Word: marketeers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...economics." They calculate and compute and invest to pile up ever more profits like "Smith said capitalists should." Time fails to note that most farmers could make more money by stashing their assets in a bank vault and living off the interest. According to Time, the results of free market competition have been innovation, growing production and "reasonable costs to consumers...
...lazy welfare cheats. The forces putting farmers under have virtually nothing to do with their own efficiency, and everything to do with barriers to competition that would make Adam Smith very unhappy. Not only do farmers have to overcome drought, locust plagues, hail storms, and an uncontrollable international food market, but the numerous, relatively unorganized and competitive farmers also have to buy from and sell to aggregations of vast economic power in the shape of oligopilistic farm machinery companies, food processors, packagers, distributors and retailers. Worse still, all these steps are integrated in one killer firm...
According to Business Week, the four biggest tractor firms control over 80 per cent of the market. And William Shepard, in his book Market Power and Economic Welfare discovered that the four top firms in any given food product line control an average of 55 per cent of the market. And both the farmers' suppliers and buyers average profits three to four times greater than the farmers...
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...
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...