Alan Guebert is an Illinois farm journalist.
This harvest season, American farmers and ranchers will fill the national larder until it literally spills onto the streets: 9.5 billion bushels of corn heaped atop the 1.4 billion bu. left over from last year; nearly three billion bu. of soybeans, a record, and 500 million bu. more than the world will buy in 1999; about 2.5 billion bushels of wheat, whose unsold portion in the coming year will equal the entire wheat production of Australia.
And meat? U.S. producers will grow 25.8 billion lb. of beef, 18.7 billion lb. of pork (another record) and 23 billion lb. of broilers in 1998.
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Ironically, this bounty will bring hardship to its producers. But the hardship farmers face this winter won’t be the typical big crop-low price pothole most know how to ride out. This one will be a deep, farmer-devouring ditch.
According to Kent Olsen, a University of Minnesota ag economist, the average accrual net farm income for the 208 farmer-members of the Southwest Minnesota Farm Business Management Association will drop from $40,600 in 1997 to a minus $42,650 in 1998.
This 200-percent income collapse, in the heart of Minnesota’s prime corn and soybean country, is the first negative average accrual farm income in the association’s 59-year history, notes Olsen.
One would think there are enough brains in this wonderful country to keep agriculture from stumbling into such a devastating, self-dug pit. Surely we’re smarter than this.
Evidence is piling up, however, to suggest we’re not. The collective voices of today’s ag leaders say expanded free trade will lift U.S. farm prices.
They demand Congress give fast-track trade authority to a president most of them detest and they clamor for unfettered trade with the butchers who run China, Iran, Cuba, Iraq and North Korea.
Many of these same farm leaders also cry for the U.S. to kick $18 billion more towards the International Monetary Fund. Of course the IMF will likely use the bailout money as a crowbar to force countries to devalue their currencies – which will only make our ag exports more expensive in those “saved” nations.
Somehow these leaders conveniently, perhaps intentionally, look past the simple facts of today’s global ag market.
Here are three which leap from USDA’s Aug. 28 Ag Export Report:
- While the volume of U.S. ag exports for fiscal year 1999 actually will rise by 6.7 million tonnes over FY ’98, total ag export value will drop from $54.5 billion to $52 billion.
- The value of FY ’99 ag imports to the U.S. will rise to $39.5 billion, the 12th consecutive food import record in a row.
- The projected FY ’99 ag trade balance (exports minus imports) will be $12.5 billion, the lowest since 1987.
One clear conclusion suggested by the USDA data is that we should be smarter than to put our future farm profit hopes in the never-really-free, never-very-fair “free trade” basket our leaders continue to yammer about. But we do.
Congress is showing the full force of its collective dim wit, also, as it prepares to throw billions more of U.S. taxpayer money at farmers to paper over the fast-growing crisis rather than remove farm produce from the flattened market or at least not force farmers to grow even more next year.
According to figures cited by Senate Agriculture Committee chair Richard Lugar, three years of Freedom to Farm have cost taxpayers $17.2 billion whereas the old “failed” farm program it replaced would have cost only $9.6 billion over the same three years.
Surely someone, somewhere, is smart enough to figure out that maybe some changes – even just temporary – are in order for this costly, suicidal farm bill, right? No such luck. Not yet anyway.
Which begs the question: How did we get so dumb so fast?
