Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann

Author:Thom Hartmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2010-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

The Impact on Small Business

Small businesses rarely lobby Congress, the White House, or regulatory agencies for more regulations. But because large businesses have an infrastructure to deal with regulations, the burden of regulations on small businesses sometimes wipes them out. Many regulations come along with benefits. Farm subsidies represent a huge transfer of tax money to corporations, but only a very small portion goes to family farmers.

In the agriculture industry, four multinational corporations control 82 percent of the beef cattle market; five companies control 55 percent of the hog-packing marketplace. Although large agricultural corporations numerically own only 6 percent of U.S. farms, that 6 percent accounts for almost two-thirds of all farm income.11

In a growing trend known as contract farming, farmers are forced (because they can’t compete against large-scale multinational purchasing) to sell their farms to agribiz companies and then work on the land they once owned. The United States lost 300,000 family-owned farms between 1979 and 1998. As agriculture writer Julie Brussell notes, “This agrarian ‘genocide’ mirrors the descent of much of America’s rural country into economic serfdom.”12 The result, as documented by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s (CELDF) Thomas Linzey, is that, “Suicides have replaced equipment-related deaths as the number one cause of farmer deaths.”13

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