The Union Farmer Quarterly/Fall 2001

ILOs are not just a new and more modern way of farming, a quantitative increase in the scale and intensity of food production. Instead, they represent a qualitative escalation, almost a quantum leap. And as we have seen, the change is anything but benign. As Romeo Bouchard of Quebec's Union Paysanne describes it, "Industrial agriculture, of which the pork industry is only one illustration, goes against nature, tortures animals, degrades soils and landscapes, contaminates water, reduces the farmer to indentured labour, jeopardizes food safety, eliminates family farms and depopulates the countryside."

The loyal opposition to this distorted version of agriculture is a remarkably diverse and decentralized farmer-citizen alliance fighting mega-barns in each of our communities and on the national and international levels. That alliance is on the front line in the struggle for the family farm, food security, environmental health, food safety, and democracy itself. The National Farmers Union is proud to be a part of it.

But let's not kid ourselves. The forces of industrial agriculture have huge resources, massive clout, and incredible gall. Like Taiwan Corporation and Metz Farms, they are used to having their own way, and they can be very nasty when they see that threatened. They spend huge sums of money to wage lengthy wars of attrition which take over their opponents' lives and divide and sicken communities. They use lawyers' letters and injunctions, bullying and vandalism, bureaucratic delays and run-arounds, media and peer pressure, and their immense economic power. Most insidiously of all, they use the propaganda of inevitability.

There is something eerily familiar about the claims of the corporate ILO promoters and their big-farm allies: that this industrialization process is predestined, that it represents progress, that there is no real alternative for agriculture. Ah, yes - that's what we're constantly being told about Free Trade, genetic engineering, the erosion of democracy, the globalization of investment and return. In fact, it's the very same voices saying it - the voices we heard in Seattle and Quebec City - the big agribusiness transnationals and their friends in politics and the bureaucracy and in well-heeled "agriculture industry" organizations.

They dress up in their Hallowe'en costumes and make the rounds - Seattle, Quebec, Genoa, Qatar, Kananaskis - collecting their treats and working their vicious mischief. And as they go, they keep singing the same "inevitability" refrain over and over, hoping we'll fall for it, or at least allow ourselves to be tricked into indifference or despair, so that we'll give up the struggle and just let it all happen.

Well, if the fight that citizens are waging against ILOs is any indication, giving up does not seem like a likely scenario. Fred Tait is adamant. "This is not fate, not inevitable," he repeats. "It is a plan, designed by others. If we expect someone else to do our fighting for us, we don't have a chance. But when the people take charge and say, 'Here is our vision, our plan' - that is when we win."