Why Wildflowers?

originally published May 2, 2007

Four years ago, a small group of people who live out on the south end of Barnett Shoals Road decided that threats to one of the last remaining rural roads in Athens-Clarke County and surrounding greenspace needed to be brought to the attention of the community. Having been broad-sided by the approval and building of the Milford Hills subdivision, many people vowed to never ever let that kind of development happen again, but our efforts were largely piecemeal and sometimes ineffective. Between Whitehall Road and Bob Godfrey Road, there are over 28 neighborhoods and well over 1,000 properties, several of which are large and prime targets for development, particularly conservation subdivision development. While individually and in small groups, efforts to change the conservation subdivision development ordinances had been successful, this small group felt that a different way of trying to preserve this area might work more effectively than constant skirmishes with developers, the Planning Commission, the Planning Department and the Mayor and Commission. Why not use sugar instead of vinegar to reach the same ends? The outcome of this thinking was the Wildflower Celebration. This year marks our fourth year of inviting the entire Athens community out to see this special part of the county for themselves.

A Report

We’d like to offer a report on just how well our plan worked. There’s some good and bad news; we’ll start with the good. Our original hope was to form a coalition of the neighborhoods out here and we’ve mostly achieved this goal. After a couple of years of distributing flyers about the Wildflower Celebration to the entire community,we think our neighbors recognize “us” when we produce flyers at other times of the year.

Now for the bad news. We continue to have to fight off threats to keeping our road rural in nature and overdevelopment at bay. One critical threat, as we see it, is a plan to widen the road from Whitehall Road to beyond Barnett Shoals Elementary School. Originally, we thought this would just involve widening the road enough to bring it up to the width standards required by the state. Then came the plan to correct the Barnett Shoals/ Old Lexington Road merge by reconfiguring the intersection and putting in a traffic light. A traffic light was seen by many as the first of many that might eventually march down the road. The result of two public meetings was a request for a study of the entire corridor in order to encourage overall planning rather than piecemeal approaches to solving traffic problems. But the lesson here is “be careful what you wish for,” because the study resulted in a plan to widen the road to five lanes in some parts and four lanes in front of the school. Parents were particularly upset with this proposal.

At the third and last transportation meeting, the five lanes were down to two with a third lane for turning in front of the school. But in the plans, the traffic light remains at the Barnett Shoals/ Old Lexington Road intersection and a second has been added. While some residents beyond the Old Lexington Road intersection would like to see a traffic light, many people who live further out would prefer a modern roundabout that would be not only safer, but more aesthetically pleasing. It remains to be seen whether these planned changes to the road will be made real. (On a more positive note, the “Corridor Management Plan” developed by the Planning Department, and recently approved by the ACC Commission, designated our portion of Barnett Shoals as rural, so that should help us in the long run.)

Both Sides of the County Line

Road-widening and traffic lights are not the only threats we continue to face. An approved development off Barnett Shoals started out with an unusually high density not in keeping with the character of the homes in the area, though its proposed density has been reduced. Several large parcels are for sale at the moment, and each time this happens we hold our collective breath.

Just across the county line in Oconee County, a developer is attempting to rezone over 268 acres in order to put in a dense golf-related development at the intersection of Barnett Shoals and Bob Godfrey roads. The project has been deemed a negative “development of regional impact” by the Northeast Georgia Regional Development Center. If built, this development will obliterate what is perhaps the most historically and archeologically significant area in Oconee County, as well as bringing more traffic down Barnett Shoals Road into Athens, further crowding our road and threatening, again, the rural nature of this marvelous part of Athens-Clarke County.

Finally, a note to other neighborhoods who are thinking of forming larger coalitions in ACC corridors: go ahead with your plans. Once more corridors have coalitions, we might just have a more positive effect on development in our entire community. Until then, though, we remain hopeful in our activism, we’re beginning to think that we may need to let go of the sugar and go back to piss and vinegar in order to be heard.

And one more thing: we invite you to come out to the 4th Annual Wildflower Celebration on Saturday, May 5 from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., with main activities at Athens Montessori School. Please plan to drive or bike the entire road for a glimpse at some wonderful wildflowers and scenic views.

Gail Hoge and Bill Paul

For directions and more information about the Wildflower Celebration, call 706-353-3440.

The 2007 Farm Bill

originally published May 2, 2007

As spring rolls northward across America, the nation’s three million farmers tug at their baseball caps, fire up their tractors, and begin to plant. Farmers decide which crops to plant based on a complex set of factors and pure intuition, but one of the most powerful influences is the agriculture policy of the federal government. The Farm Bill comes up for renewal only once every five years, including 2007.

This year’s Farm Bill will be a massive piece of legislation; the 2002 Farm Bill ran to 421 pages and 10 titles. For the next five years, the Farm Bill will wield a powerful influence on what Americans eat, how many family farmers go bankrupt, how well we conserve our farmland, and even how we fuel our cars. The bill’s influence reaches around the world: stoked by massive government subsidies, the mighty American agriculture industry smothers the farming industries of poor countries. As the bill plows through the halls of Congress this year, an array of progressive groups, free-trade advocates, and corporate lobbyists will wrestle for the soul of American agriculture for years to come.

Farming The Money Fields

American farm policy was originally intended to support family farms. But over the years, farms have consolidated into larger units. Between 1948 and 2002, the number of American farms plummeted from 5.8 million to 2.1 million (according to a Jan. 14 article at www.stateline.org), with these fewer farms now producing 2.6 times as much food as in 1948. Although farmers produce more food per acre, their share of the American food dollar has fallen, from 37 cents in 1954 to 19 cents in 2000 according to the Institute for Food and Development Policy at www.foodfirst.org.

The big winners from agricultural reconstruction have been food processors and the giant trading companies, such as Archer Daniels Midland. Federal farm subsidies have encouraged the consolidation trend, with 74 percent of subsidies now going to 10 percent of farmers and two-thirds of farms receiving no payments at all, according to a September, 2006 article in The Economistand the Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database. U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics show that as subsidies and market forces relentlessly drive prices ever lower, most family farmers are now forced to hold an off-farm job to make ends meet.

A Corn-Fed Country

Before 1972, farm policy held prices up by restraining production. The federal government would pay farmers to hold land out of cultivation, which had environmental benefits as well. If the nation’s farmers still produced too much food, which they frequently did, the government would buy up the surplus and distribute it to low-income families and as foreign aid. The aid helped many hungry families around the world, but sometimes had the perverse effect of driving prices down in the recipient countries, and so discouraging local farmers from growing their own food.

The farm strategy was reversed in 1972 by President Nixon’s agricultural secretary, Earl Butz. Instead of holding back production, farmers would now be paid direct subsidies and encouraged to grow as much as possible. The subsidies go to only five crops: corn, soybeans, cotton, rice and wheat.

As America’s farmers began to flood the market with subsidized crops, food scientists searched for something, anything, to do with the surplus production. One fateful answer to this dilemma was high-fructose corn syrup, which now appears in practically all your canned goods and processed foods (unless you buy organic). The American obesity epidemic has been propelled by, among other factors, a flood of high-fructose corn syrup. A recent New York Times Magazine article by the writer Michael Pollan detailed the conundrum whereby vegetables, organic foods and other nutritious foods are not subsidized, so that junk food is cheaper than nutritious food. In this distorted market, only yuppies and hippies feel they can afford to eat a healthy diet.

The Global Politics of Food

Growing up, I was taught to be proud that “American farmers feed the world.” It is ironic and disturbing to learn that American farmers may now be smothering other countries’ ability to feed themselves. [delete this sentence: A bushel of corn, which currently costs American farmers $2.64 to produce, sells for $1.84 in the global market.] American farmers can sell corn at less than the cost of production because subsidies make up the difference. Farmers in poor countries, without subsidies, cannot compete at these prices even with lower labor costs.

In Mexico, corn is the primary crop of millions of poor farmers, the most vulnerable segment of society. Their meager livelihoods were dependent on tariffs protecting Mexican corn. These protective tariffs have been gradually lowered each year by NAFTA, exposing Mexican farmers to direct competition from the subsidized corn growers of the American grain belt. Oxfam America argues that the resulting economic devastation has been the single largest factor propelling the wave of Mexican immigrants into the United States.

A similar situation exists for cotton. The west African country of Mali, one of the poorest nations in the world, can produce cotton more cheaply than the United States can. One third of Mali’s population is dependent on the cotton industry. But because farm subsidies allow American cotton to be sold well below its cost of production, Malian cotton is not competitive on the world market. The federal government pays $3.4 billion in cotton subsidies each year, more than all of our aid to Africa, according to Oxfam.

In 2004, the World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled that American cotton subsides were in violation of our obligations under free-trade agreements. (Yes, the WTO does get it right sometimes!) Since that time, the cotton subsidies have continued, in defiance of the WTO. However, major corporate players such as Archer Daniels Midland are beginning to accept that eventually, if they want to continue reaping the benefits of open markets elsewhere, American agriculture must bite the bullet. Expect a major catfight over phasing out subsidies in the Farm Bill debate, with the probable outcome of “Not yet.”

The Progressive Alternative

A cluster of anti-hunger and environmental groups, including Bread for the World, the One Campaign, the American Farmland Trust, and Oxfam, has been developing proposals for the Farm Bill. These groups face a moral conundrum: agricultural subsidies have a devastating effect on farmers in poor countries, but removing the subsidies would devastate our own rural communities.

At this point, the progressive agricultural agenda is twofold. First, we should return to a policy more like the New Deal policies of price supports via setting farmland out of production and government purchases of commodities. This would avoid flooding the world market with artificially cheap food. Second, the farm budget should be redirected to support communities, not commodities. One way of doing this is to offer “green payments” for land conservation, wildlife preservation and carbon sequestration. To learn more or to get involved in the progressive campaign for farm reform, visit the websites of the organizations mentioned above.

Dan Everett

Dan Everett teaches computer science at UGA and is active in the Green Party. He can be reached at drdan@uga.edu. This article was reprinted from “The Radish,” the bimonthly newsletter of the Daily Groceries Co-op in Athens. To learn more about Daily, visit www.dailygroceries.org.