Paying Farmers Fairly Could Curb Climate Change and Hunger

During a recent campaign stump through the Midwest, Bernie Sanders walked the fields in Iowa, posed on a tractor, and galvanized the rural crowd with a word not spoken by a presidential candidate in many decades: parity.

Paying farmers a fair price that affords a decent
lifestyle can play its part in softening climate change.

Though foreign to most of the voting public, parity is at the core of agriculture’s potential to address the farm, food, and climate crises.

Parity is the notion that family farmers should be paid a fair price for their product—one that covers their costs and provides them with a decent livelihood. According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, “The idea of parity stemmed from a continuous search for a concrete measure of economic justice for the farmer.”

Farmers had parity in 1914, just before the United States entered World War I. It was the “Golden Age” of U.S. agriculture, when a bushel of corn bought five gallons of gasoline. (No one suspected that seven years later it would take two bushels just to buy one gallon.) At the beginning of the war, U.S. farmers profited as Europeans relied more and more on food from the United States. But when German U-boats sank U.S. supply ships going to Europe, the United States entered the “War to End All Wars.” High wartime grain prices, plentiful credit, and new Ford tractors led to an agricultural boom. Land values rose dramatically. Farmers took out second, third, and fourth mortgages and bought more land. Financing flowed, and land speculation was rampant. Fortunes were made on Wall Street and in the North American heartland.

Then the war ended.

Read the story from Yes! magazine Eric Holt-Giménez and Heidi Kleiner - “Paying Farmers Fairly Could Curb Climate Change and Hunger."