The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism by Michael Hudson

Author:Michael Hudson [Hudson , Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2022-08-11T03:00:00+00:00

cent of the crops’ sales value, “by which remark we mean that complete restitution of the elements of crops removed, such as potash, soda, lime, magnesia, chlorine, phosphoric and sulphuric acids, and ammonia, cannot be made short of an expense of three dollars per acre.”

6. 1849 Patent Office Report, p. 15.

7. Paul W. Gates, Agriculture in the Civil War (New York: 1965), pp. 263f., observes: “By withdrawing from the Union in 1861, the Southern states removed the conservative element that had long prevented the adoption of important legislation affecting agriculture and the development of the West. In rapid succession congress enacted the Homestead Act with its free-land policy, the Pacific Railroad Act with its liberal aid for the building of a railroad to the Pacific, the act creating a Department of Agriculture, the National Bank Act, and the Morrill Act, all of which had been held up by the shrewd politics of a minority section.”

Most government aid now goes to the largest agribusiness corporations, not to family farms, whose number has been dwindling by about 10,000 farms each year, headed by midwestern dairy farmers. The Farmaid report illustrates the concentration at work.

Cargill, founded in Minnesota in 1865, has become America’s largest privately-owned corporation in terms of revenue. It controls one-quarter of all U.S. grain exports, and nearly as much (22%) of the U.S. domestic meat market. Former Congressman Henry A. Waxman calls it “the worst company in the world” and accuses it of driving deforestation, pollution, climate change and exploitation “at a scale that dwarfs their closest com

8. “Corporate Control of Agriculture,” Farmaid (n.d.). https://www.farmaid.org/issues/ corporate-power/corporate-power-in-ag/.

petitors.”9 The U.S. government has brought many charges against Cargill for financially manipulating grain prices. Farmers typically sell their crop in advance to Cargill and other grain companies, which organize market contracts for each crop through the Chicago Board of Trade. During the Great Depression the Board (along with the U.S. Commodity Exchange Authority) accused Cargill of trying to corner the corn market to push up crop prices to consumers, and in 1938 suspended the company and three of its officers from the trading floor.

More recently, Cargill has been charged with illegally employing child labor and many other human rights violations throughout the world, as well as land monopolization in Colombia. The above-cited Mighty Earth report states that “perhaps Cargill’s largest negative impact on the natural world is its role in driving the destruction of the world’s last remaining intact forests and prairies,” headed by deforestation of the Amazon to grow soybeans, and of Sumatra and Borneo to produce palm oil, one of the least healthy fast-food additives.

Pollution and related environmental problems are endemic to American agribusiness practice. “Feeding and raising meat consumes more land and freshwater than any other industry,” the Mighty Earth report concludes, “and the industry’s waste byproducts rank among the top sources of pollution around the world. Many of these impacts are concentrated in the United States, where factory farming has its stronghold, but are spreading rapidly to other parts of the world.

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