Farm Subsidies are Killing People, the Economics of Food Production in the US and how it affects the World
The NY Times has a very cogent analysis of why poor US residents are fat and unhealthy , a state of affairs that would not have been dreamed of 100 years ago. It was written by Michael Pollan, author of the book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma", a thorough analysis of the current food chain in the US and its implications for a more energy and nutrition conscious future.
The NYT article analyses the cost of the grocery items in the center aisles of a supermarket, where most processed and packaged foods are shelved, in contrast with the articles sold around the perimeter, where most unprocessed or less processed foods are displayed. It points to the Farm Bill as the culprit: ". . . it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy."
The problems that stem from this state of affairs are enormous. One example-- Beef is raised in feedlots eating corn and soy, causing toxic and ph imbalanced manure that pollutes more heavily, and attracts e coli infection more readily both in the manure and in the meat, instead of grazing naturally and leaving healthy ph balanced fertilizer piles out in the pasture.Then high tech "solutions" to the e coli are employed-- antibiotics to stop the infection, which is then passed on in the meat. The manure resulting from feedlot cattle becomes a pollutant instead of a fertilizer.
If you've got a school age kid in public school and eating lunch from the cafeteria, the impact becomes more personal, since school lunch programs are administered by the USDA, and those cafeterias are stocked with items made from US surplus crops, those same items you see in the center aisles of the supermarket. Which crops always have the highest surplus? The ones that are subsidized, since the farmers are guaranteed to make a profit. And the cost of health care and health insurance for all has skyrocketed with the increase in incidences of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.
Even worse, the negative implications of the Farm Bill don't stop at the US border. "By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities — or to the United States. The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s. (More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico’s eaters as well as its farmers.) You can’t fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural agriculture in Mexico."
What can we all do? The Farm Bill is coming up for renewal this year. Contact your CongressPeople and let them know you want the Farm Bill to become a Food and Earth Health Bill. Let them know that the bill needs to be rewritten in a careful and considered manner so as not to hurt farmers, and to encourage stewardship of the land. Let them know that school children and the poor deserve real food. Let them know that a system that supports Big Agribusiness, Big Food, and Big Pharma at the expense of the rest of us is unacceptable.