On milk and monopolies. 31 March 2010 1:22 pm
Posted by Tracy in : agriculture,books,economics,geekery,GMOs,milk,politics,reading,school , trackbackSo yesterday I spent some quality time (read: almost four hours) in the Rose Reading Room of the main branch of the New York Public Library, blasting through Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink
I definitely preferred the earlier chapters of Nature’s Perfect Food, which focused on the social, cultural, and political history of milk consumption, to the second part of the book, which focused on milk production. But again, I read the whole dang thing in one sitting, and maybe my attention was just flagging towards the end, so of course those parts seemed less awesome. In particular, I wish I’d had more time to really work on the chapters that addressed the political economy of dairy farming in New York State, since that reading was heck of timely. You see, just this Monday, New York State dairy farmers met with U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Agriculture officials (official government announcement here) as part of the public phase of joint DOJ-USDA work on monopolistic practices in agribusiness. This USDA-DOJ collaboration is potentially a really big deal; it’s been a long time since the federal government took major antitrust action against the food/agriculture industry, and I don’t think the USDA has ever been included in such investigations before. Here’s the New York Times coverage of that program’s public launch, earlier this month, and here’s a report from the first joint DOJ-USDA workshops in Ankeny, Iowa, courtesy of Civil Eats. And thanks to the DuPuis reading, I have a little more background about how dairy farmers in New York state have been a little more screwed-over than their counterparts in other states (particularly Wisconsin and California, the country’s other major dairy producers). Long story short, the rural-urban divide in New York is such that farm policies were often designed with a “country serves the city” model in mind, which meant encouraging farmers to increase profits by producing more, thus driving down prices. Other states, with more powerful dairy industry lobbies, tended to favor what DuPuis calls a more “producerist” approach instead of the “productivism” seen in New York.
Which leads me to recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), since that’s a classic productivist strategy if ever I saw one: when in doubt, make more! Which leads me to recombinant DNA technology and in particular the Monsanto corporation’s domination thereof… which leads me to holy cats, a U.S. District Court judge struck down a gene patenting law on Monday! As I commented to the friend who first linked to that article on Facebook, between this case and the approaching expiration date on Monsanto’s patent on Roundup Ready soy, I should ought to be in intellectual property AND food geek AND health politics wonk heaven for, well, the forseeable future. Also: twitchier than ever about the U.S. Supreme Court. Yow.
Anyway, here’s a few more New York Times articles following up on the court’s decision and its consequences, and here’s what I wrote about GM food just this month and back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I was still taking classes at the University of Oregon. And now I must hustle myself over to yet another branch of the New York Public Library, to read about aquaculture!
