Word: farmers
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...Transkei--nominally an independent black state within South Africa--who last month refused to let a black baby into the whites-only hospital? It didn't matter that there were no beds free in the black hospital, he said; the baby could share with another black. Or the white farmer who severely beat his black maid to get her to confess to stealing the madam's purse; it wasn't shocking because he beat her, only because she died of the injuries. It must be some kind of unconscious puberty rite that white South Africans go through: I cannot believe...
Even more important, as Jim Hightower points out in his book on the food industry, Eat Your Heart Out, "the question is no simply who owns the farm, but who owns the farmer." Because they lack market power, farmers have been forced to sign contracts which commit the farmer to grow a certain crop for a certain price. If a farmer has had a bad year and goes into debt, a common occurance in such an unpredictable business, the corporate contractor can step in and tell the farmer how to run his farm...
Another study that Time chose not to cite found in 1970 that 22 per cent of the U.S. food supply is produced by corporate farmers and by contract. The American Agriculture Marketing Association predicts that by 1985 corporations will control 75 per cent of our food supply in one of these two ways. And even the USDA admitted in a 1973 report that only cash grain and forage crops, and range livestock will be controlled by independent family farmers in 1985. Pat Benedict, a wheat farmer, is the exception, not the rule...
...Farmers are certainly not the ones making a killing at the check-out counter. Time notes that 87 per cent of food price increases take place after the farmer has received his share. Time laid the blame for these price increases on the consumers, with their "insatiable desire for even fancier processing and packaging" and American labor with their ever increasing wages...
Time inadvertently drops clues to the solution of the Case of the Hard-pressed Farmer. One man says, "Each acre produces so little profit that all you can do is go for bigger acres." Another man who started a farmers cooperative says, "The market is so crazy these days that if you can't get access to the price you want at the moment it is offered, you might as well give up... We were at the mercy of people who just were not concerned with our needs...