To Revive Rural America, We Must Fix Our Broken Food System

1. Reversing these decisions can help farmers, slaughterhouse workers, and families within the food industry, and would help revive rural communities.
2. These actions would level the playing field for farmers, workers, and small businesses, and restore dignity and respect to workers at all levels of the American food system.
3. The decline of rural communities and the consolidation of the American food system was the result of deliberate policy choices.
4. Perhaps most importantly, the consumer welfare standard is a misguided enforcement strategy because it does not account for the chicken farmers who are squeezed by Tyson, or the slaughterhouse workers whose wages have stagnated even as profits within their industry have soared.
5. Because farmers and other rural workers make less money, they also spend less money within their communities, creating a ripple effect that negatively impacts other local businesses.
6. Beyond the Farm Bill, the inability of either party to challenge concentrated power in the American food system is best illustrated with the meat monopolies.
7. But the best way to reshape America’s food system to benefit rural communities is to restore competition by replacing the current pro-monopoly antitrust regime.
8. To Revive Rural America, We Must Fix Our Broken Food System America’s agricultural system has become extractive, and more and more of the profits are flowing to a few.
9. Why is it, then, that farm working has become automatized, when every geographical spot is by nature special and complicated? How can people get back to highly trained, highly skilled, and highly paid work on farms? I guess the author hints to that small farms are really more efficient than big farms, and that bad government subsidies are to blame, like the Soviet kolkhoz system.
10. Deliberate policy decisions caused the decline in farmers’ share of the food dollar, and many of the same policy decisions explain why wages for slaughterhouse workers have stagnated during the past three decades.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/to-revive-rural-america-we-must-fix-our-broken-food-system/