2003-08-26
Written by A.V. Krebs for Greenpeace
No one sector of the 20th century American experience has been more spuriously romanticized and at the same time abused economically, politically, and socially than our nation's family farm system and the men, women and children who have sought to sustain it. At the same time, throughout this century, agriculture has remained America's largest productive business. Not only does agriculture consume 30% of our manufactured goods, but with labor and from our abundant natural resources it also produces 70% of the nation's new wealth.
However, America's family farm system of agriculture now stands on the threshold of eradication. Promised as recently as the 1970's that if they "planted fence row to fence row" a potential world market was standing ready to buy their commodities, U.S. farmers soon learned that they been sold out to corporate agribusiness. Throughout the 1980's an ever-mounting numbers of farm bankruptcies, foreclosures, and forced evictions reaped a grim "human harvest" of suicides, alcoholism, divorce, family violence, personal stress, and loss of community.
Continuing now into the late-1990's, the very economic and social fabric of rural America is being ripped asunder. Meanwhile, the control of our food supply has been seized by corporate entities whose purpose is not to feed people, or provide jobs, or husband the land, but simply to increase their cash flow and reduce their transactional costs in order to placate their excess-profit-obsessed institutional investors.
We see the same situations developing in the fishing industry and the communities that have traditionally supported that industry. Just as the fundamental nature of American agriculture has been changed by corporate agribusiness, factory-type farms, vertical integration, and forward (advance) contracting so too has the world fishing industry been transformed by transnational corporate control, factory trawlers, value-added commercialism, and Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs).
While corporate agribusiness has managed to successfully eliminate "excess human resources," - i.e., family farmers - from agriculture through a series of policies and price manipulations, so too are the large corporations that today dominate seafood production destroying this nation's fishing industry through promoting the privatization of the marine commons through the use of ITQs. Under such a system participants - usually large corporate interests and in many cases the very same corporations that dominate corporate agribusiness - are allocated and own quota shares in the total annual catch of a given fishery. Quota holders can also "transfer" --- buy, sell, lease ---shares on the open market, as with private property or commodity futures contracts.
Thus with each passing year it has become more and more apparent that the fate of the U.S. fishing industry has only to look at the demise of this nation's family farm system of agriculture in recent decades to fully comprehend its own fate. In each case, capital has replaced efficiency, and technology has replaced labor, as corporate-controlled interests have become more intent on becoming "miners" of the land and seas than stewards of these natural and finite resources of the world's food supply.
It is important to realize that, unlike in the past where farmers and fishermen were the producers of our food, increasing numbers of them are now becoming simply the raw material providers for a giant food manufacturing system. Meanwhile, corporate food companies continue to seek to standardize our food supply through the "manufacturing" of our food, value-added food, while at the same time forcing consumers to pay a higher and higher quantitative and qualitative cost for their daily food. By deifying "cost benefit analysis" at the expense of the "common good" these corporations have managed to annul the positive dimensions of the family farm system and the independent fishers and eliminate their economic and environmental advantages, particularly as they relate to building genuine communities.
As social anthropologists Patricia L. Allen and Carolyn E. Sachs point out, any system built upon a foundation of structural inequities "is ultimately unsustainable in the sense that it will result in increasing conflict and struggle along the lines of class, gender, and ethnicity." Today, this nation's corporatized food system has become just such a system.
The consequences of such action, as Greenpeace has previously noted, is that companies such as American Seafoods, Tyson's, and ConAgra have transformed the fishing trade into a "global extraction industry dominated by multinational corporations and industrial economies of scale." They have thus made fishing "not about a way of life," about feeding people and providing economic sustenance for local coastal fishing communities, but rather about "making a good rate of return on their global investment capital."
It was in 1994 Congressional testimony that Rolland Schmitten, Assistant Administrator for Fisheries, National Marine Fisheries Service, was asked the question "Do ITQs promote `big business' as large companies have resources to buy or lease a significant amount of shares?" He replied:
"This could happen, as experienced with grocery stores, agriculture and other enterprises . . . To the extent that larger firms are relatively better capitalized, they may be able to obtain more shares relative to their needs for efficient operation than could smaller firms."
Despite such public rationalization, the corporate seafood industry's own spokespersons admit to the fact that the major problem facing an area such as the Alaskan groundfish fisheries is over capitalization, abetted by heavy bank financing from abroad, principally Norway, and also by subsidies from the U.S. government. As Vince Curry, President of the Pacific Seafood Processors Association and current employee of the At-Sea Processors Association (the factory trawler industry group) noted in 1994, "The problem with factory trawlers is they've built twice as many boats as have been justified, and they've created a very severe problem for this industry. They're driving ITQs because it's one way to take a public resource and use it to get them out of their bad investments."
Indeed, in 1995, the United Nations' Food Agricultural Organization (FAO) Ministerial Conference, in adopting the Rome Consensus on World Fisheries noted that the problem of overfishing in general, and over capacity of industrial fishing fleets in particular, threatened the sustainability of the world's fisheries resources for present and future generations. They urged that governments and international organizations take prompt action to review the capacity of fishing fleets in relation to sustainable yields of fishery resources, and where necessary reduce these fleets.
Again the parallel can be seen in agriculture as it was Ismail Serageldin, the World Bank's Vice President for environmental and socially sustainable development and Chairman of its agricultural research group, who recently observed that "we have to do the hard work of dealing with the problems of the small-holder farm in remote areas. They are the real defenders against food insecurity."
Such voices, however, have been ignored by the corporate interests that today dominate the fishing industry and agriculture industries.
As in our nation's rural communities, the growing crisis in our coastal fishing communities is systemic, for as it negatively affects the fishing fleet based in those communities so too does it impact the community's entire economy. Whereas previously the dollars earned from fishing multiplied as it moved through the community's economy, now that money is either no longer being generated, or in the case of the large transnational, they leave the community immediately on being monetized.
There are other striking parallels between what has been taking place in agriculture and is currently underway in the fishing industry. Just as banks and farm management companies have been seizing more and more control of bankrupt and foreclosed farms, so too have the corporate giants of the fishing industry been pursuing more debt-laden factory trawlers. In recent years American Seafoods, the world's largest seafood company which in actuality is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Norwegian company Aker/RGI, has been buying such trawlers to the extent it now has a total of 15 of the largest factory trawlers in the Northern Pacific, completely dwarfing its competitors.
Taking a page from corporate agribusiness's book, the giants of the fishing industry have in many ways duplicated those conditions which have been the hallmark agriculture's "harvest of shame" --- the treatment of its migratory labor force. Like corporate agribusiness, factory trawler companies have also been using lax labor laws to maintain their operations. Shipbuilding jobs have moved to shipyards overseas. Factory trawler workers have been excluded from federal minimum wage and overtime laws. While some make no money at all, crews are often cheated out of wages, and these same workers have fewer rights to file wage claims. At the same time trawler companies have a history of opposing labor unions and usually do not hire local workers, but rather frequently hire foreign workers in addition to breaking numerous laws.
These parallels should come as no surprise, for as noted earlier, some of the same companies that today dominate corporate agribusiness have also become major forces within the corporate fishing industry - namely ConAgra, the nation's second largest food manufacturer and current minority owner in Trident Seafoods; and Tyson Foods, the nation's leading poultry producer as well as owner of several factory trawlers.
For example, currently Tyson Foods and founding President Don Tyson are being investigated by Independent Counsel Donald C. Smaltz. Early in 1998 Tyson's plead guilty to giving former USDA Secretary Mike Espy $12,000 in illegal gratuities and consented to pay the federal government $4 million in fines and $2 million in costs. The company also said it would comply with ethics requirements in dealing with federal officials, and as a result will not be subjected to a potentially costly ban on doing its $200 million in yearly sales in programs managed by the Agriculture Department. It admitted to giving gifts to Espy at a time when it was urging the USDA to go slow on imposing new meat and poultry handling instructions.
Prior to this investigation, the Tysons, who are long time supporters of Bill Clinton, were questioned whether they would have any influence over the President's appointments to positions such as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (a division within the Commerce Department), of which the National Fisheries Service (NMFS) is a part. Son John Tyson responded "I would be irresponsible to my company and my industry if I didn't have any input."
That same year the U.S. Department of Commerce, using recommendations from its own scientists at NOAA, as well as from the Pacific Fishery Management Council, issued a rule proposal regarding allocation of the year's whiting harvest. The proposed rule would set aside a significant amount of the allocation to smaller Pacific Coast fishers who do business with local shoreside processors. Within a month, however, the Commerce Department, many believed due to the intervention of the White House, reversed itself, ignoring the recommendations of its scientists and of the Council and gave the allocation to Seattle-based factory trawlers, including Arctic Alaska, the Tyson subsidiary. Marine biologists said there was no scientific justification for such a reversal, and that the new rule would cost the local communities between $35 and $40 million in lost income.
Thus, as the nation's small fisheries become subsumed in the hulls of giant corporate factory trawlers, joining those thousands of family farmers who have been lost to corporate agribusiness's grim reapers, the words of Tim Ralston, a Petersburg, North Dakota farmer strike a poignant note:
"When tractors are as big as barns
--- their machinery the size of groves.
Then might shall have become right . . .
machines will have won.
When there's one yard light in a Dakota night
and one farmer waking in the morning sun.
Then there by the grace of God
went us and technology's logic is done."
A.V. Krebs is author of "The Corporate Reapers: The Book of Agribusiness (Essential Books: 1992)"