Lutherans Lead Rally for Fair Farm Prices

CHICAGO (ELCA) -- Members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America were among more than 850 participants and leaders of a July 9 rally at the Sweetgrass entry point on the U.S.-Canadian border to protest subsidized Canadian commodity prices and domination by large agribusiness corporations.
The Rev. Mark R. Ramseth, bishop of the ELCA's Montana Synod, Great Falls, Mont., gave an invocation at the rally. "The Bible understands agriculture. It respects and honors those who labor with their hands and work in the fields," Ramseth said. The church must support those who earn a living from the land, he said.
"The church is rural America, and rural America is the church. We need to stand in solidarity together," Ramseth said. More than 65 percent of Montana's 150 ELCA congregations are rural, he said. The ELCA synod is a member of the Montana Association of Churches, a group that supported the rally.
The "National Day of Protest," was organized by the Campaign to Reclaim Rural America, a grass-roots movement based in Montana. The rally included speeches supporting the campaign and the presentation of a petition with nearly 13,000 signatures. Aimed at members of Congress, the petition states the campaign's requests.
"Due to the economic emergency created by the ongoing depressed prices at the marketplace for agricultural products, we ... petition for an investigation into the causes of the depression," the petition states. It includes a call for anti-trust investigations into the concentration of ownership in agribusiness industries, mandatory price reporting of commodities and an emergency price support for agricultural products.
The rally concluded with a three-hour human blockade of trucks hauling agricultural commodities from Canada. Rally organizers worked with police and U.S. Customs officials to ensure a peaceful demonstration, said Helen Waller, Montana rancher and spokeswoman for the Northern Plains Resource Council. Waller is a member of the ELCA's First Lutheran Church, Circle, Mont., and helped organize the rally. She said the blockade was a "symbolic effort" to demonstrate the problem of markets flooded with commodities. Canadian exports just add to the already full markets and low prices, Waller said.
"If there is not a change, we will lose the family farm," she said. "It is inevitable." Waller blames large agribusiness corporations who buy commodities from farmers at prices "as low as they (corporations) want." These corporations, in turn, sell to consumers at sharply elevated prices, thus creating a huge profit margin, she said.
As a result, small farm operators are losing money, Waller said. USDA statistics for the Northern Plains area indicate that it costs a farmer $5.69 to raise a bushel of wheat, she said. Farmers sell a bushel of wheat on the current market at $2.19. "It's a tragedy," Waller said.
Americans must ask themselves, "do they want a food system totally controlled from field to dinner table by a handful of corporate boards?" she said.
Consumers must realize the importance of standing behind farm families, to ensure stewardship of the land and the quality of food, Waller said.
The Sweetgrass protest was accompanied by rallies at the state Capitol in Boise, Idaho; at the border in Portal, N.D.; at a World Trade Organization conference in Seattle; in Columbia, Mo.; and in Louisiana at the Vicksburg Bridge on I-20. More than half of those who attended the rally in North Dakota were ELCA members, said Darwin Holmstrom, field organizer with the Dakota Resource Council.

[*Lisa Smith is a senior at Wartburg College, Waverly, Iowa. This
summer, she is an intern with ELCA News and Information.]

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