The Union Farmer Quarterly/Fall 2001

- by Helen Forsey, Quarterly Editor

This Hallowe'en, a bunch of corporate CEOs are dressing up as farmers and going out trick-or-treating. Dressed in overalls and rubber boots, they'll knock on the doors of government offices across this country looking for goodies. But it won't be apples and candies and peanuts that will fill their bags. Instead, they'll come away gleefully clutching tax exemptions, regulation exemptions, low-interest loans, training and construction monies, rural development grants, and hearty official endorsements.

It's Hallowe'en all year round for the big transnational agribusiness corporations, and that's been true for some time. The corporate-driven industrialization of agriculture has been happening for close to fifty years, but in the past decade it has taken forms which society can no longer ignore. The most obvious is the exploding numbers of "intensive livestock operations" (ILOs), commonly known as mega-barns.

Hundreds of these monumental pieces of corporate mischief are now strewn across the Canadian landscape, with more being built or plotted every week. Sometimes the companies themselves are the miscreants; in other cases they carry out their pranks by proxy, recruiting ambitious or desperate farmers to build the barns, dig the lagoons, and take the flak. In either case, the profits flow to the board rooms and the sludge flows out into the countryside.

For these corporations, "trick or treat" isn't a special once-a-year custom; it's simply business as usual.

And you can forget the "or". As the pile of treats grows, the tricksaccumulate as well: contamination of ground and surface water, air pollution, dismal wages and working conditions, damage to local roads, plunging property values, chronically inhumane conditions for the animals - the list goes on. And the pace and scale of the damage are far more alarming than any Hallowe'en prank.

Perhaps the sneakiest trick of all is the way these companies manage to hoodwink the public by posing as farmers. Together with their allies in some of the establishment farm organizations, they claim that their multi-million-dollar pork or mushroom factories are just family farms struggling to compete. They paint their opponents, rural or urban, as "anti-farm" - selfish and ignorant non-farmers who don't understand rural realities. Then in full farmer costume they go out and collect the benefits that governments have put in place for "agriculture", and head for the bank, their laughter muffled by their masks