12/25/2023 0 Comments Forge empires fair trade ratios![]() ![]() I researched all Farm Bill related documents in the USDA Archives that chronicled farmer engagement, farmer organization advocacy and influence and impact, from 1910s through early 1940s. Drawing upon archival research at the United States Department of Agriculture's National Archive Library Special Collections, secondary analysis of USDA Economic Research Service data, literatures on social contract theories, and critical agrarian studies, this paper chronicles the origin of this framework of mutual responsibility, which forms the basis of the US Farm Bill. ![]() This paper serves as a preliminary farm policy analysis to help ground this research agenda. Nevertheless, more research is needed to inform negotiations about agricultural governance that curbs overproduction so as to provide equitable price floor for a diverse and expanding sector of farmers, ranchers, fishers, and food providers. Many questions ensue, regarding land ownership and tenancy, farmlabor and conservation compliance, as well as the general need to keep food prices affordable-particularly amidst the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. A century after supply management first erupted into federal policy priorities, rumblings for “parity”-farmgate prices that amply cover costs of production-return: the multifunctional public good of agriculture necessitates negotiating fair social contracts, between food providers and those provided. This old secret crisis of surplus, coupled with the crisis of its own invisibility (hidden by assertions of scarcity), and the new enclosures and profits created in the wake of glut's destructive impacts, all comprise the engine of late agro-capitalist expansionism. ![]() This eroded, erasing the original, ongoing problem of oversupply. agricultural policy originally aimed to be a social contract between (white, male, landed) farmers and non-farmers. What do farmers and non-farmers owe each other? And what does this framework of mutual responsibility mean for agricultural governance, particularly in the United States? At the nexus of this mutual dependence is a tenuous contract, straining against the chronic crisis of commodity crop overproduction. Farmer & nonfarmer responsibility to each other ![]()
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