FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
French Farmers Protest Macron’s Reneging on Raising Crop Prices; U.S. Farm Bankruptcies Rise
Dec. 9, 2018 (EIRNS)—France’s largest farm organization, FNSEA, plans to conduct demonstrations all this week, protesting not only against the excessive green fuel taxes, but also the fact that last week, President Emmanuel Macron’s government announced it was postponing what was to have been a slight raising of the floor prices to farmers. Farmers on both sides of the Atlantic are facing impossibly low prices for their output. In France, under what was called a “field-to-fork” law passed in early November, a 10% increase in the floor price for farmers’ food commodities was to be adopted at a Dec. 5 Cabinet meeting. But it did not happen. Government spokesmen said the measure will be on the Cabinet’s agenda later this month, or early next year, but FNSEA decided to stage protests now, in the midst of the Yellow Vest groundswell.
In the U.S., the trend is becoming worse with family-scale farmers selling out, declaring Chapter 12 bankruptcy, or otherwise reacting to impossible financial conditions. Price levels for corn, soybeans, beef, and milk are far below what is necessary to continue farm operations, with milk being the most acute. Prices have been below costs of production now for four years.
For example, in the Upper Midwest, the number of farms filing for bankruptcy over June 2017-June 2018 doubled in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, going up to 84, from 42, compared to the same period for 2013 to 2014. A spokesman for the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, which released the statistics last month, also reported that the farm bankruptcy and troubled-loan trends have not peaked, but continue to get worse. The Chapter 12 bankruptcy procedure taken by these farms allows for stretching out debt repayment over three years, but there is no guarantee that repayment can be achieved.
In Wisconsin, for example, there is currently around 7,600 total number of dairy herds, after 500 dairy farms were lost in 2017; some 150 of those farms are shut entirely, and the other herds are amalgamated. Wisconsin has lost about half its dairy farms over the past 15 years. The number of cows has remained about the same, with larger operations becoming the norm.
Throughout the farm regions, country towns are now nearly ghost-towns, with shops boarded up, schools and churches closed, and government functions shut down.
