Sanders rolls out plan to help family farmers during Iowa stop

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 presidential candidate, on Sunday rolled out a plan to protect family farmers from climate change and larger agriculture companies. 

Sanders’s plan, which was introduced at a campaign stop in Iowa, would increase anti-trust enforcement to block “monopolistic mergers” and ban contract farming, protect farmers from “patent lawsuits from seed corporations,” give more farm subsidies to small and mid-size farms and restrict foreign ownership of farmland, according to a statement from his campaign.

{mosads}It would also stop exempting factory farms from anti-pollution rules and punish farms that create herbicide drift and pollute organic farms.

“While corporate profits soar in agribusiness, while merger after merger gives even more power to a handful of huge conglomerates, thousands of family farmers are forced off their land every year because the prices they get for their products are lower than the cost of production,” Sanders said,  according to the statement.

“Tragically, instead of seeing good jobs, education and health care coming into our rural communities, we are far too often seeing desperation and depression – and a terrible increase in suicide and opioid addiction,” he added.  “We need to turn this around. We cannot create an economy that works for all Americans if we continue to neglect the needs of rural America.”

Sanders is one of more than 20 people vying for the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination. He is considered one of the frontrunners, polling behind only Joe Biden in many surveys.