| Book Review | Western Historical Quarterly 32.2

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| Book Review | Western Historical Quarterly 32.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Agriculture and the Problem of Monopoly: The Political Economy of Grain Belt Farming, 1953–1980. By Jon Lauck. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. xiv + 259 pp. Tables, notes, index. £30.00, UK; $45.00, US).

Faced with a surge in corporate mergers and acquisitions that has left independent small-scale, "family farmers" battling against concentrated power, it has become common to link bankruptcies, out-migration, and hard times in the midwestern grain belt with the alleged abuses, anti-republican tendencies, and corrosive, unhealthy social effects of big, powerful, monopolistic agribusiness interests. John Lauck tests this hypothesis by studying the longest period of sustained prosperity in American agricultural history. He finds that among midwestern meat packers, grain processors, and grain traders a highly competitive, constantly changing, uncontrollable, and chaotic reality prevailed. The market still rules, has always ruled, despite the growing concentration and power of agribusiness, and the incessant attempts at collusion, constant anticorporate outcries, steady demands for government antitrust actions, and growing trends toward conglomeration and global cartels. . . .

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