American farmers don’t benefit from government subsidies

Dear Editor:

Roland McKay’s article on The Real Cancún effectively profiles agricultural subsidies as the central focus of debate at the WTO talks - indeed, talks collapsed this week primarily due to the contention that enormous agricultural subsidies in the United States and European Union continue to undermine and impoverish the lives of poor farmers around the world. However, McKay makes a common but important mistake in his article when he refers to the “overfed farmer” of wealthy countries, implying that these farmers are the guilty recipients of government subsidies.

In fact, the $300 billion that the United States and European Union spend on subsidies does not go, as media often portray, to “farmers,” but rather to the largest agribusiness corporations. In the United States, the largest seven percent of all farms receive over 50 percent of farm subsidies, whereas small-scale family farmers receive little to no subsidies year after year.

It has been said that corporate agribusiness is the nation’s largest welfare recipient—certainly not our farmers, who, contrary to being overfed, comprise one of the poorest segments of our population. Six out of the 10 lowest-income counties in the United States are in rural Nebraska. In Minnesota, the number of farms has declined by 50 percent since the 1940s; Wisconsin has lost half of its dairy farms since 1987. Increasingly, family farmers, to stay alive, are forced to buy into a system that is designed for their failure.

Because a handful of corporations control over half the beef, pork, chicken, flour and retail markets in the United States, farmers are forced to accept abysmally low prices for their products (receiving on average 19 cents of every food dollar sold) and agree to technology contracts that minimize their autonomy and often require use of genetically engineered crops. In short, farmers are not just suffering abroad, but domestically as well.

It’s not by accident that we rarely hear this side of the story. The consolidation of agricultural systems in the United States—and thereby the decline of the family farm and the accumulation of capital by agribusiness—is one of the driving reasons the United States now has so much sway in world agricultural markets, holding, by some estimates, 900 million farmers in systemic poverty.

Our individual lives are therefore not that separate from the historical and political spheres of the WTO. Although it is easy to overlook the effects of international trade on domestic issues of labor, markets and livability, it is in precisely these contexts that we have the greatest ability to act. If international agreements contain an intrinsic domestic front, it follows that our actions as citizens are implicated in the broader global picture. Each one of us makes daily decisions as consumers, that contribute either to the lives of farmers or of corporate agribusiness. And inevitably, the less we support our own family farmers, the more we support the oppression of poor farmers around the world.

Daniel Ungier ‘04
 

EnviroThursday to discuss Environmental commitment

Dear Editor:

Thanks to Danny Schwartzman and Haris Aqeel for their column on environmental commitment at Macalester. These issues and opportunities to get involved will be discussed at a special EnviroThursday on September 25 (Olin-Rice 250, 12-1 p.m.). Representatives from a variety of student groups will be present. Up to the minute information on the status of the Environmental Studies program (which is alive and kicking but with an uncertain future) and the college’s involvement with the Talloires Declaration on Environmental Sustainability will be presented. All are welcome. Refreshments are provided!

Brett Smith, Acting Director, Environmental Studies
 

Mac Weekly should have eulogized former student

Dear Editor:

I was disturbed and upset to see the front-page article on Jeanette Foster's suicide in the Sept. 12 issue of The Mac Weekly. While Jeanette Foster deserves a written tribute to her participation in the Macalester community, it would have been far more fitting to place a eulogy to Jeanette in the inner pages of the issue. Instead, "Community reacts to graduate's summer suicide" was questionably placed in the news section of the paper. I raise issue with this decision as Jeanette's suicide happened in May. I can see no reason why an article about it should be on the front page and am inclined to wonder whether the goal was to provoke macabre interest in the events.

Jeanette was an active member in the Macalester community and deserves a respectful and kind eulogy. The scandal-invoking inquiry into her personality that appeared instead was both unprofessional and unbecoming. I was disturbed at the tone of the article, which seemed to lean toward unseemly speculation about Jeanette's motives and mental state.

Jeanette Foster spent four years at Macalester. The action she took in May was tragic and her death is an extreme loss to many. Her plans to help others with her psychology degree demonstrated both her deep concern for those in need and the kindness inherent to her personality. Our loss is irreplaceable.

Kitty McCarthy '04
 

Editor’s response: After thoughtful consideration and many rounds of discussion, The Mac Weekly staff made the decision last week to run the aforementioned article as printed. We hoped to provide the Macalester community, which was rife with false rumors, a more accurate account of what had happened, as there had been no coverage last semester. The tragic nature of Jeanette’s death and its effect on the Macalester community did not make this decision easy or quick. We, too, were saddened and troubled by Jeanette’s death, as no doubt were many other members of the community. However, as a newspaper, our responsibility is not to provide partial news coverage of events that occur, nor is it to avoid covering events because they are shocking or disturbing. It seemed to us that her death deserved more than a eulogy, which would have provided nothing more than an idealized version of her life. We appreciate all the feedback, both positive and negative, that we received regarding this article.