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The agricultural establishment(3) boasts loudly about the economic efficiency of the American food system. Each decade since the 1930s, fewer American farmers have been able to feed more Americans with an ever-decreasing share of consumers' incomes spent for food. Americans, on average, now spend less than a dime of each dollar of disposable income for food and farmers get less than two cents from that dime. The economic efficiency of American agriculture is impressive, but what about its non-economic costs? Economists have been conscientious in totaling up the tremendous economic savings for American consumers, but they have never bothered to total up the growing social, ecological, and ethical costs. If we American consumers are to make wise decisions, we must understand the total costs and benefits of our food choices.
The quest for economic efficiency has transformed American agriculture from a system of small, diversified, independently operated, family farms into a system of large-scale, industrialized, corporately controlled agribusinesses. The industrial technologies that support specialization, mechanization, and ultimately, large-scale contract agricultural production, were all developed to reduce the economic costs of production and make food cheaper for consumers. As a result, millions of farm families have been forced off their land and thousands of small farming communities have withered or died. Economists have given little attention to the value of the lives of farm families that have been destroyed by the loss of their farms, their way of life, and their heritage. Likewise, their measures of efficiency have never considered the value of the lives of rural people – with roots in rural schools, churches, and businesses – forced to abandon their communities as farm families were forced off the land. The human costs of America's food choices have been undeniably tremendous, but since they weren't economic costs and couldn't be measured in dollars and cents, they have gone uncounted and largely unnoticed.
The ecological costs of economic efficiency also have gone uncounted and thus largely ignored. Today, only the most diehard industrialists bother to deny that industrial farming has degraded the productivity of the land through erosion and contamination and has polluted the natural environment, including streams and groundwater, with chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and livestock manure. Certainly, we had soil erosion in the "dust bowl" days, but we were making great strides in soil conservation, before the dawning of industrial agriculture in the late 1940s. In spite of stepped up soil conservation efforts of the 1990s, American farms still are losing topsoil at rates far exceeding rates of soil regeneration. Feeble efforts to control soil loss through reduced tillage leave farmers increasingly reliant on herbicides that pollute our streams and groundwater and that disrupt or destroy the biological life in the soil.
The large-scale confinement animal feeding operations, CAFOs, are the epitome of industrial agriculture. They are promoted to community leaders as a rural economic development strategy and to politicians and consumers as the only means of keeping American farmers competitive in a global economy and keeping American food costs low. CAFOs consistently fail to live up to any of the economic promises. CAFO operators do business wherever they can get the best deal, which typically is not in the local community. They consistently place greater demands on local roads, bridges, and other public services than they pay in local taxes. The few low-paying jobs go mostly to immigrants to the community, whose demands for new public services outweigh any additions to the local tax base. A few local investors may benefit economically, at the expenses of their neighbors, but most of the economic benefits go to outside corporate investors.
Rural communities bear the brunt of the costs of polluted streams and aquifers, their sources of drinking water, contaminated by animal feces and urine from the CAFOs. There are reams of scientific research reports documenting the linkages between air and water pollution from CAFOs and various public health risks. The American Public Health Association has called for a nationwide moratorium on CAFOs, citing more than 40 scientific reports(4). The Director of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, testifying before a U.S. congressional committee, documented the CAFO health risks associated with contamination of air, water, soil, and foods with toxic chemicals, infectious diseases, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and E. Coli 0157:H7(5) The question is not whether CAFOs present significant health risks; the only question is whether rural people can be forced to continue to bear the health risks in the name of economic efficiency.
CAFOs are commonly promoted as the natural economic evolution of family farming. However, many of the family farms displaced by CAFOs were actually more economically efficient than the CAFOs that displaced them. When CAFOs began to take over hog production, for example, actual farm records data from the major agricultural universities indicated that one-third to one-half of independent hog producers had lower production costs than did the typical CAFOs. CAFOs were able to gain a significant share of hog markets, by displacing the "least efficient" one-third to one-half of independent hog producers. Once they could influence market prices, they were able to drive the prices offered to the remaining independent hog farmers to less than $10/cwt. in 1998, the lowest in nearly 30 years. This is the basic process by which "more efficient" independent hog farmers were driven out of business by "less efficient" CAFO operations. This is not economic efficiency; this is economic exploitation.
Even so, corporately controlled, contract production is becoming the only means by which larger agricultural producers can gain access to markets. Contract production has already eliminated competitive markets for poultry, beef, and hogs. The same basic trend toward CAFO production is already well underway for dairy. A large portion of vegetable and fruit production has been under corporate contract for some time, and with genetic patenting and biotechnology, corporate control of field crops, such as corn, soybeans, and wheat will soon follow.
Loss of food security may turn out the greatest of all neglected non-economic costs. With the globalization of agriculture, through "free-trade" agreements, food in the future will be grown wherever in the world it can be produced at the lowest economic cost. High costs of land and labor in the United States – consequences of favorable employment opportunities and the urban-to-rural population migration – may keep U.S. production costs well above costs in other food producing regions of the world. The multinational food corporations that increasingly control agriculture are not people – they have no heart, no soul, and no citizenship. These corporations have stockholders scattered all around the world. They will produce or buy agricultural commodities wherever they can produce or buy at the lowest cost, without regard for national origin. The continuing quest for economic efficiency now threatens our national food security.
Before corporate agriculture abandons America, however, they will have turned much of rural America into a "third-world" wasteland. Polluted streams and groundwater, abandoned waste lagoons, eroded and depleted topsoil, depleted aquifers, a deskilled workforce, rural crime, and decaying rural communities. These will be the legacies of the corporatization of American agriculture. As people in rural communities fight back with more environmental rules and regulations, the corporations will have even more incentives to locate their production facilities elsewhere in the world, where people are too economically desperate or politically powerless to protect their natural environment. And with a global, "free market" economy, there will be nothing to keep Americans from becoming dependent imports for their food.
Economists argue we need not be concerned about depending on food imports. We will be even better fed at a lower cost, they say. But in times of crisis, a nation that can't feed itself is no more secure than is a nation that can't defend itself, and we live in uncertain times. Perhaps we won't abandon agriculture completely, but we could easily become as dependent on the rest of the world for our food as we are today for our oil. Perhaps, we can keep our food imports flowing, as we do for oil, but how much will it costs, how large a military force will it take, how many small wars will we have to fight, and how many people will be killed.
In summary, the highly touted productivity and efficiency of American Agriculture is largely an economic illusion. Food in America isn't really all that cheap; most of us are simply in a position to avoid paying the full costs of our food. Some our food costs have been paid by family farmers who have been driven out of business or to the verge of bankruptcy. Some have been paid by rural communities that have withered and died as farm families have been forced off the land. And some have been paid by migrants and other farm workers who could see no alternative to exploitative wages and working conditions. These unpaid costs are paid by people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves at the mercy of those with more economic power.
Other food costs are paid in the form of taxes. Over the past decade or so, taxpayers have paid an average of $15 billion per year to subsidize the large-scale industrial producers of corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, sugar, and other basic farm commodities. Our taxes also subsidize large-scale irrigated agriculture in the West and giant CAFOs in the Midwest. Does it matter if we pay for our food in taxes or the grocery store, as long as we pay, one way or the other? The problem is that most of the most government subsidies go to the large, specialized industrial agricultural producers at the expense of small, independent farmers who try to support their communities and try to care for the land. These large, commercial operations typically rely heavily on hired labor, agricultural chemicals, mechanization, and distant markets, all of which tend to be exploitative of people, non-renewable resources, and the land. The ecologically and socially responsible family farmers who receive government payments typically get barely enough to put in another crop.
Many, if not most, of the food costs we don't pay are being billed to our children, grandchildren, and others of future generations. When our choice of "cheap food" leads to environmental degradation and social injustice, we are not really avoiding those costs; we are simply charging them to future generations. Those of future generations can't express their preferences and values either in the marketplace or at the ballot box. They can't choose to pay the full cost of food nor can they redirect government programs. They must depend on us to ensure that they will have land capable of producing enough food and a society capable of ensuring equity and opportunity. Our failure to pay the full cost of our food today is destroying the productivity of our land and the civility of our society. Much of the unpaid cost of our food is simply being put on a charge account to be paid off by our children's children and their children.
Of course, paying high prices is no guarantee that food is produced by ecologically and socially responsible means. Some of the highest priced foods, particularly highly processed food and food eaten in restaurants, are produced under some of the most oppressive working conditions and come from the most highly industrialized production operations. Neither is buying high-priced organic food a sure means of paying the full costs of food. Increasingly, organic foods in supermarkets are produced by large industrial, migrant labor operations in California, Florida, and Mexico. Actually, "fair priced" food need not be expensive, particularly if we are willing to take the time and make the effort to process and prepare it for ourselves, and even those with little income can afford to pay the full cost of good food.
The best way to pay the fair and full price for our food is to know as much as we can about how our food was produced, where it was produced, and who produced it. Then we should ask, what are the ecological and social implications of our food choices? The easiest way to answer these questions is to buy locally, from someone we know, at farmers markets, through CSAs – directly from farmers we know and trust. But, we are not necessarily limited to direct, local food sources. We can buy from food retail operators and restaurateurs that we trust to buy locally or to buy only from producers and suppliers they know they can trust.
Of course, most of us don't have realistic opportunities to buy everything we eat from someone we know well enough to know if they are responsible producers. But the more we look, the more sources we will find, and the more opportunities we will create for producers who have the courage to ask their customers to pay the full cost of food. Someday, hopefully, we will all have an opportunity to pay and will be willing to pay the full cost of all of our food. In the meantime, however, we will each have to decide for ourselves whether we are willing to pay the full cost, or instead, are willing to impose the ecological and social costs of our food upon someone else. Only when Americans pay the full costs of food will they fully understand the real economics of food.
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