Family farmers are being rapidly driven off their lands by the new industrial agriculture system. Often run by global transnational corporations, they operate on entirely different principles, and with far different goals. (In the US, only 2% of the population still farms the land.)

Corporate agriculture buys up small farms and merges them into huge ones. They eliminate diverse cropping and substitute single crop monocultures for the export market. They use machines to do work that people did. And since monocultures are vulnerable to insect attack, they have to use great volumes of pesticides to help the monocultures survive.

Since these are "absentee owners," they are indifferent to local ecological conditions; they grow crops by one-size-fits-all industrial formulas, applicable, they believe, anywhere.

But when it comes to feeding the world cheaply, safely, and efficiently, they do not even try. Consider these factors:

1) Large scale industrial agriculture companies do not produce food for local people to eat. They prefer export-oriented monocultures—luxury items, that bring higher profits: flowers and ornamental plants, cotton, beef for fast-food chains, exotic coffees, exotic fruits, berries and vegetables. Meanwhile, land that once grew staple foods for local people, contributes nothing. Hunger increases.

2) They claim "efficiency," but industrial farms don’t count the external costs that society has to pay from this kind of production. For example, intensive use of pesticides and fertilizers seriously increases pollution of air, soil, and water. Pesticide residues on foods contribute to major public health problems, like growing cancer rates. Foodborne diseases like salmonella and ecoli have dramatically increased from the factory farming of hogs, beef, and chickens. Use of massive amounts of antibiotics as a growth stimulant for chickens, pigs and cattle may be causing antibiotic resistant "superbugs" in animals and could be reaching humans through the food chain. With that comes fears of a global pandemic. Use of machinery to replace hands-on farmers means a major increase in oil consumption, with associated pollution. The overuse of chemicals and machines combine to produce a massive loss of topsoil. The U.S. has lost half of its topsoil in the last four decades; fertile farmlands are turning to dust.

3) The emphasis on export trade, rather than local use, means tremendous public investment in transport infrastructure: new ports, airports, roads; subsidized by taxpayers. Meanwhile, shipping foods across oceans, rather than growing for local consumption, increases greenhouse gases and ocean pollution from the cargo ships and oil tankers.

Can we really call it "efficient" that the average plate of food on American tables is transported thousands of miles by ship and plane, when it could be grown a few miles away?

4) Then there are the external costs of the exodus of small farmers from their lands and communities. One such cost is welfare and other government payments to ex-farmers and farm workers, driven into poverty. Even worse is what happens to the communities they leave.

The U.S. Office of Technology Assessment studied 200 communities and learned that as farm size increases so does poverty, and the faster that farm size increases, the faster poverty increases. And, a University of California at Davis study concluded that as farm size and absentee ownership increase, social conditions in the local community deteriorate. Empty storefronts. Poverty. Crime. Social breakdown. So please, let’s not speak of efficiency where such costs are not included.

5) But ignore these external costs for the moment. Are large industrial farms efficient even in their own terms? Do they produce a greater output per unit of input? They don’t. The most efficient farms are not big farms, but "small to medium-sized," just large enough for a family to work fully, while using small scale technology. A recent study also shows that small farms (27 acres or less) are more than ten times as productive (in terms of dollar output per acre) than large farms (6,000+acres), and extremely small farms (4 acres or less) can be over one hundred times as productive.

When farms do get larger, the costs of production per unit often go up. Larger acreage may require more expensive machinery and more chemicals to protect crops. So, why do many farms choose to get larger? For absentee owners, the goal is not efficiency, it’s profit. Even if per unit costs go up, as long as prices are above cost, each unit sold adds to profit.

New policy

An efficient farming system would be immensely beneficial for society and for the environment. It would use the fewest resources for the maximum sustainable production, i.e., food for people who need it, while causing the least damage to nature. Industrial farming is not the answer.

The situation is clear: Our conversion to industrial agriculture means subsidizing the richest corporations on earth to run a system that eliminates livelihoods, harms communities, poisons the earth, and doesn’t feed the people, either. Maybe you pay a few pennies less for your industrial potato, but the next generation will pay billions more in taxes, to clean up the mess this system creates. This is not "efficiency."

We must change directions. It must become public policy to reverse the increasing corporate control of our food supply. We need a farm and food policy that works for family farmers and consumers. To find out how you can encourage this, please call.

International Forum on Food and Agriculture
Food First / Institute for Food and Development Policy
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Organic Farming Research Foundation
Corporate Agribusiness Research Project
Center for Food Safety
Pesticide Action Network, North America
Organic Consumers Association
Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens
David Suzuki Foundation
Earth Island Institute
National Family Farm Coalition
EarthSave International
Food & Water
Grace Factory Farming Project
Humane Farming Association
International Forum on Globalization
Mothers & Others for a Livable Planet
Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology
The Humane Society of the United States

Signers are all part of a coalition of more than 60 non-profit organizations that favor democratic, localized, ecologically sound alternatives to current practices and policies. This advertisement is #2 in the Industrial Agriculture series. Other ad series discuss the extinction crisis, genetic engineering, economic globalization and megatechnology. For more information, please contact:

Turning Point Project, 310 D St. NE, Washington, DC 20002

1-800-249-8712, www.turnpoint.org or email: info@turnpoint.org