Action must be taken to fight Farming Monopolies!
In rural regions like Alberta, there is a growing issue of corporate investors monopolizing land. This monopolization of farmland drives out the competition in the industry and allows corporate farming entities to manipulate resources beyond the typical scope of smaller farming communities. The result is an increase in the price of food, increased prices for the procurement of land elsewhere (the effects of which include increasing housing costs, and costs on smaller businesses both inside and outside of the agricultural sector), the disregard for the environment, and the fueling of climate change, and the allowance of “Big Farming” to flex power over the local governments in the affected areas.
“Big Farming,” says its actions are good. Food production is more unprecedented every year, the world is in no shortage of food, and the actions that the industry’s critics call an “assault on biodiversity”, “Big Farming” contends that it actually opens the door to low-cost cost farming opportunities for the aspirant through land rentals. Local farmers say otherwise, they say that the Farming conglomerates are depriving them of sovereignty and forcing them to exist in a lose-lose market. Either try to compete with “Big Farming” and go broke or make a merger profit by selling yourself to the investor class. But yes, food production is unprecedented, and there are two questions to ask, A) Is the present cost worth it, and B) Can a different approach to food governance achieve the same result but more equitably?
I think the answer to A) is obviously no! Food insecurity has grown at the same time that food production has reached unprecedented levels. People cannot afford to eat what is being produced and the amount of food waste is reaching unprecedented levels, primarily being fueled by industry, not people. The costs of procuring the current global food supply are not paying off for the common person. The answer to B is a complicated yes. The prime advantage of corporate farming is indeed in the mass mobilization of resources to fuel food production and I don’t believe that other models could match that as of yet (perhaps they will with the advancement of technology), but as was alluded earlier that’s not inherently problematic given all the food waste which would decline. Of course that all depends on our model.
The mainstream proposal for reorganizing our agricultural sector is to toughen “anti-trust” activities. Break up the conglomerates into smaller enterprises to give more breathing room to smaller competitors such as independent farmers. This is what most independent farmers want while more progressive policymakers have called not just for the breakup of farming monopolies but their “democratization” as well, in the pursuit of “sustainable farming”. Independent Farmers ideally would be small enough to be isolated to “territorial markets”, a territorial market being one where resources are so scarce that the conservation of biodiversity becomes necessarily in-built into the market model. For larger farms, these would either become “farming cooperatives”, or in the case of sustained private ownership, workers would be unionized, and the corporate entity, subject to food boards (quasi-governmental bodies charged with the oversight of regional food systems through the use of regulation and fee levying). I’m not particular about any of these proposals and believe each has its merits, some more than others. I, however, propose something else.
The monopolization of farmland is a perfect opportunity to test the proposed land value tax. A progressive tax that seeks to extract taxable value from the concentration of land, its implementation could achieve the goals of land reform or provide an off-setting opportunity if said reform fails. On principle, the land tax should be relatively high for large concentrations, let’s say in our theoretical example, 51% at minimum for these lands owned by “Big Farming”. I say on principle because I believe “man”, as an extension of his natural right to bodily sovereignty, has a right to claim exclusive ownership of, and the right to manipulate the planet’s resources for self-benefit. The two are inextricably linked in my eyes, for what sense would it make to say a man has a right to control his body if he cannot use his body to interact with the material world? Combining this with the unchanging supply of land (neither decreasing nor increasing) and its necessity for human activity, its communalistic properties are elevated higher than would be for the other factors of production (labour and capital). This line of reasoning is why socialists wish to nationalize land but, in my mind, a heavy tax is a suitable middle ground. Since land is a necessity for anything and given its unchanging supply, it unlike, the other factors of production offers a more stable tax base for the procurement of public revenue. Landowners could only escape a hefty land tax by selling land. This is where we get our panacea.
To quickly avoid hefty taxation, we can predict that investors will sell off land at lower prices than they bought it. We can predict that other investors will be unlikely to buy this sellable land given the penalty so either the state will grab it or those who have been priced out of the market such as small independent farmers will buy it instead. The land value tax would achieve the goal of anti-trust and progressive land reform. However, if for some reason the reform doesn’t work, the existence of a stabilized and large source of public revenue can be used to fund offsets to monopolization whether that be rebating food bills for the people to fight food insecurity, investing in green farming technology and conservation, or subsidizing smaller farms, etc. The land value tax has a mechanism for achieving desired results that standard regulatory pursuits do not.
Only time will tell if we have the political will for such an idea.