Viewing page 65 of 132

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

POVERTY OF EDUCATION  SANCHEZ

populations. Although maternal mortality has declined significantly over the recent decades the relative difference between white and nonwhite maternal mortality has increased. In the early 1940's the death rate among nonwhite mothers was slightly less than double the rate among white mothers. Since 1955, the rates among nonwhite mothers have been approximately four times those among white mothers.

One cannot help but wonder how so much poverty can exist when the federal government has had an elaborate farm program for decades. Most of us city dwellers probably acquired our meager knowledge about agriculture from movies about rural poverty in the depression and we had the happy impression that the federal farm programs had been designed to solve all that and had done so. This brings us close to the "dirty secret." The whole federal farm program has been geared to help the commercial farmers, which is to say, it has been arranged for the profitable and stable production of food and fiber. "It is clear that the price support and related programs do very little for the rural farm poor, and nothing directly for the rural nonfarm poor." Innumerable farms and plantations receive payments of $200,000, $150,000, $100,000, and $50,000 year after year from the government for participation in various aspects of the farm program. Senator Eastland's Eastland Plantations, Inc. received $157,930 in 1967 (which comes out to be a pleasant $13,141 a month), while farm workers and those in farm related industries were excluded, until very recently, from the Social Security Act, the Minimum Wage and Collective Bargaining Laws, and antipoverty programs, small as they are, have been geared to urban areas. "Our current farm policies tend to focus strictly upon the economic well-being of commercial farm operators and landowners, to the exclusion of the interests of farm laborers, tenants, rural communities and society at large."

Meanwhile, the technological revolution reduced farm employment by 45 per cent between 1950 and 1965 and will reduce the need for farm labor by another 45 per cent in the next 15 years. (Surely, the ability of many farmers like Senator Eastland to buy the machinery for modern farming was financed not entirely by their own business acumen but by federal payments of $13,000 a month received for not planting hundreds of acres of cotton and wheat, etc., and not employing the labor of hundreds and thousands of people.) The combination of new technology and government benefits for large farmers has produced a 20th century duplicate of the 18th century Enclosure
359

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-12 18:09:38