Pollan, you may know, is the author of the Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire. He knows food. His study of the farm bill starts from the research of University of Washington professor Adam Drewnowski, who asked: “How is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?” The answer is economic — and the economics flow from the farm bill.
Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?
For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system – indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, 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.
A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent.
Unfortunately, it gets worse: the impact of the farm bill is to submerge the price of US commodities, crushing independent farmers in other parts of the world, destabilizing the economies of developing countries. As a result, many people come to our shores in search of jobs to replace the ones our cheap food exports destroy…
To speak of the farm bill’s influence on the American food system does not begin to describe its full impact – on the environment, on global poverty, even on immigration. 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.
If Pollan is right, and I suspect that he is, a move to dramatically change our farm subsidies program — or remove them entirely — could have an excellent effect on the health of Americans and the global and local economy. Today’s farm subsidies help huge agribusiness far more than Massachusetts farms. It would be great to see our Senators and Representatives take an interest in this…
…Pollan is exactly right. This is the first time I’ve seen it quantified, but the facts (as recognized even by the WSJ about a dozen years ago) are that agribusiness subsidies in the US–and also in the EU, by the way–and the resultant export of surpluses into the third world, are and have been decimating the local farm economies of the third world. The third world has other problems, such as corruption, but it is the decimation of local farm economies that has led to the refugee problem that you are seeing in the US and that Europe’s EU countries are also seeing. Stop the dumping, and the refugee problem just might go away.
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Is the subsidy problem going to be reduced any time soon? Probably not–too many entities are making too much money, off the subsidies. And therein lies the rub.
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Regarding the Twinkie problem, take a look at the ingredients on the food you buy. If you see “high fructose corn syrup” anywhere on the list, stay away from it. HFCS is one of the leading causes of obesity, but it provides millions of dollars in profit to corn farmers and their advocates at companies such as Archer-Daniels Midland. One of the things that I’m continually amused at is the fact that people complain about tobacco products causing lung cancer–and they are right to do so–but I have yet to see an outcry against use of HFCS, which is also debilitating. Maybe someday it will happen, but not any day soon.
WRT to Trade and Economics, look here. The problem isn’t free trade, the problem is legislation like this.
For one thing, free trade agreements mean that other countries are forced to open up their markets to our unfairly cheaper (subsidized) agriproducts.
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One could argue we aren’t really doing free trade, because aren’t subsidies sort of illegal under those sorts of agreements? Or rather, under ideal free trade? But the US and Europe have managed to make free trade agreements with those stipulations in them (leaving the subsidies in place) because they’ve got big enough economies to push smaller ones around (promise them crumbs, because crumbs off our table is better than nothing).
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However large a part of the problem the agribusiness welfare system might be, though, you still have the issue of non-democratic dictatorship-style governments artificially keeping their populace down to pander to big business, and the environmental, low wage, and worker safety issues that arise from that.
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Even China, which is supposedly doing just so very well, isn’t. If you look at the way the government is keeping the rural countryside poverty high, how it suppresses information (even Google), and enacting other dictatorial policies, that rising tide (and oh boy is it!) is definitely NOT lifting all boats. And it’s in the Communist regime’s best interests to maintain that duel economy, first because there’s a constant supply of cheap workers which big corporations love, and second so they can continue to perpetrate their form of government.
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In other words, I don’t see China changing its tune any time soon. Liberal trade policies were supposed to break down the communist wall. But they seem just as in control as ever. If in 50 years China is still a communist country, I wouldn’t be surprised…
It took me a long time to figure this out, but the fact that “free traders” want to ignore is that “free trade” is not limited to “free trade” in goods, or “free trade” in services, it is also “free trade” in labor. It is the last that the “free traders” want to inhibit. And, it is the last that creates the refugee problem.
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Listen up and listen well. I’ve followed the refugee issue from Africa into Europe over the last 5-7 years, in large part because of the decimation of native African agriculture because of the EU’s agri-policies. A few years ago, refugees tried to get to the Canary Islands (Spain, hence entry into Europe). More recently, they tried to get to an island off the coast of Morocco (forget the name) that was also Spain. And, just a few days ago, the EU indicated that they were going to do an interdiction action along the entire Mittelmeer to try to disrupt the flood of refugees from Africa. Free flow of goods? Yes. Free flow of labor? No.
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Will the interdiction work? Decidedly not. The Maginot line didn’t stop the Germans in 1940, did it? And the proposed Maginot Line along the Mex/US border won’t work either.
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Free trade, with the likelihood of dumping of heavily subsidized agricultural products, which is what the USofA and the EU are doing, is a recipe for disaster. And, the thing that you’re going to have to contend with, the fact is that the heavy subsidization, and the subsequent dumping, isn’t going to end any time soon.
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Point being: you’re screwed. More “illegal immigrants.” And it really is as simple as that.