Agbiz Blues

Critics of agribusiness in the Pacific Northwest have found some unlikely allies in small business members of the Hermiston, Oregon Chamber of Commerce.

In the ups and downs of the business cycle, local farm equipment dealers either have received no orders from corporate farms or have been left out in the cold when giant farms fail.

"We'd much rather have 15 little guys out there than one corporate outfit," says Tom Key, the local John Deere dealer. The reason? "We know that a family farmer is going to be around for awhile. Because he's more stable we can develop a relationship with him, something it's pretty tough to do with a corporation."

"I doubt that you'd find a dealer in town who would tell you otherwise," concurs Al Smith, Hermiston's New Holland dealer.

Men like Smith know what they're talking about; in the last decade they've watched such giants as the J.R. Simplot company, Sun River Farms (a transplant from California), and Taggeres Farms bring some 100,000 acres of desert land into potato production in Morrow County to the south. But has either man sold a single potato digger or tractor to one of these corporate farms?

"Nope," says Tom Key. "They buy all their equipment out of state somewhere. But don't think that doesn't stop them from getting on the phone and hollering at us to jump over there at the drop of a wrench if they need warranty service or parts. That's about all that we've gotten out of these deals."

Not all local businesses have been so lucky. "You should have seen those fertilizer people and tire dealers making a beeline for these outfit's front doors," says Jim Key, a local family farmer. "They were just falling all over each other to extend them credit and anything else they wanted.' But, notes Key, when Simplot and Taggares decided to split up their jointly-owned potato farm in the late 1970s, tying up all assets in court proceedings until this year, and again when Sun River closed its local potato operations in March, "there were all kinds of people in town who were left holding the bag," as the agribusiness giants failed to pay their equipment purchases.

"Of course they have to make up their losses somehow so they pass them along to us. It's us farmers who are still here that will be footing the bill for these corporate shenanigans for a lot of years to come."

- Dan Mintie

Right wing? Who, me?

A. The word "right wing" is - I don't quite know what that means. There are a lot of people that have said that the United States would go to pot if the rightwing, as illustrated by Ronald Reagan, ever got into power. And the United States is doing quite well. So that's a label. To say that anything connected with that label is bad, I just reject it. I'm a right-winger myself...

- George Schultz, in an interview with the Baltimore Sun, July 31, 1983.

Bayer's bitter pill

The environmental and Third World marketing practices of Bayer, the world's third largest chemical firm, were strongly criticized at a June 28 stockholder meeting held in Cologne, West Germany.

The protest was organized by the International Bayer Coordinating Group, a coalition of more than 25 groups. The group, which owns 800 shares in Bayer, used its voting power at the meeting to run an alternative slate for the board of directors and air charges against the company. Their action was the most organized and broadly based shareholder action to date in West Germany.

Bayer is a major polluter of Dutch and West German rivers and coastal areas. Each year, protesters charge, the company pours 300,000 tons of highly poisonous waste into the North Sea from its Belgian plants. Public opinion has forced the company from pouring chemical and paint manufacturing waste from plants in Germany, however.

Bayer also employs a double standard in marketing its products abroad, and dumps useless or dangerous drugs and pesticides on the Third World. At the shareholder meeting, the activist group presented evidence that in Africa Bayer has marketed a dangerous skin ointment, a painkiller associated with urinary tract disease despite a ban on its sale in Germany, and an antidiarrhea drug that damages the optic nerve, also withdrawn from the German market.

The coalition's actions did bring some success. Protest candidates for the board of directors received votes representing over 17,000 shares-far more than the total held by the coalition, though minute in comparison to the 34 million total shares in the company. Bayer management was forced to respond to the charges, both in a leaflet prepared for shareholders and in presentations at the meeting. To counter the protesters, Bayer also organized a demonstration outside the hall by company employees calling themselves "Workers Against Parasites." That action backfired, however when some shareholders misunderstood the signs to mean that stockholders were the parasites.

Based on a report by Barbara Kasel. The International Bayer Coordinating Group can be reached c/o Axel Koehler, Hafstrasse 27A, 5650 Solingen 11, West Germany.

Solar swallowed by Big Oil

Standard Oil Company of Indiana has announced that it will buy the remaining stock of Solarex Corporation, the nation's last independent solar energy cell maker. Standard-better known as Amoco-already owns about 30 percent of Solarex. But the oil giant is being sued by Solarex stockholder Walter Ames, who alleges that Amoco has engaged in practices bordering on bribery to avoid the financial terms of the original stock purchase contract between the two companies.

A Washington patent attorney who served on Solarex's board of directors for sever years, Ames accuses Amoco of "paying off" Solarex board members with lucrative "consulting agreements" ever since it bought into the company in 1979. In return, he says, the corporate board created new categories of stock. "Joseph Lindmeyer, the former president of Solarex, and other top executives just made millions and millions of dollars," says Ames. "I know for a fact that Lindmeyer sold almost $1 million worth of his personal Solarex stock to Amoco for $15 per share" in one purchase-an offer not extended to small stockholders who had no market for their stock.

Ames, who says he believes in the importance of solar power, contends that the public's interest in solar technology is being sacrificed to the oil company's desire to control the energy field. "The founders of the company sold the dream of solar energy for oil dollars," he told Multinational Monitor. Solarex's only principal competitors in the solar field are divisions of other major oil companies, Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) and Exxon.

- Phil Hill