Corporate Agricultural Dumping: Growing the Wealth Gap & Harming Farmers

Big Ag harms farmers all over the world and gets rich off of your tax dollars.  Although on its face it would seem obvious that you can't sell at a loss forever and stay in business.  However nobody cares if the farmers stay in business as long as there is money to be made in the highly financialized commodities market.  That's where this Big Ag move is played.  It has long been standard US foreign policy practice to harm the stability and sustainability for lesser countries and in this way creating opportunity for exploitation and lots of profits to be made off the misery.

     The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) has used World Trade Organization formulas to document the systematic dumping of US grown agricultural commodities (specifically wheat, soybeans, corn, cotton, and rice) for two decades. They found that in the wake of the volatile commodity markets that dominated in the period from 2007 to 2013, export prices largely exceeded production costs. In recent years, however, US agricultural commodity dumping has started again. According to IATP's calculations, in 2015 US wheat was exported at 32 percent less than the cost of production, soybeans at 10 percent less, corn at 12 percent less, and rice at 2 percent less.
     Dumping clearly increases inequality between farmers in the global North and South. Less visibly, dumping also worsens incomes and increases inequality within rural America.

Corporate Agricultural Dumping: Growing the Wealth Gap:



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