A few weeks ago I was in an old Burgundian town in central France, huddled inside a house as a suffocating heat enveloped the land.

It was 105 degrees beyond those walls, just as it had been the day before. 105 degrees was four degrees above a record high of 101, and 26 degrees above the average temperature during the traditionally hottest month of the year there. This was the second heat wave in France in the space of three weeks, notable not just for the historical temperature records those canicules broke, but also for how deeply they desiccated a generally wet country.

Bretagne, where I live, is the wettest part of France. Its climate is comparable to that the Pacific Northwest of the United States: rain all winter, short summers with only a few hot days. Yet in the news the last few weeks have been multiple debates about diverting large amounts of water from reservoirs in order to stave off a farming crisis caused by the droughts. The situation is much worse elsewhere in France, with water warnings issued in multiple départements and an unrelated (-ish) radioactive contamination of the Loire, France's longest river, affecting not just agriculture but drinking water in cities.

Perhaps those of you reading this in the United States can somewhat sympathize with these problems, seeing as something quite similar recently happened to much of the east coast and mid-west. The weather there's been “unusually" warm as well, following an “unusually" cold winter and a series of torrential rains that (perhaps you've heard) threaten a significant amount of the American food supply.

If perchance you haven't heard this last part, that's hardly surprising. Though catastrophic climate events make for interesting news stories, food insecurity isn't something the capitalist media is necessarily keen to broadcast. Besides being a matter of potential unrest (hungry people often revolt), one of the supposed victories of capitalism is that we've progressed far beyond the famines, droughts, and the food shortages which mark the “developing" and “primitive" world.

Those old enough to remember Reaganite propaganda will understand this more readily than I suspect younger folks will. Television in the 80's, particularly news and political programs, devoted intense coverage to famines in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, with particular attention to countries who were not part of what was then called “The First World" (the US, Europe, and other developed capitalist nations). [By the way, the “Second World" was communist-aligned countries, and “Third World" referred to the unaligned states over which the first and second worlds warred]

Such media became a kind of relentless litany of the failures of State Communism and “tribal" or “primitive" forms of government, all serving to reinforce within the American mind that capitalism was a triumph and the rest of the world just needed to get with the program.

Of course, this propaganda obscured food production crises in the United States. One such crisis was the widespread loss of small family-held farms throughout the country during the 1980's. The story of how this happened will be familiar to anyone who was paying attention during the housing crisis in 2009 (which nearly destroyed the entire global financial system). In fact, the mechanism was the same.

"God Bless The USA"

In the late 70's, grain prices were unusually high, meaning there was suddenly more profit to be made in growing and selling grain than other crops. Farmers who wanted to take advantage of these high profits expanded their production and moved away from other crops, greatly increasing the amount of grain on the market. Banks, seeing the potential to profit also, began lending money to farmers at cheaper interest rates. All this readily-available credit encouraged farmers to purchase more land to devote to grain production, again increasing the overall supply of grain.

Incidentally, also increasing this supply was an unexpected embargo against grain sales to the U.S.S.R., implemented as a retaliation for the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. That invasion of course is what led the United States to train and fund a young Saudi Arabian man, Osama bin Laden, to fight the Soviets. History is never an isolated narrative.

When supply outstrips demand, prices fall. This is because sellers (who in capitalism are always competing with each other) reduce their prices in order to convince buyers to purchase their goods. And since sellers are competing with each other for buyers, when one seller lowers their price, others will often lower their own just a little more. Multiply this by thousands or millions of competing sellers trying to profit from the same sort of product and you often have sudden market collapses.

A market collapse occurs when prices fall so low that sellers or producers (or in this case, farmers) not only do not profit from their sales, they actually lose money. That's what happened to farmers in the early 1980's: grain prices fell so low that farmers were selling at a loss and therefore couldn't pay back the money they'd borrowed from banks to expand their grain production.

Two figures between 1980 and 1990 will help you understand the depth of the problem. The first number is the amount of farms lost: 548,000 (just over half a million). But a more relevant number is the change in farming population between 1980 and 1990: 3,661,000. That is, 3.7 million fewer farmers existed in the US from 1980 to 1990, while only half a million farms disappeared.

This is what happened during the housing crisis as well: everyone was trying to sell houses at the same time, spurred on by initial high prices. This flooded the housing market, caused prices to plummet, and then the market collapsed. In both situations, sellers (farmers or house-owners) had gotten themselves into severe debt, betting that future profit would more than make up for their risk.

One thing not mentioned in either case, however, is what happened to all those extra properties (farms and houses) after the collapse. In both cases, finance capitalists and corporations (American and foreign) who had much more capital to draw from than average farmers or home-buyers, snatched up the indebted property for very small amounts of money. This is what has led to the concentration of massive amounts of land (in the form of farms or houses) into fewer and fewer hands within the United States.

Historical events in which large groups of people suddenly lose everything they have because of capitalist and government manipulation usually result in civil unrest or revolt. But of course, in America such events never do. No small part of the fault for this is leftist abandonment of people groups deemed ignorant or backwards. In the case of farmers (who are in the US mostly but not all white), no leftist group in the United States has given any serious attention to their plight for almost a century.

Leftists (by which I particularly mean urban, college-educated leftists) tend to think of rural populations (especially farmers) as an inherently right-leaning group of people, hopelessly Republican, Christian, and racist. Many of them indeed are now, but there's nothing intrinsic to working the land or living outside of a city that makes them so. Instead, besides leftist abandonment of their causes, the reason why rural and farming populations skew right in the US is because right-wing political groups, politicians, and capitalist interests spend a lot of money (particularly through propaganda) to make them (and keep them) that way.

If government propaganda to make farmers right-wing seems far-fetched, you probably are too young to remember the best example of this, Lee Greenwood's “God Bless The USA." Lee Greenwood, besides having written perhaps the most horrific patriotic song in American history, was also incidentally appointed by Ronald Reagan to the National Endowment of the Arts advisory council (the same NEA that conservatives wanted to defund because of Robert Mapplethorpe). While the song itself is quite atrocious, the video shows the depth and brilliance of such propaganda: