research continues for good texts to go with the many images i've collected for my industrial agriculture collage zine.
i think this quote from the book "the agricultural dilemma: how not to feed the world" by glenn stone is going to make it in:
"Our real dilemma is how to unthink the entrenched belief that we will starve without new tricks from scientists and input industries when in reality we have been locked on a treadmill of subsidized over-production for over the last century. When agriculture is industrialized — driven by those input industries and the perennial support and subsidy they need from the public purse — it grows inexorably at the expense of our economy, environment, and health."
my digging in old USDA periodicals like "agricultural research" and "foreign agriculture" certainly supports this conclusion as well. at this point i'm pretty convinced that the main goals of international food aid after WWII was to deal with excess agricultural stock here in the US (aka, overproduction), and to further US foreign policy goals of giving stuff to asian countries to avoid them "going communist". and yes, all of the overproduction was subsidized by the US gov. in fact, in the early 60s, the US gov had to pay farmers to not grow things because they were growing so much that prices were extremely low.
also, USDA leaders were explicit in their own publications that their efforts were not supporting small farmers (who were largely getting left out of all the glorious modernization) - they were supporting middle-scale and larger farms, because everything was geared toward volume and export.
