How Farm Policy Affects Us All
(Page 4 of 5)
June/July 2007, Issue 222
By Tom Philpott
Meanwhile, we’re becoming a nation of overweight citizens, thanks to the flood of cheap refined sugars and grains we’re urged to consume. (See charts below.)
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THE 2007 PROPOSAL
The agenda released by the Bush administration on Jan. 31, 2007 seeks to carefully balance its own need to trim the federal budget and further its free-trade agenda with its desire to appease an important farm-state voter constituency. What the proposal doesn’t do is address the massive health, environmental and social problems haunting U.S. food production. It’s another push down the same old road.
Until the recent spike in grain and oilseed prices caused by surging ethanol and biodiesel production, farmers have for years been selling commodities such as corn, soy, cotton, wheat and rice for less than the cost of production, with taxpayer subsidies paying the difference, and the biggest farms getting the majority of the subsidies, according to research by the Environmental Working Group. Owners of the largest 20 percent of farms received nearly 90 percent of the $165 billion in taxpayers’ money over the past decade. The real winners were the big grain-buying firms, which made billions by buying up cut-rate grain and turning it into dubious “value-added” goods such as high-fructose corn syrup and ethanol. Large meat-packers also thrived, turning cheap, taxpayer-subsidized corn and soy into food for animals that don’t even naturally eat grains. As a result, beef, poultry and pork markets became highly profitable. Meanwhile, U.S. farms failed by the millions. Since 1950, the number of U.S. farms has plunged from around 5.5 million to just over 2 million.
Federal farm policy has not just been stubbornly ineffectual at achieving its aim of bringing supply and demand into line, despite annual cash infusions routinely in excess of $10 billion. It also has given rise to, or at least done nothing to check, a food production and distribution system that inflicts vast environmental and public health destruction. According to the USDA, diet-related maladies such as diabetes and obesity cost us some $70 billion per year.
Apologists for U.S. agricultural policy point out that these titanic taxpayer subsidies and external health and environmental costs buy us the world’s cheapest food system; we spend a smaller percentage of disposable income (which does not include subsidies) on food than any other nation on the planet. But even on these grounds, U.S. food policy fails. The USDA reports that 11 percent of U.S. families — representing some 35 million people — chronically lack access to sufficient food. And most of the rest of us are eating too many calories, and the wrong kinds of food.
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