The Plowboy Interview: Frances Moore Lappe

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PLOWBOY: But how are those exploitative forces operating here?

LAPPE: One of the biggest parallels between our country and most underdeveloped nations is the increasing concentration of food control. Look at farming. A mere 5% of our landowners—many of them absentee owners—now possess almost half of our nation's farmland. The profit margin from crops is so thin (by 1979, real profits per acre had sunk to half what they were in 1945) that the only thing for farmers to do is, as Earl Butz put it, "get big or get out". And the key to getting big is to first own a lot of that valuable land. As agricultural economist Donald Paarlberg said, "We are developing a wealthy hereditary landowning class which is contrary to American traditions."

Thus the farmers in the middle—since most of the smallest ones have managed to survive by means of off-farm income—are getting squeezed out of business. In fact, if two-thirds of America's growers tried to live solely on the sales of their crops, their income would be well below the official poverty line. Farmers are forced to compete against each other and to produce more and more, yet that same increased production depresses prices so that they have to produce more still in order to make the same income.

There're always ways to get rid of the extra food, though: Half of our harvest is fed to livestock, and our agricultural exports have doubled in the last decade. But the pressures of steadily expanding production are leading to the destruction of food-linked resources. Increased monoculture planting of erosion-inducing crops has resulted in a constant loss of topsoil on more than a third of our cropland. Farmers have had to rely on irrigation to raise yields, and the added demand is draining the water from giant aquifers. And of course, more fertilizers and pesticides are needed to maintain maximum productivity under these deteriorating conditions . . . the overall use of agricultural chemicals rose by almost 60% from 1970 to 1979.

PLOWBOY: But if food production is increasing, surely somebody—besides the small minority of growers who are big enough to survive—must be benefiting.

LAPPE: A disproportionate share of the benefits flows to the five major grain-trading companies. Here the concentration of economic control is even more extreme than it is in farming at this point.

Take the largest trader, the Minneapolis-based Cargill Corporation, for example. While the real income of farm operators has remained virtually unchanged since the 60's, Cargill's income has gone up over 400% in the past decade. Yet this firm, surviving on U.S. food resources and production, is virtually unaccountable to the interests of farmers . . . or even to the American government! The company's major trading arm, Tradax, is chartered in Panama and based in Geneva. Cushioned by Panamanian tax advantages and protected by Swiss secrecy laws, Tradax does not have to report any of its transactions to the USDA or to the IRS!

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