4 minute read
Erik Somerfeld, District 2, Power Jeff Bangs, At-Large Director District 1 Inverness
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
BY WALTER SCHWEITZER
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FOOD SECURITY IS FUNDAMENTAL TO OUR NATIONAL SECURITY
When you are hungry and struggling to survive you become desperate. There is no telling what you might do. During the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers found empty shelves. Meat, dairy, and produce were being rationed. Farmers were euthanizing livestock, dumping milk, and plowing in vegetable fields. This should never be the case in the richest most powerful nation on earth. Over half of our annual federal budget is spent on our national security, and yet the National Guard protecting our capital and democracy was struggling to get decent food. Some troops ended up in the hospital with food poisoning. The US helps feed the world, but during a crisis, we struggled to feed ourselves. This is wrong and needs to be fixed. There is nothing good about the COVID-19 pandemic, but hopefully, there will be positive changes from what we have learned during that period.
How did this happen? Sixty years of a “cheap food policy” which is more about corporate control of our food dollar developed a fragile food supply chain. We have concentrated our food supply into the hands of a few in the guise of efficiency. This has come at the expense of resiliency. When I first started farming Montana raised and processed 70% of our food. Now it is less than 10%. You used to be able to go to your locally family-owned grocery store and the shelves were full of Montana-raised and processed food. Now you have to travel for hours to corporate-owned stores and buy food that has been processed and shipped 1,000 miles or more. This has exposed us to disruptions to our food supply and weakened our national security. Eighty-four percent of our meat is processed by just four corporate monopolies mostly foreign-owned. Nearly 90% of our fruits and vegetable are produced in just three states. Just one dairy processor controls over 25% of US dairy products. Just one corporate monopoly sells over 50% of our food and in some regions 90%. This is not a resilient food supply.
Farmers Union has been advocating for decades that we need a more resilient food supply by promoting more locally grown and locally processed food. Over a hundred years ago Farmers Union worked with our elected leaders to create antitrust laws and the Packers & Stockyard Act to rein in the corporate monopolies to secure our food supply. The good news is that consumers and some of our elected officials have noticed and are trying to fix the problem. President Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act and Build Back Better Plan focus on a more resilient food supply by investing in more regionally raised and processed food. Investing in regional processing is a good start, but more importantly, stopping anti-competitive practices by corporate monopolies is critical. These corporate monopolies force smaller processors out of business, are price gouging consumers and producers. They have put our food supply at risk. Senator Tester’s Meat Packing Special Investigator Act would place an investigator in the Packers & Stockyard division with subpoena powers to investigate anticompetitive practices. I agree with Senator Tester. Corporate consolidation is a direct threat to our national security. When a single cyberattack or a shutdown due to a fire or a pandemic threatens the very food we eat that is proof that something must be done fast to protect our national security.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is authorizing emergency procedures to help agricultural producers impacted by extreme drought conditions. USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA) is working with crop insurance companies to streamline and accelerate the adjustment of losses and issuance of indemnity payments to crop insurance policyholders in impacted areas.
These new crop insurance flexibilities are part of USDA’s broader response to help producers impacted by drought, in the West, Northern Great Plains, and other areas.
“Crop insurance helps producers weather natural disasters like drought,” RMA Acting Administrator Richard Flournoy said. “We recognize the distress experienced by farmers and ranchers because of drought, and these emergency procedures will authorize insurance companies to expedite the claims process, enabling them to plant a new crop or a cover crop.”
Producers should contact their crop insurance agent as soon as they notice damage. The insurance company must have an opportunity to inspect the crop before the producer puts their crop acres to another use. If the company cannot make an accurate appraisal, or the producer disagrees with the appraisal at the time the acreage is to be destroyed or no longer cared for, the insurance company and producer can determine representative sample areas to be left intact and maintained for future appraisal purposes. Once an insured crop has been appraised and released, or representative strips have been authorized for later appraisal, the producer may cut the crop for silage, destroy it or take any other action on the land including planting a cover crop.
Additional information can be found at https://www.rma.usda.gov/en/News-Room/ Frequently-Asked-Questions/Crop-Insurance-andDrought-Damaged-Crops..
