>big livestock and poultry combines such as Smithfield and Tyson,
>which through "vertical integration" have reduced chicken farmers to
>peonage and now are attempting to do the same thing to pig and
>cattle raisers. Now you can take the view that as long as Safeway or
>Albertson's has its shelves stocked then it does not matter whether
>the food was grown by a family farmer in the Midwest or one one of
>Othal Brand's plantations in Mexico, where workers are underpaid and
>crops are dosed with pesticides that are banned north of the border,
>but I don't understand how that squares with a socialist worldview
>either.
It doesn't, of course. I've read all about the chicken biz in Southern Exposure, and it sounds hellishly expoitative and ecologically disastrous. But I also don't understand how "family farming" - which can be very big, no? involving migrant employees and futures contracts, no? - squares witha socialist worldview either. To the inevitable annoyance of Carrol - who's out there in farm country - I'm putting these out mostly as questions, even if there isn't a question mark ending every sentence.
Doug