Communist Web Thursday 23rd March 2000 9.30pm gmt Save the family farms and communities! The working people of rural America - farmers, farm workers, miners, loggers, factory and mill workers - generate hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth each year. But only a tiny fraction of the wealth they create is returned to them. The rest, a "king's ransom," flows into the profit coffers of giant corporations like Cargill, Tyson, Iowa Beef, Peabody Coal, Weyerhaueser, Monsanto, Exxon and John Deere. The result is a deepening crisis across the rural heartland from the coal fields of Appalachia to the Rio Grande Valley, from the wheat fields of North Dakota to the Mississippi delta. There is poverty and hunger in the midst of plenty. The common element in the rural crisis is declining personal and family income and mass unemployment. Independent family farmers face bankruptcy because the price agribusiness pays them for their crops is below the actual cost of production. Rural workers are struggling to win living wages, decent benefits and job security. The income crisis is so severe that many rural residents have been forced to migrate to the cities in search of living wage jobs. Many rural towns are dwindling, their businesses bankrupted, their schools losing enrollment. In many towns, only the senior citizens are left. The hardest hit have been African American, Latino and American Indian farmers who face racist discrimination in the awarding of U.S. Department of Agriculture loans. Farm workers lack the protection of federal labor laws and struggle against anti-union employers to win union rights. There is also an environmental dimension to the crisis with coal companies strip-mining, timber companies clear-cutting forests, and agribusiness giants fouling the air and water with animal waste in enormous hog and poultry farms. Now there is growing concern about genetically engineered crops, including Monsanto's sterile wheat seeds. There is massive overuse of chemicals and herbicides, antibiotics and growth hormones in livestock feed. It is promoted by agribusiness giants like Monsanto. The corporate ideologues claim the crisis of rural America is the inevitable result of "free market" economics. They say family farmers are "inefficient" and must be terminated in the interests of "competitiveness." This is the same tune USX, GM and other industrial corporations whistled as they downsized millions of workers out of their jobs, turning entire regions into... http://www.billkath.demon.co.uk/cw/sav/sav.html
