20-mavzu. Agrar munosabatlar va renta nazariyasi

farm commodities (for example, wheat, soybeans, cattle,
and rice,) and also food products (items sold through
restaurants or grocery stores). Generally, the number of
competing firms in the market diminishes as farm products
are refined into commercial food products. Although
thousand of ranches and farms raise cattle, only four firms
(Tyson, Smithfield, Swift, and Excel) account for 82 percent
of red meat produced at cattle slaughtering/meat packing
plants. And thousands of farms grow tomatoes, but only
three companies (Heinz, Del-Monte, and Hunt) make the
bulk of the catsup sold in the United States.
Our focus in this chapter will be on farm commodities
(or farm products) and the farms and ranches that produce
them. Farm commodities usually are sold in highly competitive
markets, whereas food products tend to be sold
in markets characterized by monopolistic competition or
oligopoly.
Partly because of large government subsidies, farming
remains a generally profitable industry. U.S. consumers
allocate 14 percent of their spending to food and farmers
and ranchers receive about $250 billion of revenue annually.
Over the years, however, American farmers have experienced
severely fluctuating prices and periodically low
incomes. Further, they have had to adjust to the reality that
agriculture is a declining industry. The farm share of
GDP has declined from about 7 percent in 1950 to 1 percent
today.
Let’s take a close look at both the short-run and long-run
economics of U.S. agriculture.
The Short Run: Price and
Income Instability
Price and income instability in agriculture results from
(1) an inelastic demand for agricultural products, combined

1 Ўзбекистон Республикаси «Ер кодекси». Т., «Ўзбекистон», 1999 й., 20-модда.