free market / corporate (non)resiliency
Coronavirus Reveals Corporate Colonization of Rural Economies
https://www.johnikerd.com/...rporate-colonization-of-rural-economies?postId=5eb1c469db987e00173ec9f3
Today’s livestock/meat sector runs pretty much like a factory assembly line, beginning with breeding stock genetics and ending at retail food markets—from conception to consumption. For fresh vegetables, the assembly line begins with seeds and ends with salads. Whenever there is a disruption in processing or any stage or station of production, the whole assembly line must be shut down. The basic problem for producers and for rural economies is that hogs, cattle, and chickens can’t be turned on and off like machines. They just keep growing and producing meat, milk, and eggs. Likewise, vegetables just keep on growing until they “go to seed.”
Problems are further complicated by the essentially separate assembly lines for supermarkets, restaurants, and institutional food service markets. During the current crisis, the restaurant and institutional sectors have been closed while the supermarkets have remained open. The large meat packers and vegetable processors have been largely unable to shift production from one type of outlet to another because of highly specialized handling, processing, and distribution facilities. So, producers have been killing flocks of hens that were producing for the institutional liquid egg market while there has been a scarcity of eggs in the supermarkets. Others have been plowing up vegetables that were destined for the restaurant market while supermarkets shelves for fresh produce were empty. Dairy farmers are dumping milk destined for closed schools, while kids obviously still need milk.
Virtually all production in these sectors are either under contract or essentially committed to specific processing plants. There are no open markets or independent processors left that can accommodate the numbers of animals that come out of today’s large confinement animal feeding operations or CAFOs. The same is true for large scale commercial vegetable production. Large independent producers are essentially locked in as well because the plants where they usually sell are expecting their production and other plants in their area are scheduled to run at capacity without their production. So, when a particular processing plant shuts down, the animals or produce scheduled for that processor are left without anywhere else to go. So, vegetable growers plow up crop before they “go to seed.” Contractors euthanize their producers’ hogs and chickens or cancelling contracts leaving it up the contract growers to get rid of the animals.
There are no open markets left where large numbers of independent producers and buyers meet to negotiate a fair market price that would result in the allocation of agricultural commodities to where they are needed. There are no local processing facilities that can accommodate more than the limited number of food crops or animals that are produced by local farmers for their families or a few local customers. Those facilities are currently running at capacity because of market failures elsewhere. Most of the local restaurants, school, hospitals, and institutions are end points in corporately owned or contracted supply chains and have little if any freedom to access surplus local production.
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that neither farmers, food service workers, consumers, nor local governments in rural areas have any degree of control over their local agri-food economies. Their economic well-being depends entirely on decisions of a few large corporations that have no legal responsibility other than to maximize profits for the benefit of their stockholders.