OT: Weed It and Reap

[Guest guest]

Op-Ed Contributor

Weed It and Reap

By MICHAEL POLLAN

Published: November 4, 2007

 

For Americans who have been looking to Congress to reform the food system,

these past few weeks have been, well, the best of times and the worst of

times. A new politics has sprouted up around the farm bill, traditionally a

parochial piece of legislation thrashed out in private between the various

agricultural interests (wheat growers versus corn growers; meatpackers

versus ranchers) without a whole lot of input or attention from mere eaters.

 

 

Not this year. The eaters have spoken, much to the consternation of

farm-state legislators who have fought hard — and at least so far with

success — to preserve the status quo.

 

Americans have begun to ask why the farm bill is subsidizing high-fructose

corn syrup and hydrogenated oils at a time when rates of diabetes and

obesity among children are soaring, or why the farm bill is underwriting

factory farming (with subsidized grain) when feedlot wastes are polluting

the countryside and, all too often, the meat supply. For the first time, the

public health community has raised its voice in support of overturning farm

policies that subsidize precisely the wrong kind of calories (added fat and

added sugar), helping to make Twinkies cheaper than carrots and Coca-Cola

competitive with water. Also for the first time, the international

development community has weighed in on the debate, arguing that subsidized

American exports are hobbling cotton farmers in Nigeria and corn farmers in

Mexico.

 

On Capitol Hill, hearings on the farm bill have been packed, and newspapers

like The San Francisco Chronicle are covering the legislation as closely as

The Des Moines Register, bringing an unprecedented level of attention to

what has long been one of the most obscure and least sexy pieces of

legislation in Congress. Sensing the winds of reform at his back, Senator

Tom Harkin of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, told a

reporter in July: " This is not just a farm bill. It's a food bill, and

Americans who eat want a stake in it. "

 

Right now, that stake is looking more like a toothpick. Americans who eat

have little to celebrate in the bill that Mr. Harkin is expected to bring to

the floor this week. Like the House bill passed in July, the Senate product

is very much a farm bill in the tradition- al

let-them-eat-high-fructose-corn-syrup mold.

 

For starters, the Old Guard on both agriculture committees has managed to

preserve the entire hoary contraption of direct payments, countercyclical

payments and loan deficiency payments that subsidize the five big commodity

crops — corn, wheat, rice, soybeans and cotton — to the tune of $42 billion

over five years.

 

The Old Guard has also managed to add a $5 billion " permanent disaster "

program (excuse me, but isn't a permanent disaster a contradiction in

terms?) to help farmers in the High Plains struggling to grow crops in a

drought-prone region that, as the chronic need for disaster aid suggests,

might not be the best place to grow crops.

 

When you consider that farm income is at record levels (thanks to the

ethanol boom, itself fueled by another set of federal subsidies); that the

World Trade Organization has ruled that several of these subsidies are

illegal; that the federal government is broke and the president is

threatening a veto, bringing forth a $288 billion farm bill that guarantees

billions in payments to commodity farmers seems impressively defiant.

 

How could this have happened? For starters, farm bill critics did a far

better job demonizing subsidies, and depicting commodity farmers as welfare

queens, than they did proposing alternative — and politically appealing —

forms of farm support. And then the farm lobby did what it has always done:

bought off its critics with " programs. " For that reason " Americans who eat "

can expect some nutritious crumbs from the farm bill, just enough to ensure

that reform-minded legislators will hold their noses and support it.

 

It's an old story: the " hunger lobby " gets its food stamps so long as the

farm lobby can have its subsidies. Similar, if less lavish, terms are now

being offered to the public health and environmental " interests " to get them

on board. That's why there's more money in this farm bill for nutrition

programs and, for the first time, about $2 billion to support " specialty

crops " — farm-bill-speak for the kind of food people actually eat. (Since

California grows most of the nation's specialty crops, this was the price

for the state delegation's support. Cheap indeed!)

 

There's also money for the environment: an additional $4 billion in the

Senate bill to protect wetlands and grasslands and reward farmers for

environmental stewardship, and billions in the House bill for environmental

cleanup. There's an important provision in both bills that will make it

easier for schools to buy food from local farmers. And there's money to

promote farmers' markets and otherwise support the local food movement.

 

But as important as these programs are, they are just programs — mere fleas

on the elephant in the room. The name of that elephant is the commodity

title, the all-important subsidy section of the bill. It dictates the rules

of the entire food system. As long as the commodity title remains untouched,

the way we eat will remain unchanged.

 

The explanation for this is straightforward. We would not need all these

nutrition programs if the commodity title didn't do such a good job making

junk food and fast food so ubiquitous and cheap. Food stamps are crucial,

surely, but they will be spent on processed rather than real food as long as

the commodity title makes calories of fat and sugar the best deal in the

supermarket. We would not need all these conservation programs if the

commodity title, by paying farmers by the bushel, didn't encourage them to

maximize production with agrochemicals and plant their farms with just one

crop fence row to fence row.

 

And the government would not need to pay feedlots to clean up the water or

upgrade their manure pits if subsidized grain didn't make rearing animals on

feedlots more economical than keeping them on farms. Why does the farm bill

pay feedlots to install waste treatment systems rather than simply pay

ranchers to keep their animals on grass, where the soil would be only too

happy to treat their waste at no cost?

 

However many worthwhile programs get tacked onto the farm bill to buy off

its critics, they won't bring meaningful reform to the American food system

until the subsidies are addressed — until the underlying rules of the food

game are rewritten. This is a conversation that the Old Guard on the

agriculture committees simply does not want to have, at least not with us.

 

But its defiance on the subsidy question may actually be a sign of weakness,

for one detects a note of defensiveness creeping into the rhetoric. " I know

people on the outside can sit and complain about this, " Representative

Collin Peterson of Minnesota, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee,

told The San Francisco Chronicle last summer. " But frankly most of those

people have no clue what they're talking about. Most people in the city have

no concept of what's going on here. "

 

It seems more likely that, this time around, people in the city and all

across the country know exactly what's going on — they just don't like it.

 

Mr. Peterson's farm bill passed the House by the smallest margin in years,

and might have been picked apart on the floor if Representative Nancy

Pelosi, the speaker of the House, hadn't leapt to its defense.

 

(She claimed to be helping freshmen Democrats from rural districts.)

 

But Senate rules are different, and Mr. Harkin's bill will be challenged on

the floor and very possibly improved. One sensible amendment that Senator

Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, and Senator Chuck Grassley,

Republican of Iowa, are expected to introduce would put a $250,000 cap on

the payments any one farmer can receive in a year. This would free roughly

$1 billion for other purposes (like food stamps and conservation) and slow

the consolidation of farms in the Midwest.

 

A more radical alternative proposed by Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of

Indiana, and Senator Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, would scrap

the current subsidy system and replace it with a form of free government

revenue insurance for all American farmers and ranchers, including the ones

who grow actual food. Commodity farmers would receive a payment only when

their income dropped more than 15 percent as the result of bad weather or

price collapse. The $20 billion saved under this plan, called the Fresh Act,

would go to conservation and nutrition programs, as well as to deficit

reduction.

 

What finally emerges from Congress depends on exactly who is paying closest

attention next week on the Senate floor and then later in the conference

committee. We know the American Farm Bureau will be on the case, defending

the commodity title on behalf of those who benefit from it most: the biggest

commodity farmers, the corporations who sell them chemicals and equipment

and, most of all, the buyers of cheap agricultural commodities — companies

like Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Coca-Cola and McDonald's.

 

In the past that alliance could have passed a farm bill like this one

without breaking a sweat. But the politics of food have changed, and

probably for good. If the eaters and all the other " people on the outside "

make themselves heard, we just might end up with something that looks less

like a farm bill and more like the food bill a poorly fed America so badly

needs.

 

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer at The Times Magazine and a professor

of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of

" The Omnivore's Dilemma " and the forthcoming " In Defense of Food: An Eater's

Manifesto. "

 

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