Hightower Lowdown - As a farmer told me, “You can still make a small fortune in agriculture, but you have to start with a large fortune.”
... Now in the sixth year of plummeting prices, farmers are producing more, getting less… and going broke. For example, it costs dairy farmers on average $1.92 to produce a gallon of milk, but monopolistic buyers pay them only a-buck-32 per gallon. No surprise then that since 2000, half of America’s dairy farmers have been squeezed out of business. Overall, farmers’ profits have fallen by almost half in the last five years, so farm debt, bankruptcies, and suicides are rising again towards the calamitous levels of the 1980s farm crisis.
A central cause of today’s spreading farm depression is the increasing monopolization of all things farmers must buy (from seeds to machinery) and monopolization of the markets that buy from them. Just four biotech giants, for example, control 63 percent of all commercial seeds sold in the world; four meat processors control 84 percent of the US beef market, and four global traders control 90 percent of the entire world’s grain sa
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