As report after report from the countryside in this state and throughout the country clearly show, working farm families are in the midst of a worsening crisis that is even deeper than in the 1980s. The biggest overriding problem is that farmers receive less for selling their commodities on the market than is needed to meet the costs of production and make an adequate living for their families.
Farmers need both immediate emergency relief and longer- run protective measures. Many politicians resist with the argument: why subsidize "unproductive" farmers? But this is not the issue. Farmers aren't in crisis because they aren't productive. Even the smallest ones produce enough food for scores of people and are thus making a valuable contribution to society. Though many farmers can't make a living off of what they produce, in fact, bank lenders and food processors and marketers profit handsomely off this same produce.
We're trade unionists - one of us a factory worker and the other a cleaner at Northwest Airlines. We're also socialists and are running for city council in St. Paul. Most of our opponents won't address the farm crisis because they don't consider it an immediate issue in their ward or in the city. We disagree. The fate of our brothers and sisters on the farm, and the possibility of joining them in common action, is of utmost concern for city workers. Only through collective action against our common enemy and exploiters, can we win.
To help forge this alliance, we urge the labor movement to campaign for the following measures that should be adopted immediately to help protect farmers from the ravages of the disasters that are engulfing them.
First, the federal government should declare a moratorium on all farm foreclosures. No bank, finance company, or federal agency should be permitted to involuntarily take a farm family's livelihood away from them.
Second, all working farmers should be guaranteed disaster relief sufficient to compensate for the full loss of crops, livestock, land, or buildings. This should also include farmers, whose contracts with processors are arbitrarily torn up.
Third, farmers' costs could be sharply reduced if the government provided low-interest credit, with preference given to those with greatest need. Moreover, farmers should not be forced to mortgage their land in order to obtain loans.
Fourth, reducing taxes farmers pay could further slash costs. The only tax should be a sharply graduated income tax on the wealthy.
Fifth, the government should guarantee farmers a market and income for the products of their labor to meet their production costs and have a decent living.
Sixth, watch-dog committees of farmers, unionists, and consumers groups should be established to counter the attempt by big business to drive a wedge between farmers and wage workers by asserting that farmers' demands for a living income will drive up grocery store prices.
Through solidarity and united action among working farmers - those with contracts and those without, those from the Northeast and those from the Midwest, those from Canada and Mexico and those from the United States, those who are native-born and those who are immigrants, those who grow soy beans and those who produce tobacco - a powerful movement to fight for farmers can be built. And when collaboration between fighting farmers and militant workers who are beginning to resist worsening conditions grows, the foundations will begin to be laid, both in this country and internationally, for those who toil on the land and in the factories, who produce the country's vast wealth, to conduct a revolutionary struggle to replace big- business rule with a government of workers and farmers.