Some of the report's authors would go on to work in government to implement CED's policy recommendations. Over the next five years, the political and economic establishment ensured the reduction of "excess human resources engaged in agriculture by two million, or by 1/3 of their previous number.
Their plan was so effective and so faithfully executed by its operatives in the US government that by 1974 the CED couldn't help but congratulate itself in another agricultural report called "A New US Farm Policy for Changing World Food Needs for the efficiency of the tactics they employed to drive farmers from their land.[5]
The human cost of CED's plans were exacting and enormous.
CED's plans resulted in widespread social upheaval throughout rural America, ripping apart the fabric of its society destroying its local economies. They also resulted in a massive migration to larger cities. The loss of a farm also means the loss of identity, and many farmers' lives ended in suicide [6], not unlike farmers in India today who have been tricked into debt and desperation and can see no other way out.[7]
CED members were influential in business, government, and agricultural colleges, and their outlook shaped both governmental policies and what farmers were taught. Farmers found themselves encouraged to give up on a farming system that employed minimal outsourced inputs and capital and get "efficient by adopting instead a system that required they go into debt in order to purchase ever more costly inputs, like fossil-fuel based fertilizers, chemicals, seeds, feed grain, and machinery. The local, decentralized food distribution networks that were previously in place became subject to corporate buyouts, vertical integration and consolidation, leaving farmers with fewer and fewer outlets to sell their goods. With this consolidation of grain handlers, railways, food processing, meat packing, brewing and beverage makers, cereal makers, food retailers and restaurants, more and more of the food dollar went to processors and retailers, which gained increased market power.
Farmers, meanwhile, were and continue to be squeezed on both ends: by input suppliers putting upward pressure on selling prices and by output buyers exerting downward pressure on their buying prices. This analysis is confirmed by the Keystone Center, an establishment think tank with representatives on its board from Monsanto, DuPont, Shell, Coca-Cola, Dow, General Electric and the Rockefeller Foundation, to name a few. The organization's 2001 report "The Keystone National Policy Dialogue on Trends in Agriculture observes that "Agricultural policy in many respects supported the concentration of farming into larger and fewer units. Some would say agricultural policy is biased toward bigness. [8]
Echoing the plans laid out in CED reports, the Keystone report states that "Agricultural research programs have supported farm consolidation by focusing on substituting capital for labor, rather than developing knowledge and production systems that enable operators of modest-sized farms to enhance their incomes by using management and skills to minimize capital expenditures. [9] It was no accident that research programs at agricultural colleges favored one group at the expense of another.
The Keystone Report also clearly indicates that a focus on a less capital-intensive system would have been financially beneficial for smaller farmers, stating "Hundreds of millions of public dollars have been invested in research to improve the efficiency of capital-intensive systems, while virtually nothing has been invested in low-cost systems. If this research imbalance were to be addressed, management-intensive systems might in many cases exceed the efficiency of capital-intensive systems. That would improve the competitiveness and income of moderately scaled, owner-operated farms, and counter the trend toward concentration. But this and other research approaches currently get relatively little attention in publicly funded research programs. Changing the research focus is a prerequisite to revitalizing small and medium-sized farms. [10]
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