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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 12. New Blows to Southern Agriculture During the ’Thirties: Trends and Policies - 7. Labor Organizations - 8. The Dilemma of Agricultural Policy
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264 An American Dilemma
It is difficult to see how the federal government would be able to cope
more successfully with the displacement problem and with other problems
developing as a consequence of economic trends, agricultural policy, and the
War, without having the farm workers organized and their interests and
opinions articulated. When after the present War the government is faced
with the problem of reformulating its agricultural program for the South,
we should expect that it will find it necessary at least to protect the Southern
tenants in their legal right to organize strong unions.
8. The Dilemma of Agricultural Policy
If the farm workers become organized in the South, whether by their
own efforts or by government encouragement, and if their organizations are
able to enter into successful collective bargaining with the planters, any
success in raising the earnings and living levels for farm labor on Southern
plantations will accentuate^ or rather make explicit in form of unemploy-
menty the basic over-population of Southern agriculture. Any policy which
will improve levels of living, thereby increasing costs to plantation owners,
will stimulate mechanization and will displace cotton by other crops which
do not require so much labor. In the long-range view this might be desir-
able, in terms both of economic rationality and of human welfare. But the
immediate effect, if vigorous countermeasures to remove the surplus popula-
tion from the cotton land are not taken, would be accentuated unemploy-
ment, and the Negroes would be hurt the most. This is the dilemma of
agricultural policy in the South.
The dilemma is, of course, much more general. It is at the bottom of all
agricultural policy in America and elsewhere. The ultimate objective in
attempting to raise the living levels for farmers and to protect their eco-
nomic security must be to make agricultural production more efficient
—
be it through the lowering of the credit rates, through the use of more
mechanical equipment, through improvement of livestock and plants,
through teaching the farmers how to use better techniques and how to plan
their operations in a more economical manner. But all this must make the
tendency toward over-production even more pronounced. It must lower
the number of acres and workers required for satisfying a given demand.
Some experts, like the agro-biologist, O. W. Wilcox, even go so far as to
believe . . that if the most productive methods now known were gener-
ally applied, then it would be possible for 1,600,000 farmers on 40,000,000
acres to produce as much of our eight principal crops as are now produced
by six or seven million farmers on ^bout 240,000,000.”*®
This may be an exaggeration. But it seems obvious that the increase in
production which, within a not-too-distant future, would be technologically
possible to achieve, is large compared even with the largest conceivable
needs of the American people. According to certain estimates, if all families
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