Fighting for the Farm

Rural America Transformed

Jane Adams, Jane Adams

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812201031
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia rurale

In North America industrial agriculture has now virtually displaced diversified family farming. The prevailing system depends heavily on labor supplied by migrants and immigrants, and its reliance on monoculture raises environmental concerns. In this book Jane Adams and contributors—anthropologists and political scientists among them—analyze the political dynamics that have transformed agriculture in the United States and Canada since the 1920s. The contributors demonstrate that people become politically active in arenas that range from the state to public discourse to relations between growers and their contractors or laborers, and that politics is a process that is intimately local as well as global.The farm financial crisis of the 1980s precipitated rapid consolidation of farms and a sharp decline in rural populations. It brought new actors into the political process, including organic farmers and environmentalists. Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed considers the politics of farm policy and the consequences of the increasing alignment of agricultural interests with the global economy. The first section of the book places North American agriculture in the context of the world system; the second, a series of case studies, examines the foundations of current U.S. policy; subsequent sections deal with the political implications for daily life and the politics of the environment.Recognizing the influence of an array of political constituencies and arenas, Fighting for the Farm charts a decisive shift since the early part of the twentieth century from a discursive regime rooted in economics to one that now incorporates a variety of environmental and quality-of-life concerns.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Jane Adams

At the beginning of the twentieth century, North American agriculture prospered. A century ago, one could imagine that agriculture and industry were, or could be, balanced and complementary. The countryside was densely populated with agriculture, timbering, and mining supporting dynamic small towns. Farmers produced both for their own needs and for the needs of the larger society, creating complex and regionally specific circuits of commercial and customary exchange. Often riven with class, racial, ethnic, religious, and gender divisions and conflicts, rural communities provided the hearth for much of the U.S. and Canada’s political, intellectual, and cultural life.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a revolution in production has been virtually completed. The countryside is depopulated. Agricultural labor has been almost completely replaced with mechanical, chemical, biological, and information technologies. The few commercial farmers left provide few of their daily household or enterprise needs from their own production. Firms offering specialized supplies and services sell the resources that were once part of a farmer’s necessary stock of knowledge and skill.

North American farms have always been part of the larger national and world economies, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, their role as primary producers has been vastly overshadowed by other elements in the agriculture-food system (Magdoff, Foster, and Buttel 2000). In the process, small towns that once served as seats of government, market centers, and manufactories for their rural hinterlands have lost their reason for existence. Those in the orbits of urban regions have become bedroom communities. Those that do not lie within easy reach of cities are withering and dying, populated largely by retirees and the people who care for them.¹

This transformation flags a sharp shift in the issues facing rural America. While farmers continue to face volatile and unpredictable weather, marketing, and labor conditions, the attention of the nation, and of some farmers, has shifted to the environment and to community quality of life. The environmental movement of the mid-twentieth century signaled this shift. It framed apocalyptic visions of a future laid waste by overpopulation and pollution. It has been the leading foe of the application of genetic engineering to agriculture, and among the strongest critics of the green revolution and its biotechnologies. At its more radical edges, but with broad sympathy from large portions of the population, it began creating visions of human-nature interrelations far different from scientific and technical models of knowledge and control. As many of the articles in this volume document, “green” politics have become an increasingly important aspect of debates regarding farming and farm policy.

The Politics of Agriculture

Throughout most of the twentieth century, agricultural and rural policy debates have been framed in technical and economic terms. Only rarely have social relationships been highlighted. And, aside from an enduring concern with conservation, the destructive consequences of radically simplifying the ecology were unforeseen. As Ferguson (1990) observed, mid-twentieth century theories of development assumed that all social problems would yield to expert-driven technical solutions.² For much of the century, most rural people seemed to agree that expert advice not only promised but provided unprecedented prosperity and comfort, and they accepted the downsides of declining populations and emigrating children as a necessary consequence. Governmental policies and private initiatives created enormous material abundance, signaled by the year-round availability of inexpensive fresh and processed foods in every North American supermarket. Except for a few dissenting voices, the direction of the postwar food system received virtually unquestioned support. That is no longer the case.

At the end of the century, as several of the essays in this book demonstrate, those policy decisions have led to the threat of both ecological and social death. They have eliminated most farmers, emptied out the countryside, and created production systems predicated on chemicals that contaminate surface waters, drain ancient aquifers, and often poison the farmers themselves. My own work has traced this transformation (Adams 1994b). Nostalgia and regret are not attitudes becoming of a scholar, but one cannot look at the current conditions of rural America without feeling that, as Kathryn Dudley says in this volume, “something has gone terribly wrong.” And, as immigrants from Mexico, other Latin American countries, and other regions of the Third World pour into the United States and other industrial nations, it is obvious that the current wave of capitalist development, termed globalization, is restructuring the peasant agricultures that have remained in the rest of the world.

Understanding the political dynamics that brought us to this current state is, therefore, not an idle exercise. But, curiously, while social scientists have devoted considerable energies to developing and critiquing specific policies for agriculture and for rural communities, very little scholarship has analyzed the political process itself. Of that scholarship, most analyzes the state. Far less attention has been paid to the ways that people become agents, interest groups form, issues become framed and debated, and alternatives are constructed. These questions assume that the governance of society is a process of continual invention by human actors, rather than the rehearsal of an inherited script or one written by larger social forces. Sometimes, as the articles in this collection demonstrate, people do appear to act in service to some external playwright. More often, however, they tap into their received knowledge and desires to create unforeseen alternatives. A focus on political dynamics forces the analyst to come face to face with uncertainty, indeterminacy, and invention.

The aim of this volume is to collect the work of scholars from several disciplines who bring their specific disciplinary and theoretical perspectives to bear on political processes within North American agriculture.³ It is impossible, of course, within a single collection, to present all relevant theoretical and topical issues. This volume does, however, provide the student of North American agriculture with a window into how, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholars are attempting to comprehend the play of power and the political process in North American agriculture.

Plan of the Book

This collection begins with an overview of the development of North American agriculture, using two specific regions as case studies based in somewhat contrasting theoretical approaches. Alan Rudy bases his analysis of the Imperial Valley on O’Connor’s work on the fiscal crisis of the state and the environmental crisis; Murray Knuttila places the development of western Canadian prairie agriculture in the context of the world system and Canada’s place within it. Douglas Constance, Anna Kleiner, and Sanford Rikoon take up five theories of the state in the era of globalization and test their applicability to a specific political battle over large-scale hog production in Missouri. Miriam Wells analyzes the formation of specific interest groups in the ethnically stratified strawberry fields of California within a shifting legal and political arena.

The second section takes up some of the historical roots of U.S. agricultural policies, with Stuart Shulman’s analysis of the agenda-setting debates around the first farm credit legislation and Jess Gilbert’s and Mary Summers’s rethinking of the New Deal. These readings not only recast our understandings of the agricultural New Deal, but demonstrate the contingent and contested outcomes of one of the major policy arenas of twentieth century farm policy. Barry Barnett then presents a particularly lucid and complex account of the causes of the farm crisis of the 1980s, arguing that the intellectual and ideological framework within which agricultural economists operated made them unable to accurately analyze the crisis as it occurred.

Barnett’s article forms a bridge to the third section, “The political implications of daily life.” Kathryn Dudley and Laura DeLind turn from politics as direct engagement with state institutions to the “micropolitics,” or cultural context, within which political action occurs or does not occur. Dudley’s provocative ethnography of a Minnesota farming community’s response to the 1980s farm crisis captures the paradoxical nature of these farmers’ moral commitments in communities that, as she says, “reproduce the logic of market capitalism.” DeLind addresses, as well, the problem of creating viable communities. She demonstrates the power of a vision of an alternative food system and social order and the pressures exerted on this vision by the daily practices required to operate within a capitalist order.

While both Dudley and DeLind focus on the practices of daily life that create or undermine durable communities, the final section examines the discursive arena, where meanings are publicly deployed and contested. Alan Hall shows how, in the play of Canadian political processes, the trope of “sustainability” has become stretched to the limits of its meaning, even as its practical usage remains contested. Ann Reisner applies formal discourse analysis to understand the ways in which various groups draw upon discursive resources and use them in political struggle. Her article demonstrates, as Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon and Wells have already indicated, that, on occasion, social movements can create compelling formulations that allow them to prevail in the political arena, even when opposed by powerful, heavily financed interests.

Harriet Friedmann’s article, with its utopian vision supported by a deep analysis of contemporary global political economy and by an attempt to shift paradigmatic assumptions through alternative tropology, completes the volume.

The remainder of this Introduction orients the reader to the major debates and issues relevant to the topics taken up in each section.

North American Agriculture in the World System

This section contains four chapters. The first two sketch more than a century of development, from European settlement in the case of Canada and from U.S. settlement in the case of the Imperial Valley of California. The second two analyze specific political struggles: over concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in Missouri and the organization of strawberry production in California. All these studies focus on the role of the state in relation to localities, drawing on different, albeit not necessarily contradictory, theories to describe the processes the authors try to understand. These chapters lay out many of the key theoretical and analytical issues facing the analysis of North American agriculture. These include problematics of historical periodization, the nature of the modern democratic state in a capitalist economy, the salience of classes and other significant social groupings, and the significance of territoriality. They begin to address the contingent nature of “actors,” understood as the identities claimed by and attributed to people who appear within the play of power in public arenas.

Periodization

With the historical turn in the social sciences, the question of periodization, central to historiography but little attended to by functionalist analyses, becomes important. Rudy and Knuttila orient us to the development of farming in western North America. Striking in their accounts is the brief span of time that has elapsed since the opening of the western lands to U.S. and Canadian agriculture. Equally striking is the displacement of agriculture from the center of these regions’ economies. Barely a century after their opening, potentially irreversible ecological and social degradation, respectively, of the two regions threatens their continued social viability.

Rudy’s and Knuttila’s accounts indicate that the development of both regions was intimately linked to larger national and global development projects. Canada formed as a nation in the 1860s, establishing the west as a “new frontier of investment” by the “various fractions of capital,” ushering in the period Knuttila diagnoses as the beginning of the corporate phase of capitalist accumulation. This coincided with the consolidation of U.S. control over its western territories following the Civil War.

In both western Canada and the Imperial Valley settlers did not firmly establish themselves until the early years of the twentieth century. The processes of industrial development in North America and Europe drove demand for agricultural products, stimulating the development of new technologies and marketing systems and displacing European populations, many of whom migrated to the Americas. Both states strongly supported the development of a class of landowning agriculturists. This was a period of considerable instability and fluidity as nature was subdued, communities were formed, labor supplies were established, and governing institutions were created. It was characterized by crises: in the case of the Imperial Valley, misplaced irrigation works that diverted the Colorado River into the Salton Sink, creating the Salton Sea; in western Canada, crises attendant on marketing of wheat. In each case, the federal governments moved aggressively to resolve the crises in order to preserve the landowning farmers its policies had created.

Knuttila locates the beginning of the next period with the Great Depression; Rudy with World War II. These periodizations are based, in part, on differences in the two regions and countries: Knuttila sees the depression as the end of a period of expansion and the beginning of a period of sustained crisis and instability, contextualized by Canada’s location in the continental economy and the establishment of Keynesian principles in state regulation of the economy. Rudy focuses on the institutional stability established by the New Deal with the completion of irrigation works and the federal government’s postwar commitment to providing Mexican migrant agricultural labor through the bracero program. Western Canada’s reliance on wheat, in contrast to the diversified agricultural products of the Imperial Valley, must also be considered as a factor in their differences, as the crises and population declines afflicting Saskatchewan also afflicted the other grain (and cotton) producing regions of the United States. Some of the issues raised here will be more fully addressed in chapters 5 through 8.

Both Rudy and Knuttila place the beginning of a new period in the 1970s, with the neoliberal economic policies often referred to as globalization. The 1970s, as Wells says in Chapter 4, mark a global economic watershed. In the wheat growing regions of Canada, state-led institutions that attempted to regularize and support wheat production and marketing were dismantled; in the Imperial Valley, globalization undermined established labor relations. More significant in California, the ecological limits of irrigation agriculture began to threaten the continued viability of many crops with increasingly severe pest outbreaks and degradation of the general environment.

Ironically, the cases studied by Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon in Missouri, and Wells in California locate the 1970s as a period when popular, subordinate groups were successful in obtaining government regulations. In Missouri, independent farmers won exclusion of absentee corporate operations; in California, farm workers unionized and gained protections long available to other workers. These gains were, however, short-lived, as the forces unleashed by globalization reworked the terrain.

The State

The state is an obvious focus for those concerned with political processes and the play of power. Within their territorial reach, state institutions, with their monopoly of legitimate force, are arguably the most powerful single entity. They are, almost by definition, political in their constitution and processes—concerned with the ordering of power relations and the attendant resources within their domains. Their forms of authority and modes of financial support derive from non-market mechanisms of accumulation; the modern nation-state has, in addition, enormous capacity to regulate and direct other sectors of society. The chapters in this section and Shulman’s chapter on the formation of the Farm Credit system, in particular, document the growing capacity of the U.S. and Canadian states to affect the course of agricultural development.

The nature and role of the state has been a subject of sustained debate in western social, political, and moral theory. All of the articles in this volume, insofar as they theorize the state, draw their primary influences from Marx and Weber. They are all historical, locating their analyses within a logic formed by prior actions, what Shulman, following Skocpol, terms “path dependent.” They are, as well, structural, concerned with defining the key societal forces, metaphorically understood as structures, within which individuals and groups act.

The chapters in the first section draw, more or less explicitly, on a tradition that problematizes the relationship between state and civil society.⁴ They vary somewhat in how they understand this relationship, and in their analyses of salient social groups: Knuttila, writing about the development of western Canada, views the state as providing services to or acting as the agent of capital accumulation. The Canadian state he describes appears much like the executive branch of the capitalist class theorized in some of Marx and Engel’s and Lenin’s writings. Rudy, in contrast, understands the state as semi-autonomous, being both the agent and the product of rural and agricultural development. Drawing on O’Connor’s (1973, 1988, 1998) work, he views liberal democracies as forced to resolve often conflicting and sometimes contradictory demands in order to maintain their own apparatus and operations: they must create the conditions in which the (capitalist) economy can function smoothly and promote capital accumulation, and at the same time they must legitimate the social and ecological consequences of accumulation.

Constance, Kleiner, and Rikoon’s analysis of the political battles regarding corporately owned, large-scale hog operations views governing bodies in much the same way. They are a contested terrain in which government mediates class conflict derived from the needs of the state to promote economic development and, simultaneously, deal with the environmental, class, and community consequences of this development.

Throughout the twentieth century the governments of Canada and the United States have increased their capacity to effect their institutional goals. Not only have they increased overall capacity, in some quantitative sense, but their arenas of action have expanded and shifted. Knuttila focuses on the shift from promoting private infrastructure development through providing domestic and international legal structures and financial support (e.g., railroads, wheat pools) to actual administration of key aspects of the economy, as with the Canadian Wheat Board, and direct regulation of produ...