Farm crisis
As farm crises are crises of American agriculture referred. Such crises occurred several times and were caused by changes in production methods and consumer demand. Major farm crises were the farm crisis of the 1920s and the farm crisis in the Midwest in the 1980s.
Farm crisis of the 1920s
As a result of the aid provided by the USA to the warring powers of the Entente cordiale in World War I , agricultural production rose in the USA. Encouraged by the government, more land was reclaimed. There was also a need for additional workers, which increased with the entry of the US into the war and the drafting of agricultural workers and farmers. Many farmers got into debt to buy new agricultural machinery or to electrify their operations. In the expectation that it would take a very long time before European agriculture would recover from the consequences of the war, prices for farmland also rose markedly: the national average in 1920 was 22 percent higher than the previous year and 68 percent higher than 1914 . As the agricultural sector in Europe quickly developed, broke the prices and many farmers found themselves increasingly unable to meet their obligations and their rates and mortgages to use. Many of them were also unable to pay the taxes that were due - and higher due to their earlier higher income. The complex problem accompanied the US economy for a decade and a half.
Farm crisis of the 1980s
In the 1970s, US agriculture was still dominated by efficient family farms . Due to their high regional specialization, certain zones formed in which the cultivation of a certain plant variety predominated.
Today this form of agriculture hardly exists. Today's agriculture is characterized by huge fields on which a single type of plant is grown ( monoculture ), correspondingly large sowing, processing and harvesting machines.
At the time of the general economic recession in the USA (second oil crisis , 1979 to 1982), agriculture became increasingly unprofitable. In addition to the general economic downturn and the increased costs for operating materials and fertilizer, there were also political reasons for this. The grain embargo against the Soviet Union as a result of the Soviet war of aggression against Afghanistan (1980) and a cut in subsidies for agricultural goods led to a massive structural change. The situation was exacerbated by a devastating drought. Only those businesses were able to survive that were large enough to be able to work their areas with modern equipment and to appear creditworthy. As a result, land prices fell by up to 50 percent. The government advised farms to set aside land.
The structural change of farms in the USA is characterized by the following processes:
- specialization
- Area enlargement
- Rationalization,
- Reducing the number of workers per farm,
- Area expansion through artificial irrigation in ecologically unstable arid areas
literature
- Raghuram Rajan, Rodney Ramcharan: The Anatomy of a Credit Crisis: The Boom and Bust in Farm Land Prices in the United States in the 1920s. in: American Economic Review , 105 (4), pp. 1439-1477
- Cynthia Clark Northrup: The American Economy: A Historical Encyclopedia, Volume 2 (= The American Economy: A Historical Encyclopedia ). ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, California 2003, ISBN 1-57607-866-3 , pp. 328 (English, 709 pp., Limited preview in Google book search).
- Neil E. Harl: The Farm Debt Crisis of 1980s . Iowa State University Press, Ames, Iowa 1990, ISBN 0-8138-1188-0 .
- Earl M. Rogers, Susan H. Rogers: American Farm Crisis. An Annotated Bibliography (Garland Reference Library of Social Science; Vol. 432). Garland Publ., New York 1989, ISBN 0-8240-7243-X .
- James H. Shideler: Farm Crisis, 1919-23 . Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn. 1977, ISBN 0-8371-8791-5 (reprinted from Berkeley, Calif. 1957).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rajan, Ramcharan: The Anatomy of a Credit Crisis: The Boom and Bust in Farmland Prices in the United States in the 1920s. P. 6
- ^ Northrup: The American Economy: Essays and primary source documents (2003), pp. 327-328