Crusader’s Death Won’t Kill Farm Reform

Skip Pescosolido had a secret. Without telling his family, with nary a mention to his business partners, and certainly with no publicity, Skip would get hold of kids who didn’t have any money, and he would do something extraordinary for them.

He would educate them. He did this by paying their way through the elite New England prep school he himself had attended on scholarship many years ago.

But then, Carl A. Pescosolido Jr. was an educator and an advocate for the poor even in his most public capacity--as California’s best-known and most articulate crusader for unfettered agricultural markets.

A San Joaquin Valley citrus grower, Pescosolido’s idea of enterprise was simple: He believed that it should be free. As a result, he waged a courageous 10-year campaign against federal regulations that for decades have permitted the cartelization of the California orange business.

For a long time, it was a lonely struggle. Many in the industry liked the security of a system that allocates to good and bad growers alike a prorated share of a crop limited by committee, even though, as Pescosolido so well understood, it’s as bad for efficient farmers as it is for consumers.

The most likable of men, Pescosolido made enemies because of his views. Several years ago, an anonymous caller threatened his life.

At 7:25 p.m. on the night of Nov. 11, Pescosolido was driving east through the darkness on Interstate 30 in Dallas when, according to police, a 1980 Pontiac Grand Prix struck his car. Forced off the road, Pescosolido’s vehicle plunged into the waters of Lake Hubbard below. His funeral was last week. He was 55.

Skip Pescosolido wasn’t bumped off by anyone in the citrus business. Dallas police say they arrested a 24-year-old San Antonio man, who has a long record of motor vehicle violations, on charges of involuntary manslaughter.

Besides, killing Pescosolido wouldn’t have done his opponents much good. By the time of his death he’d been joined in his struggle for reform by a good number of growers, economists who’ve studied the question, a pair of dedicated lawyers and many others across the political spectrum.

“He was a great man,” says James Bovard, whose book “The Farm Fiasco” lays bare the folly of U.S. agricultural policy.

Judith Bell, director of the West Coast regional office of Consumers Union, worries that opponents of “marketing orders,” the federal rules that keep agricultural markets from operating freely, will be without a leader.

She adds that her organization is opposed to the marketing-order system: “It’s just a mechanism for the industry to keep the prices up. If people knew about it, they’d be outraged.”

Skip certainly was. He fought the Navel Orange Administrative Committee (which decides how many California navels reach consumers), Sunkist (which dominates the committee) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the fields, the courts and the media. He never wavered.

Two summers ago, he was fishing on the Snake River with his old friend and Harvard classmate, Peter Bragdon, headmaster of Skip’s prep-school alma mater, his beloved Governor Dummer Academy. Pescosolido looked ashen and seemed to be suffering a terrible headache, so Bragdon rolled his last orange along the floor of the boat toward his ailing friend, hoping that it would rejuvenate him.

As it rolled, Bragdon recalled, the Sunkist stamp appeared over and over. Predictably, Pescosolido made no attempt to stop it. He wasn’t about to eat a piece of fruit bearing the Sunkist label, even in extremis.

Anyway, the struggle won’t die with Skip. Pescosolido’s son, Philip, will take over where his father left off, both at Sequoia Orange Co., the Exeter, Calif., citrus business partly owned by his late father, and in the fight to end the system whereby a committee of growers decides how many California oranges fellow growers can sell.

“Business as usual,” the younger Pescosolido says firmly. “We’re going to continue operating along the vision he’d laid out over the last 20 years.”

Phil adds an interesting insight to the arguments of principal and social benefit his father employed in opposing the status quo.

Because the rules made it impossible for Sequoia to increase its U.S. market share, Phil’s job recently has been selling oranges overseas. Sequoia has also planted groves in Jamaica rather than expand in California. Phil says new orange groves are springing up throughout Latin America, from Chile to Cuba, and that if American farmers don’t wake up, growers in other countries will eat their lunch.

“We’ve got to get competitive,” he says.

That means no longer subsidizing mediocre growers with a guaranteed share of the crop at the expense of farmers who want to invest in new equipment and better husbandry to produce superior fruit and seize market share.

In the worldwide competition of tomorrow, sheltered industries are the ones most directly headed for oblivion. A recent study by McKinsey Global Institute and three top U.S. productivity experts, including Nobel economist Robert Solow, found U.S. workers to be the world’s most productive, beating even the Japanese, precisely because American firms are relatively unprotected from foreign and domestic competition.

The implication is clear: If California agriculture is to compete, it must shed the anti-competitive climate that marketing orders tend to induce. Twelve of the 40 federal marketing orders apply here, covering California peaches, pears, plums, nectarines, Tokay grapes, desert grapes, oranges, lemons, potatoes, raisins, prunes, dates, olives and kiwi. Many don’t directly control volume, but they end up limiting supply in other ways--by requiring that fruit be larger than a certain size, for example.

With the election of Bill Clinton to the White House, it’s possible that U.S. agricultural policy will take a new course. Markets around the world are getting freer by the day, and besides, according to federal election records, during the presidential campaign Sunkist donated $107,400 to the Republican National Committee.