DeVore: What is the connection between recent attacks on township government, corporate consolidation and globalization?

Heffernan: There’s a connection between economic democracy, if you will, and political democracy. The question has long been raised, “Can you really have political democracy if you do not have economic democracy?” If you are controlled in your vote, controlled because your job really depends on it, you really can’t have democracy. So when you’ve got broiler growers for example, and increasingly hog growers, who have a big contract with a particular firm, and that firm is quite active in the political arena, those people do not feel very free to speak democratically. You can go talk with a grower and he’ll tell you all about the problems with the contract that he has, but you can’t ever get them to come up and testify before an ag committee of the state government. They are afraid to speak.

My concern is that what we call the global food system is evolving so you have maybe four or five food system clusters. And within each of those clusters you have three or four dominant firms starting with one of the five firms that control the biotechnology and so therefore basically control the seed industry right on down through the processing of grains and the handling of grains, moving it around the world, right through the production of animals and right onto the supermarket shelf. So when farmers get hooked into this kind of a system, basically all the economic decisions get made by these major firms. And these major firms have little concern about what happens in local communities. They don’t really care about the social situation in a local community, or about the schools. They live outside the community and increasingly some of them may live outside the country.

In this country and here in Minnesota you’ve got companies that want to move in and in a sense reap some of the benefits of the local area without paying all the costs; i.e., they mess up the environment, they mess up the social structure of the community and so forth. And so one of the reasons they don’t want the local folks to make the decisions is that they know that they don’t want to cover all the costs. These corporations are excellent at pushing the costs back onto the public. You hear the term public-private partnership a lot these days. I sort of laugh and say yeah, it’s public-private partnership all right, but the public picks up all the costs and the private sector gets all the benefits. And what we’re talking about here is the people are saying wait a minute, we want to control this.

So essentially they are using their economic might as a way to get political control to change the rules and regulations. Basically they want the zoning requirements and environmental criteria to be as minimal as possible and to be the same across all the counties. Many transnationals are basically trying to do this on a national level. They would like all criteria to be at the same, minimal level across the nation. These companies like it national so they can concentrate their lobbyists. In fact, they would like all nations to have the same low standards. And they want to influence how it’s set up. And really right now they are trying to use state laws to override what had been rights given to the local community. And by and large the local communities no longer feel they can make the decisions that really affect the health and well being of their communities.

Here in Minnesota you’re seeing a drive to weaken local zoning, but it’s not just a Minnesota issue. Quite the contrary, it’s a real concentrated effort to weaken local democracy on a national basis. We ran into the same problems with the same companies down in Missouri. As a result, in Missouri health ordinances got weakened a bit this year. In Nebraska, they have the I-300 initiative on corporate farming, and that’s being challenged this year. Iowa has had its problems with local zoning. Pennsylvania has had its problem with local control. The reality of it is throughout the Midwest and into the Northeast you’re seeing these kinds of efforts to weaken local control.

DeVore: But agribusiness argues that reducing local restrictions is the only way farming will remain globally competitive.

Heffernan: Most people do not argue much as to what the current structure is. The neoclassical economists who are really giving academic legitimacy to the corporation and to this industrialized agriculture—this doesn’t include all economists but that’s the major paradigm right now—argue that what we are seeing evolving is basically the way it’s going to be, that there’s not much we can do about it. This is sort of a natural system, they say. In fact I’ve seen them use the term “natural system,” and they say that this is an evolutionary, natural process. We can tinker around a little bit on the edges with some policy, but basically they argue it’s because of economic efficiency that goes with size that this system is inevitable. Most of the rest of the social scientists like myself as a sociologist argue there’s nothing inevitable about this system. The rules and regulations were put together by humans and they can be changed by humans. In fact, they are being changed by humans accept they are being changed to further benefit the big firms. There’s nothing inevitable about this system.

DeVore: So what can citizens like the people at this meeting do to counter this drive toward consolidation and the destruction of local democracy?

Heffernan: Well, the major thing here is to try and preserve the local zoning and keep as much power with the local people so they can control their destiny. And that’s not easy—when you’re up against these people they use their money to influence the political system, let’s be honest about it. Without some real stringent election reforms and so on, we’ve got a problem.

The other thing is to really appeal to the larger world. The farmers—whether they are going to become hired workers or they’re going to become growers like contract broiler producers and hog producers—are going to come out on the short end of where we’re heading. I think it’s almost getting big enough that we’re talking about a social movement of people who are beginning to challenge the system. We can do all we possibly can as farmers and rural communities, but ultimately it’s going to take the larger consuming population to get concerned and understand how concentrated the food system is today—a handful of firms that are basically deciding what gets produced, where it gets produced, how it gets produced, who in fact gets to eat.

And it won’t be until consumers really get involved and vote with their feet a bit that we’re really going to change this system. We simply have got to be finding ways of putting together an alternative food system. That’s even more key in times like we have now of international unsustainability, with concerns of terrorism and so on. We are very rapidly moving toward a time when we will become a net importer of food and agriculture products. Now the consumer really needs to think about what that means for our country to become food dependent, particularly as oil prices go up, I might add. The movement is starting; the question is will it come fast enough? I think the system will fall apart on its own. It may take 20 years but I don’t think it’s a sustainable system. The question is, will it be an evolutionary change, or is it going to take some sort of crisis of some kind to bring it down?

Just think what would happen if Cargill would implode like Enron did. They handle 50 percent of the grain that moves around the world. What would happen? Would we not have the grain move? Would a government take over? Would our government take over? You talk about shades of what we fought in the Soviet Union.