Editorials
Contents Volume CXIII, Number 18 commonweal Correspondence 546 Editorials ...
...Tuner/Success Stories/The News The result has been a harvest of ironies: record crops and successive food from Ireland: J.V...
...under this bill, conhired laborers," they say as they urge federal policymakers to sumers would bear a 3-5 percent price increase at the grocery give priority to family farmers with less than $200,000 in store instead...
...All this could be accom- green-thumb public plots, and herbs on window sills...
...program seem uncertain at home and unrealistic abroad...
...This proposal addresses the Fortunately, the Tax Reform Bill does include several gen- international market dilemma...
...But the problems with the bill are obvious: • Limit income support payments to those farmers with prices, if driven up, would be uncompetitive on the world genuine need...
...Perhaps not as long as there are two kinds small- and medium-size farms and the farm culture associated of people in this country: those who think a farmer is with them...
...ers' cooperatives, diversified crops, and a recommitment to The Save the Family Farm Act, sponsored by Senator Tom thrift even after existing farm debts are restructured...
...Contents Volume CXIII, Number 18 commonweal Correspondence 546 Editorials 547 What's on your minds?: Raymond A. Schroth 548 Surviving with style: Harvey Cox 549 In search of 'liberation': Peadar Kirby 551 Screen: Tom O'Brien 553 WHICH FUTURE Verse: Anne Porter, 554, C.W...
...How serious is suggested not only by the recent record number of farm The Lost Language of Cranes: foreclosures since the Great Depression, but by the figures last May which marked Robert Jones 558 the first one-month U.S...
...Long 570 surpluses forcing U.S...
...payments tend to increase in proportion to acreage, benefiting and cuts in production mean reducing farm acreage...
...Farming, that sends city slickers to the corner kiosk to buy Mother they say, is a business just like any other, and this situation Earth News, or to the department store for overalls...
...Still others became food exporters, competing with the One Way or Another/The Piano U.S., the world's largest exporter of food...
...The How can our import/export policies cultivate continued agbill's purpose is to cut production, and thereby reduce ricultural self-sufficiency for nations abroad...
...it is comforting to know the fields However, behind the rhetoric of market efficiency lies the are still there...
...Yet the economic The Capitalist Revolution: collapse comes as no surprise...
...not exactly the "family Production Editor: Anne Robertson farm...
...Confessions of a Parish Priest: It appears that the shift away from government subsidies to stabilize prices, begun John Deedy 560 in the 1930s, toward subsidized credit and tax incentives to increase production, begun in the 1970s, has failed the farmers...
...losses from passive investments, more realistic depreciation Perhaps only a combination of strategies will solve this rates, and taxing capital gains at the standard income rate...
...That's bad most the largest producers...
...Commonweal: 548...
...Utilize mandatory production controls to reduce Senator Robert Dole (R-Kansas) has proposed an export surpluses, thereby increasing prices and income to farmers...
...Could it undo both...
...This ment follow rather then exceed the actual decline in value...
...farmers, like many debtor nations, found themselves unable to repay their creditors...
...Since 1980, the rate of farm population decline - a steady I million farmers per Editor: Peter Steinfels decade since World War II - has doubled...
...small-town, community lifestyle that produces good How then should government policies be redirected...
...Whether these costs would cancel each other out annual sales...
...farm trade deficit in almost thirty years...
...prices (and farmers' incomes) down, while creating the Monkeys: Karen Sue Smith 572 additional problem of paying billions for food storage...
...making capital depreciation on equip- the federal government paying shippers the difference...
...Most farmers are now eligible, and present market which is one reason behind present federal subsidies...
...p. 551, Emil Antonucci...
...primarily a businessman, and the rest of us who don't...
...record government subsidies for farmers (around $30 billion this year) in face of delayed debt repayment, Staff compounding the federal deficit...
...farmers who, this year, face debt restructuring or foreclosure, this letter from the government's lending agency of last resort Books says it all...
...Pratt, 557 Marie Ponsot 566 FOR FARMING...
...It does not address the taxeral proposals which also apply to farming, such as reducing payers' burden or the specific plight of family farmers...
...unacknowledged premise: if government policy created to- Neither the inevitable modernization of the family farm day's plight for the medium-sized farmer, it also created the - air-conditioned cabs on combines and stretching par . opportunity seized by agribusiness...
...plan resembles price supports to farmers, only here the incenremoving tax subsidies on capital gains which encourage in- tive goes to shippers who must find markets for farmers' vestments in farming equipment and land expansion...
...It is camaraderie, not mere romanticism, efficiency, all at unwarranted taxpayer expense...
...In complex conundrum: government policies coupled with farmaddition, several bills in Congress look promising...
...Rita Corbin...
...Consider Publisher: Edward S. Skillin the recent purchase by Metropolitan Life of the nation's largest farm management business, Farmers National Company in Omaha, which manages over one million Illustrations: Cover, and p. 558, Paul Valerry...
...Today nearly half of the nation's food Smith, Patrick Jordan comes from 4 percent of farms with $200,000 in sales...
...And while the bill calls for production fully thwarting the practice of some producers who divide limits of less than 35 percent for any single commodity, large parcels of land into smaller units to collect multiple curbing to a degree reduced acreage, the effects of such a subsidies...
...What kind respects: the central priority of saving the family farm, and of farmers and farm culture are we willing to support at home...
...To the more than 65,000 U.S...
...Messenger for the ten thousandth: an interview with Elie Wiesel #J E REGRET to inform you that a review of your Farmers Home AdminHarry James Cargas 555 istration loan account indicates the need to take adverse action...
...claiming the necessity of mandatory production controls...
...Currently, taxpayers are not just another category of business entrepreneurs and underwrite federal subsidies to farmers...
...and inevitably, fewer and fewer farmers...
...p. 563, photo by Sam Chambliss...
...subsidy program for corn, wheat, and soybeans that would • Close tax incentives for non-farmers seeking tax shel- work like current subsidies for cotton and rice...
...Catholic bishops, writing in the food and agriculture section of their draft pastoral letter on the economy (chap- surpluses, raise prices and farmer income, while simultaneter 5), reject the business model...
...Portrait of Delmore/The Middle Generation: Robert Phillips 562 These programs, in effect, drove farmers into specialized crop production, and into deeper and deeper debt for purchases of additional acreage and heavy equipThe Resurrection of Jesus/Jesus in Two Perspectives/The Sermon on ment...
...The bishops suggest that government could: is not certain...
...goods, benefiting them indirectly...
...MeanThe Beet Queen: Linda Simon 565 while, thanks both to technological advancement and to the incentive provided by A Machine that Would Go the high dollar, some third-world countries, formerly food importers, became by Itself: John Patrick Dig gins 567 agriculturally self-sufficient...
...They argue that underlying the "crisis" is the govern- F ARMING hasn't been a way of life for most Americans mental blunder of protectionism which has shielded farmers for many years, but its place in the national psyche from the rigors of a free-market economy and undermined remains strong...
...of the American farmer...
...Agriculture, America's largest industry, is in serious Michael Harrington 558 condition...
...Will such policies foster a centralized business model or preserve the image fade...
...p. 555, acres of farmland...
...The number of farms overseen by such companies Janice Gates is predicted to encompass one-quarter of the nation's cropland by 1991, at the Advertising Manager: Ruth E. Taylor present growth rate...
...That means limiting the use of farm losses to reduce taxes sell products at world prices - about half U.S...
...Some analysts see no problem with the shrinking number of farmers or with the 24 October 1986: 547 centralization of land in the hands of a few huge conglomerates...
...Aside eels of land nor the rise of agribusiness has yet disfig= .. from the myriad questions a centralized farming economy ured the portrait...
...The image is one must pose for Americans, changes in government subsidies of independence, sweatful toil over one's own land, could effect corporation-owned as well as family-owned struggles against locusts, flood, and drought within a farms...
...And lenders who foreclosed on smaller farmers have hired management Poetry: Rosemary Deen Movies: Tom O'Brien companies to work the land in order to repay the debts outstanding, spawning the Staff: Karen F. Silva, Harriette Balsky, boom in land-management firms...
...Kin . calls for fewer farmers, more efficient farms, and production ship with nature lies at the root of the rooftop gardens, that matches, not exceeds, demand...
...The U.S...
...Their land, livelihood, and way of life are in jeopardy...
...Farmers and farm workers ously decreasing government subsidies...
...prices - with on non-farm income...
...Is this the direction we want agriculture to be going...
...Then, when the world fell into recession in the eighties, the value of the dollar the Mount: Paul M. van Buren 564 soared, land values plummeted, and foreign markets dried up, many U.S...
...Simultaneously, agribusiness and Assistant Editors: David Toolan, Karen Sue farm-management companies have grown...
...p. 550, Corita Kent...
...And plished by a self-regulating market economy without govern- even though the Sunday drive through the country is no ment controls...
...longer ann institution...
...NevertheHarkin (D-Iowa) and Representative Richard A.Gephardt less, two questions - apparently, but not inevitably represent(D-Missouri), is consonant with the goals of the bishops in two ing conflicting interests - must be squarely faced...
...news for one-third of the nation's family farmers already on • Place a ceiling on payments to any one producer, care- the brink of bankruptcy...
...Should country people, honest, hard-working, neighborly...
...Shippers would ters...
Vol. 113 • October 1986 • No. 18
