[Via... http://www.egroups.com/group/Communist-Internet ] . . ----- Original Message ----- From: Downwithcapitalism <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2001 5:42 AM Subject: [downwithcapitalism] FW: 'Free' market - theirs and ours Washington Post. 15 May 2001. Farmers in Turkey Put Their Village Up For Sale. Excerpts. CALLI, Turkey ? For sale: Quaint Turkish village, 112 baked mud homes, 24,000 acres farmland, one mosque, one schoolhouse, disappearing way of life, $1.2 million. Cash only. In the lime green hills of Turkey's northeastern Anatolian plateau, this is what the farmers' plight has come to. They are hounded by debtors they cannot pay. Their tractors sit idle because most owners are too broke to buy the diesel fuel to run them. Their wheat fields are ablaze with yellow flowering weeds for lack of money to purchase herbicides. And now, for the first time in the quarter-century history of the state Agriculture Credit Cooperative, local farmers are receiving warning notices in the mail ? pay up or the state will take your land, your tractor, your belongings, or perhaps, send you to prison. After decades in which a beneficent government routinely forgave debts and ladled out subsidies, Calli and hundreds of other farm hamlets are struggling with Turkey's new get-tough efforts to salvage the nation's collapsing economy and appease international moneylenders. "We have to make our voices heard," said Ahmet Erdogan, 52, a member of the village's elected council which hatched the desperate publicity stunt of putting Calli and 10 other nearby villages up for sale. (There have been no takers.) "The state is like a big hammer banging on us. The situation is so hard for everyone. We have people who haven't had a vegetable in their kitchen for six months." In the last half-dozen years, more than a third of Calli's families have locked their doors and deserted their farms for the cities, a trend that is emptying villages across Turkey. [N.B.] In less than half a century, Turkey has changed from a country where three-quarters of the population lived in rural areas to one where three-quarters are in cities, making it one of the world's most rapidly urbanizing nations. The story of Calli exemplifies the kind of government policies that helped push Turkey into the financial abyss that threatens its economic, political and social stability. It also demonstrates vividly why it will be so difficult for this strategic U.S. and NATO ally to impose the reforms considered critical to its survival as a reliable political partner and credible player in the global marketplace. In the past 16 years, the government has bailed out farmers with five separate amnesty programs. As a result, the single largest debtor of the Agriculture Credit Cooperative that serves Calli and surrounding villages is the government itself, which owes the association nearly $30 million for the debt it has forgiven member farmers. In an effort to pull Turkey out of its quagmire of debt ? which extends across virtually every sector of the economy from small businesses to industrial giants ? the International Monetary Fund recently approved a $10 billion loan package, demanding in return that Turkey reform its antiquated financial system. As it has in other developing nations it has assisted, the IMF has argued that the short-term pain to farmers and others is necessary to restore faith in the economy, both at home and in the international marketplace. "The era of cheap populism has ended in Turkey," the country's new economic minister, Kemal Dervis, recently told his cabinet colleagues. "We should all tighten our belts." <>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<> New York Times. 15 May 2001. Far From Dead, Subsidies Fuel Big Farms. Excerpts. DALHART, Tex. By any measure, Lanny Bezner is a successful family farmer. His eldest son, John, rides herd over his cattle, spread out on pastureland from here to nearby New Mexico. A younger son, Brian, looks after the farm's heavily irrigated cornfields, with help from the husband of Mr. Bezner's daughter, Virginia. As a Texas patriarch, Mr. Bezner rigorously sticks to the principle that economy of scale is the only way to survive in modern farming. The bigger the farm, the better likelihood of turning a profit, he says. By buying adjacent fields, he has expanded his cropland from its original 700 acres to more than 8,000. In five years he has doubled his grazing land by leasing 90,000 acres of pasture. He owns a fleet of tractors and heavy farm equipment; he fills their tanks with fuel from his own gas pumps. He dries and stores his harvest in his own imposing grain elevators, which hold more than a million bushels of corn. Surveying the farm that he carved out in the Panhandle landscape of dry mesquite and sagebrush, Mr. Bezner says the key to his family's prosperity is federal farm subsidies. "We're successful primarily because of government help," said Mr. Bezner, 59, an entomologist who grew up on a farm outside Amarillo. Although Mr. Bezner hesitated to discuss the size of those subsidies (and refused to divulge how much he makes without federal help, or what his expenses are), government documents show that in the last four years of the 1990's, he received $1.38 million in direct federal payments. Most remarkably, Mr. Bezner and the other big farmers here in Hartley County and across the country received those record-breaking payments in an era when farm subsidies were slated for extinction. Under the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996, swept up in the language of the Republican revolution under Speaker Newt Gingrich, farmers who planted row crops corn, wheat, soybeans, rice or cotton were freed from government production controls. In exchange for being able to plant what they wanted, they were told, they would have their subsidies gradually phased out. While farmers embraced their new freedom to decide what to plant, they balked at accepting the rigors of the free market. When prices for their crops held stagnant and their costs rose, farmers lobbied Congress for "emergency" payments. Their friends in Congress relented. Instead of diminishing, the subsidies have nearly tripled with steep emergency payments that reached $22 billion last year, according to Keith Collins, the top economist at the Agriculture Department. Supporters of farm subsidies, which were enacted in the Depression, argue that they are needed to save the family farm. But government documents indicate that the prime beneficiaries hardly fit the image of small, hardscrabble farmers. Because eligibility is based on acreage planted with subsidized crops in the past, the farmers who have the biggest spreads benefit the most, according to the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit advocacy organization that obtained government records of farm subsidies through the Freedom of Information Act. "The data shows that government subsidies are tilting the playing field in favor of the largest farms," said Clark Williams-Derry, the senior analyst at the Environmental Working Group who created a national database of subsidies. Mr. Bezner makes no apologies for accepting the money. To his mind, government subsidies help the American consumer by making sure grocery stores are stocked with inexpensive food. "That government money is keeping cheap cereal on the shelves in New York City," he said. SPAM TO FOLLOW Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
