was this same week, in 2003, that a farmer from South Korea sacrificed his own life outside a meeting of the WTO (World Trade Organization) in Cancun, Mexico where thousands of farmers from around the world had gathered to protest free trade agreements. A banner around his neck read, “WTO Kills Farmers.” A note read “I am taking my life so that others can live.” Each year since then, La Via Campesina, the global peasant organization, remembers Lee Kyung Hae on September 10 as International Day of Struggle against WTO and Free Trade Agreements.
Can you imagine the desperation and hopelessness that gives a person only one way out? To resort to the ultimate sacrifice of taking one’s own life? We are talking about farmers here. Farmers who should toil under the knowledge that they are doing a service to the community, working under a social contract in which society and farmers have a mutual understanding that farming -- producing food while caring for the land -- is a public good.
How long can a society survive when its farmers are going broke?
What has changed since I wrote that op-ed? Since Lee Kyung Hae took his own life so publicly and dramatically? Have we made progress? Not much. If anything, farmers around the world are in an even worse position today.
Personally, in just the past two years, I have heard of a childhood friend and former farmer who has twice attempted suicide. I have heard of farm wives who are afraid that their husbands will take their own lives. I’ve read the headlines of continuing low prices for our commodities. I attended a conference where the upbeat mood of the presenters was tempered when they had to admit that while a spreadsheet might show a farm’s positive cash balance, that farmer is likely eating into his equity. I see the ads for farm sales in which the farmer is ‘retiring.’ Younger generations have less and less interest in taking over the farm when it means planting and harvesting thousands of acres while racking up debt.
Globally, the situation isn’t any better. Little has changed since Lee Kyung Hae took his life: “Farmers are still suffering much as they were in Lee's time, and for the same reasons: free trade agreements continue to decimate local food markets, accelerate environmental degradation, displace entire communities, and strip farmers of their livelihoods.”
Yet, from politicians and from the commodity groups and Farm Bureau, we are told that to increase the price farmers receive, we need to find new markets and new uses for our farm products.
This approach has not worked, and isn’t likely to.
Instead, we need to look to the principles of parity:
““Parity” was the name associated with (the 1930’s New Deal) programs because it meant the farmer would be treated with economic equality and prices would be adjusted for inflation to remove the destructive cost-price squeeze and the need for farmers to overproduce their way out of poverty and debt. It was understood that the farmer’s individual “freedom” to do whatever he or she wished with the land would be tempered for the good of all farmers and society. A social contract was established.”1
What will change as each year, each anniversary, rolls by? Will farmers survive, or will they be replaced by managers and employees? We can choose justice for farmers by re-establishing the principles of parity, with price floors, supply management, and food reserves, and with international trade that supports each country’s farmers, workers, consumers, and environment.
1. George Naylor, “Agricultural Parity for Land De-commodification,” In Land Justice: Re-imagining Land, Food, and the Commons in the United States, eds. Justine M. Williams and Eric Holt-Giménez, (Oakland: Food First Books, 2017).