For most of this century, beginning before the stock market crash of 1929, Americans have been told that the nation's farmers produced huge food surpluses and that overproduction was one of the primary causes of the crash and the following years of depression. The "overproduction" theme has served as the foundation for 80 years of ruinous federal intrusion and manipulation inflicted on American food producers since FDR signed the Agricultural Adjustment Act into law in 1933. But the entire overproduction theme song is a hoax based on half-truths, omissions and downright lies, according to some investigators attempting to create an accurate picture of the farm scene. Dan P. Gorder, in his 1966 book Ill Fares the Land, outlines the historical origins of this web of deception, using the government's own figures. The figures were there all the time, he said, but journalists have never been interested enough in farm problems to analyze government records which are guaranteed to give anyone trying to figure them out a headache.
Most people are familiar with today's huge U. S. trade deficits, but this article will focus only on the early century beginnings of our food-base-destroying policies. Tom Anderson said in his introduction to Van Gorder's book that "the only real surplus is a surplus of government workers." For forty years the bureaucrats have been farming the farmers and milking the taxpayers, multiplying in the agencies while the number of family farms and a culturally strong way of life have shrunk to a fraction. Anderson said (and remember this was in 1966) that "the government spends more on agriculture per farmer than most farmers make from farming (today the average net income for farmers is $20,000)."
The figures Van Gorder compiled are no doubt eyebrow-raisers even to most farmers:
Between 1919 and 1938 we exported 2,225,000 tons of sugar while importing 62,535,000 tons... 28 pounds of sugar imported for every pound we exported. Between 1960 and 1964 we exported only 22,600 tons and imported 20,126,000 tons... one pound of exported sugar for every 888 pounds imported! Sugar beets can be grown almost anywhere in the U.S, yet, in those five years between 1960 and 1964, the U.S. Government paid a total of $407,589,000 for farmers not to grow sugar beets. Does that make sense? Americans were being told that the U.S. had far too many farms, yet it would have required 1,700,000 acres of sugar beets alone to produce the sugar we imported in an average year.
Between 1919 and 1938 we exported 746,000 tons of dry field beans but imported 817,000 tons! We exported 530 million tons of fresh vegetables while importing 2,205 million tons. We exported 10,139,000 tons of fresh fruits but still imported 24,917,000 tons.
American poultrymen sold 366 million dozen eggs abroad between 1919 and 1938, but imported 733 million dozen eggs.
One of the most common ways government obscures information (then and now) is to publish production and export figures while omitting the impact of population growth and imports, which if they are published at all are in separate, inconspicuous placements where busy people don't relate and compare them to production and export. A good example is commodity grains... wheat, corn, barley, rye, oats, etc. Domestic supply per capita of those grains in 1900 was 2,585 and down to 1,692 pounds in 1938.
Between 1919 and 1938 we imported 1.5 million tons more beef than we exported, and between 1928 and 1938 we imported 655 million pounds more of combined beef, lamb, veal and pork than we exported. This was at the very time when government was slaughtering millions of head of domestic livestock on ranches, farms and Indian reservations because supposedly we had too many... even though countless Americans were going hungry during the depression years. Oldtimers in my area of central Arizona told me livestock was slaughtered and burned because government policy prohibited use of the meat. (Some government "terminators," however, looked in the other direction while carcasses disappeared.)
Van Gorder described dairy production as a "realm of government wrecking, experimentation and misrepresentation so vast and disasterous that it defies description." Government records on dairy production were not kept until 1924 but between 1924 and 1938 U.S. dairy exports were 6,757 million pounds... compared to 13,981 million pounds of dairy product imports. If we had not exported a single pound of dairy products in those years our domestic consumption would have exceeded domestic production by 7 billion pounds! Yet the government ordered the elimination of six to seven million cows and heifers!
And that's how thousands upon thousands of U.S. farmers were driven out of business through preference trade policies designed to rebuild Europe after World War I, and sold to the American public on the fabrication that there were too many farms producing too much.
Today, the number of American farms continue to shrink (down to less than two million from six million in 1936), concentrated into factory farms, or abandoned altogether, crushed under soaring overhead and government policies. Millions of acres are urbanized or idled each year. Six percent of corporate farms now account for more than 60 percent of farm income. Only three percent of U.S. farms have sales of over $500,000 and they are the ones that receive the lion's share of much-maligned government subsidies. These subsidies stimulate "overproduction," economic analyst say, and create ever more dependency on... subsidies. Meanwhile 75 to 90 percent of once independent American farmers are classified by the government as "hobby" farmers because they require non-farm income to support their families, supposedly because there are too many of them.
And as Americans become ever more reliant on food imports (today, as sixty years ago, we import twice as many "fresh" vegetables as we export), the term "overproduction" appears to be as deliberately obfuscating as ever.
The Chinese regard internal food independence as a high-priority national security issue. Maybe in that regard, at least, we should borrow a page from their book