plaiins while food crops are relegated to ·poorer soils on erosionprone slopes. M0reover, in a world where many people are • too poor to buy all the plan_t food being produced, livestock has been put into service to rid the economy of "surplus" grain that might drive down prices. Livestock consumes over one . third of all the world's grain ~nnually. The result is that the four billion human beings on earth, a figure many would use to measure the burden on our cropland, aren't four billion equal units at all. One person can represent a burden on agricultural resources many times greater than another. If a person consumes a largely plant-food diet in which the animal foods eaten are produced on waste materials and nonarable land, his or her "weight" on the cultivated farmland is relatively light. On the other hand, a person is _a much greater user of cultivated farmland if he or she eats a diet of animal foods produced by shrinking annually 1800 pounds of grain'into 250 pounds of meat, as the average American does. Again, a single acre can sustain a wide range in numbers of people. It depends in part on whether the land is cropped for food for human consumption or for animal feed. Third, how many people a given measure of land can feed depends on whether it grows luxury crops for export or food for the local people. What Americans think of as "food-deficit areas".caused by the pressure of overpopulation are often "food-def~cit areas" because much of the food produced goes to small urban elites or is exported. Worst of all, the exports are frequently made in the name of "development." Here are some food paradoxes to ponder: • Africa is a net exporter of barley,·beans, peanuts, fresh vegetables and cattle (not to mention luxury crop exports such as coffee and cocoa), yet it has a higher incidence of protein-calorie malnutrition among young children than any qther continent. . • In Mali, peanut exports to France increased notably during the years of drought while production of food for domestic consumption declined by 1974 to one, quarter of what it had been in 1967. , • Mexico now supplies the Un'ited States with over one half of its·supply of several winter and early spring vegetables while infant deaths associated with poor nutrition are common. • Half of Central America's agricultural land produces food for export while in several of its countries the poorest 50 percent of the population eat only half the necessary protein. (The richest 5 percent, on the other hand, consume two to three times more than is needed.) Fourth, agricultural,land will, of course, feed no one at all unless it is cultivated. This fact seems too obvious to state, and yet many forget that in Africa and Latin America much good land is left unplanted by large ,landowners. A study of Colom- . bia in 1960 showed that while farmers owning up to about thirteen acres farmed two thirds of their land, the largest farmers, controlling 70 percent of the agricultural su~face, actually cultivated only 6 percent of their land. Although Colombi<!- is an extreme example, this pattern is found throughout Latin America. Only 14 percent of Ecuador's tillable land is cultivated. • In addition, corporations often keep large tracts out of production or use them for open-pit mining and operations', such as tin dredging in Malaya, that destroy the topsoil, making land unfit for farming unless expen~ive reclamation is undertaken. Bauxite, co'p.per and oil companies decrease tqe ·potential food acreage qy holding l~rge areas of land thought to have reserves of those natural re.sources. • This widespread wastage of agricultural land, especially by largeholders, lends credence to the estimate, confirmed by several studies, that only about 44 perc~nt of the world's potentially arable land is actually cultivated. February/March 1978 RAIN Page 5 The relationship of hunger to land turns out to be less a question of quantity than of use. We discover that the amount of land has less to do with hunger than who controls it. - D ... Despite many clear indications that the Soviets were in the market to buy in a big way and the indisputable evidence that bad weather nearly everywhere in the world meant there would be an exceptional demand for American grain, the USDA, contrary to law, did not inform the farmers. In May, the USDA publication Wheat Situation warned farmers there would be a big surplus even after all foreseeable sales. Thus, only a few American government officials·and grain company • executives were in the know. , By early June 1972, Continental Grain, Cargill, and :the . other four members of the grain export club rushed out to the early-harvest Southwest to buy up wheat. The farmers knew that harvests were going to be big and since they did not know about the strong foreign market prospects, they were happy to unload their wheat. They got about $1.25 a bushel. A few weeks later the same wheat would ·have brought $2.25 to the farmer. {In early 1973, wheat would be hard to get at $5 a bushel.) • •By July 5, Clarence Palmby, Continental Grain's vice-president, he,lped the firm to conclude the biggest grain sale in history-three days before the official announcement of the $750 m_illion loan to the U.S.S.R. that made the deal possible and that had been negotiated by Palm.by while still a USDA employee. Still at USDA in May P~lmby had even attended meetings between Continental and the Russians and surely knew a big sale was in the offing. But Palmby and his b,o~ses at USDA had still'neglected to inform the farmers, despite their legal mandate to do so. It was not until mid-July that the USDA informed the farmers. By then in the Southwest and the early harvest areas of the Midwest, one quarter of all the wheat had already been sold. In Oklahoma alone, the withholding of information by the Department of Agriculture cost wheat farmers about $47 million. Over a mere seven weeks taxpayers handed the·six grainexporting companies $300 million in subsidies. By contrast, the subsidies t~ farmers moved in the opposite direction! In 1972 subsidies were still paid to farmers to make up the difference between "parity," a price level considered fair in relation to the cost of machinery and supplies a farmer must purchase and the average market price over a five-month period. The catch, in 1972, was that the govern-. ment figured the period to begin in July, wh~n most farmers in the Southwest and some in the Midwest h3:d already sold out. As news of the big grain deal spread, wheat prices rose, narrowing the difference between average market prices and parity, thus cutting into the subsidies for -the farmer. The farmers' lost subsidies have been esti~ated•~t $55 million. , The General Accounting Office found the big traders had profits on those hundred of millions of bushels ranging from 2 cents to 53 cents a bushel, whereas normally a profit of 1.6 cents per bushel is considered good. -more•
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