I don't have a full sense yet of how massive farm subsidies (about $20 billion of our money) benefit agribusiness, depress American wages, hurt the Mexican middle class and thus fuel immigration here, but David Moberg's article in In These Times is helping me to figure it out. I'd like your help as well.
Developing a strong message backed by progressive policy is particularly important since the Farm Bill is up this year and any progressive electoral majority has to include a resonant rural message. If we can find a way to show how in agriculture policy, it's big business versus the rest of us (assuming that's true), we progressives are in a better place to build more support.
Here's the cycle as I understand it. Food prices are low, sometimes lower than the cost of production. Why? I suspect there's more to it than simply over-production. Somehow, the $20 billion in subsidies helps to keep the price of basic food products low. This policy somehow encourages consolidation which puts the little guy at a competitive disadvantage to the middlemen (like grain traders and processors like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland). Exactly how? Aside from the inherent efficiencies of economies of scale, I'm not sure. These middlemen then dump cheap grain overseas at prices the Mexicans and others can't compete with, so millions of Mexican farmers leave the land and come to the U.S. seeking work. Many of them end up in corporate chicken processing plants, owned primarily by Tyson, where the lack of union protection (or, for the undocumented, any protection at all), depresses wages and physically hurts workers. Meanwhile, big agribusiness ends up making most of the money, since their inputs (chicken feed and labor) are so cheap.
We definitely need some more work to figure out what progressive farm policy ought to be (certainly on the message side -- perhaps the wonks already have their good ideas fleshed out). Perhaps the bad outcomes from the status quo are a consequence of the food supply chain dominated by a few large agribusinesses, and the easy message is to break up the monopolies. The Farm Bill is up this year in Congress, and part of a progressive electoral coalition is a progressive rural message.
Thus, the $20 billion question is how we can best spend that money to help raise wages for American farmers and for Mexican farmers, since it is in our national interest to cultivate a prosperous, middle-class Mexico. If David Moberg is right and agribusiness is reaping lots of the benefits of the largess, how do we make that clear and how do we stop that?
Perhaps most fundamentally, what's wrong with the market for food if prices are below cost? That can't be sustainable and over-production doesn't make sense as the only explanation. Demand is relatively static for food.
I think it's time to bring together the mostly urban advocates of a better immigration policy with the mostly rural advocates of a better farm policy in finding common ground.