Farmers and consumers, who are not anticipated to play a major role in the Justice Department's upcoming agriculture antitrust roundtable in Ankeny, are still intent on having their voice heard.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Justice have jointly scheduled a series of workshops for dialogue on the issues and concerns facing agriculture. The first of those meetings is scheduled for March 12 in Ankeny, and will reportedly focus on competition in the seed industry as well as serve as an introduction to the entire series of meetings.
As Bill Bishop of The Daily Yonder notes, despite the DOJ's calls for input from farmers and ranchers, only one out of more than 20 scheduled speakers at the Ankeny event is a person who makes his living on the land. There is a brief period at the end of the discussions that has been set aside for comments from those remaining in the audience.
In response, a coalition of local, state and national community, consumer, farmer and labor organizations are holding their own townhall meeting on Thursday, March 11, at the Best Western Hotel in Ankeny.
"The corporate control of our food system by multinationals like Cargill, Monsanto and Wal-Mart is devastating to consumers, farmers, workers and the environment," said Barb Kalbach, a fourth-generation family farmer from Dexter and member of one of the coalition groups, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement.
The groups coming together believe that decades of bad farm policy and unchecked corporate mergers have driven independent family farmers out of business and created powerful corporate factory farms and agribusiness giants that dominate the market. Current statistics such as 85 percent of all U.S. beef being slaughtered by four companies, half of all U.S. corn seed being controlled by two companies and 40 percent of the nation's fluid milk supply being in the hands of one company appear to support the coalition's concerns.
Anti-Trust Hearing Stacked with Big Ag Reps and Non-Farmers
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Coalition to host townhall in advance of agriculture antitrust hearing
By Lynda Waddington
The Iowa Independent, March 4, 2010
Straight to the Source
