The Agricultural Administration Administration (AAA) was an agency under the US Department of Agriculture and was created by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. The primary goal of the AAA was to help out farmers who were struggling to survive. The ideas proposed by the AAA were to protect the domestic market for farmers and to equalize production and consumption of agricultural food.
Throughout the 1920's and during the Great Depression, farmers struggled make a living as crop prices dropped very low. They tried to produce more crops to pay off debts, but this only further impoverished farmers as there was a surplus of crops being produced. With too many crops, the prices continued to decrease, and this hurt farmers significantly.
However, when Roosevelt took power of office and launched the New Deal plan, he also initiated the AAA, which promoted farmers to get rid of some of their crops and animals. In 1933, "$100 million was paid" to encourage farmers to destroy their cotton crops. Furthermore, "six million piglets were slaughtered by the government after it had bought them from the farmers. The meat was canned and given away for free to the unemployed." With fewer crops and animals, the crop prices would rise, and thus, there would be a significant benefit towards farmers.
Despite its large benefit towards farmers, the AAA also significantly hurt sharecroppers as they did not own land. Because the crops were being destroyed, the sharecroppers were essentially useless because their main goal was to help plant crops. In addition to its damage towards sharecroppers, the AAA was also largely ineffective due to the dust storms that occurred during the 1930's. The dust storms left "35 million acres" of land in the South to be "rendered useless" and "125 million acres" of land to be under difficult conditions for farming. The AAA could not resolve this devastating issue, and thus it caused about "350,000 farmers" to leave their lands and head west.
In United States vs. Butler (1936), the AAA was declared unconstitutional because it allowed the federal government to "regulate and control agricultural production," which interfered with the power of the states. While the AAA did help out farmers by attempting to bring them out of poverty, it was also quite unsuccessful due to the Dust Bowl and the unemployment of sharecroppers.
Sources:
Freedom From Fear Chapter 7
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/modern-world-history-1918-to-1980/america-1918-1939/farmers-and-the-new-deal/
http://www.history.com/topics/dust-bowl
https://www.oyez.org/cases/1900-1940/297us1
http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/united-states-and-canada/us-history/agricultural-adjustment-administration
This post greatly details the effects of the AAA program on the agricultural industry. I like how you showed both its benefits and its issues. With this blog post I came up with the conclusion that the system only spurred short term growth in the agricultural sector making it an ineffective long term plan. Something that is also interesting is how much programs like this added to the deficit. In Roosevelt's first term as president the deficit increased by 33.7 Billion which was roughly 40% of the GDP. People thought that this was gonna spell a huge disaster so roosevelt decreased spending slightly and it only hurt the economic effort to get the country back on its feet. Overall this blog post gives insight on Roosevelt's effort to get the country back on its feet.
ReplyDeletehttp://rooseveltinstitute.org/history-lessons-deficit/
ReplyDeleteThis post, along with the your sources, serve as a great overview of the positives and negatives of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Additionally, I must also agree with Mateo's comment that the Agricultural Adjustment Administration brought more short term advancements for certain groups of people. A similar article to your post that I found further discusses this. It also touches specific controversies that surround the AAA in the "Controversy and Opposition" section.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.encyclopedia.com/economics/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/agricultural-adjustment-administration-aaa
I think this post does a great job explaining the AAA. While reading through it, I remembered the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and how similar the AAA is to it. Both administrations were created by Roosevelt in 1933, and their main objectives were to regulate prices of their respective industries. Essentially, the main difference between the two is that the AAA dealt with agriculture while the NRA dealt with industry. Furthermore, both the AAA and the NRA were struck down by the Supreme Court for being unconstitutional, with the NRA being outlawed a year earlier in 1935. Although the AAA and the NRA did have some benefits, in the end, they failed due to partisan politics between the Reformers and the Conservatives.
ReplyDeleteSource:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/National-Recovery-Administration