Add to all this safety advocates who insist that highway safety must be served by reducing the number of hours a farmer can drive to deliver grain to ever-more distant river terminals and rail loading facilities. Farm Bureau supports greater intermodal and intramodal competition and public policies that encourage competition. The AFBF Board of Directors approved priority issues for 2000 at its meeting in January. A key aspect of accomplishing this broad goal is to seek public policies that create the largest possible number of competitive transportation options for agricultural shippers. Unfortunately, the public policy trend seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
Competition is important for small agricultural shippers.
As a general rule, agricultural shippers are unable to command the market power to deal with a railroad company as effectively as a major coal mining company or electrical utility. We are often forced to deal with poor service, such as trains that are not delivered to the loading point in a timely manner or that may not be picked up for days or weeks. Farmers and agricultural shippers must also absorb extremely high freight rates that railroad companies can demand due to their monopoly market power. We believe that the railroad landscape prior to the passage of the Staggers Act allowed for the possibility of competition. The Staggers Act brought about partial deregulation of the railroad industry and encouraged rail industry consolidation on a massive scale.