*** OFFICIAL Farm Bill Thread *** (1 Viewer)

[Slapdash]

Members of Congress Received $238K in Farm Subsidies

Environmental Working Group¹s 2013 update of its Farm Subsidy Database shows that 15 members of Congress or their spouses benefitted from a total of $237,921 in taxpayer-funded farm subsidy payments last year.

EWG¹s compilation of farm subsidies has been searched nearly 440 million times since 2004 and is widely credited for advancing efforts to reform farm subsidies.

The farm subsidy database tracks $256 billion in farm income support through commodity, crop insurance, and disaster programs and $39 billion in conservation support paid to farmers and landowners from 1995 through 2012. However, EWG is prohibited by federal law from reporting crop insurance subsidies, which now comprise two-thirds of the farm safety net.

"EWG and the taxpayers footing the bill cannot know which farmers, including which members of Congress, receive subsidies to buy crop insurance," said Craig Cox, EWG¹s Senior Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources. "We do know that in 2011, 26 policyholders received more than $1 million apiece in crop insurance premium support in 2011, and that more than 10,000 policyholders received more than $100,000 each. U.S. Department of Agriculture has refused to provide us with the same information for 2012."

Sens. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) have filed an amendment to the Senate farm bill to allow the USDA to disclose which farmers receive crop insurance subsidies. Traditional farm and conservation programs limit the amount of money an individual or business can receive from the government. There are no such limits on crop insurance subsidies.

According to EWG's analysis of data derived from USDA records, members of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate who received farm subsidies in 2012 were:

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Rep. Robert Aderholt's (R-Ala.) wife, Caroline Aderholt, is a 6.3 percent owner of McDonald Farms according to 2008 ownership records. McDonald Farms received $66,891 in direct payment farm subsidies in 2012. She also personally received a $345 direct payment in 2012. EWG’s estimate of 2012 farm subsidies to Caroline Aderholt, using the percentage share information received from USDA, comes to $4,559. Caroline Aderholt’s total estimated amount of subsidies – directly and through McDonald Farms – is $207,426 from 1995-2012.

Rep. Kristi Noem (R- S.D.) received $1,400 in direct payments in 2012. Through 2008, USDA listed Rep. Noem as a 16.9% partner in Racota Valley Ranch. The estimated amount of subsidies attributed to Rep. Noem from 1995-2012 is $503,751.

Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calf.) and his wife Jill LaMalfa are each 16.67% partners (combined share totals 33.33%) of DSL Lamalfa Family Partnership, which received $188,570 in direct payments for 2012. Direct payments were the only payments received in 2012. The 2012 subsidy amount EWG estimates to Rep LaMalfa and his wife is $62,857. The estimated amount of subsidies from 1995-2012 from DSL LaMalfa Family Partnership total $1,710,385.

Rep. Frank Lucas' (R-Okla.) wife Lynda Lucas received $14,584 in disaster payments in 2012. Her total subsidy payments since 1999 are $40,613.

In 2008, Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) and his wife Terra Valadao had a combined ownership share of 33.4% of Triple V Dairy. Triple V Dairy received $22,453 in payments in 2012 for direct payments and MILC. The most recent ownership information from 2011, does not list Terra but also does not list the ownership percentages. Assuming the wife's ownership percentage was added to David's – the EWG estimate of the amount of subsidies to Rep Valadao from Triple V Dairy in 2012 is $7,484. Valadao Dairy received $82,373 in payments in 2012 for direct payments and MILC. The ownership information EWG received for Valadao Dairy is from 2011 and ownership percentage information is not available. However, there are 4 owners of Valadao Dairy and assuming equal shares, the EWG estimate of the benefit to David Valadao is $20,593. The total EWG estimate of subsidy benefits in 2012 to Rep. Valadao is $28,077. The estimated subsidy amount attributed to Rep. Valadao from Triple V Dairy and Valadao Dairy from 2005-2012 is $185,724

Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.) and his wife Lynn Fincher are each 50 percent partners in Stephen & Lynn Fincher Farms. They received a $70,574 direct payment farm subsidy in 2012. The Finchers have received $3,483,824 in farm subsidies since 1999.

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.) is listed in the Farm Subsidy Database, but no subsidies were directly paid to her. A trust named Lowell and Viky Hartzler Family Revocable Trust is listed as a 98 percent owner of Hartzler Farms, which received $697 in direct payment/ACRE and $686 for the Conservation Reserve Program for a total of $1,383 in 2012. Hartlzer Farms has received $822,151 in farm subsidies since 1995. The Hartzler’s estimated subsidies from 1995-2012 are $516,000.

Rep. John Kline's (R-Minn.) wife, Vicky Sheldon Kline, is listed as a 20 percent owner of Sheldon Family Farms LP, which received a $3,025 conservation reserve program payment in 2012. EWG’s estimate of the conservation reserve program payments Ms. Kline received, based on the percentage share information supplied to USDA, is $605 for 2012. The estimated amount of subsidies received by Rep. Kline’s wife from 2000-2012 is $6,548.

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas) received a 2012 direct payment of $339. Rep Nuegebauer has received $670 since 2011. Rep. Neugebauer also had interests in two different farming businesses from 1998-2003. His estimated subsidies using the percentage share from USDA for those two businesses are $3,651, which brings his total subsidies to $4,321.

Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) received a 2012 direct payment of $6,654. Rep Stutzman has received $196,268 in farm subsidies since 1997.

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) is a one-third owner of Thornberry Brothers, which received a $5,103 direct payment and $4,078 in disaster aid payments in 2012. EWG’s estimate of the farm subsidy benefits Thornberry received, based on the percentage share information provided to USDA, is $3,060 in 2012. His estimated total subsidies from 1995-2012 is $29,774

U.S. SENATE

Sen. Michael Bennet's (D-Colo.) wife, Susan Daggett, is listed in his 2010 financial disclosure forms as 5.5 percent owner of Daggett Farms LP and LMD Farms LP. Daggett Farms LP received $17,312 in direct payments in 2012 while LMD Farms LP received $21,007 in direct payments in 2012. EWG’s estimate of farm subsidy benefits Daggett received, based on the percentage share information provided from financial disclosure forms, was $2,107 in 2012. The total subsidy amount for Ms. Daggett is $22,789 from 1995-2012.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) received $8,207 in direct payments and $1,728 in conservation reserve payments for a total of $9,935 in 2012. Senator Grassley has received $327,246 in farm subsidies since 1995.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) personally received $2,982 in direct payments and $6,113 in conservation reserve program payments in 2012. Testers’ wife, Sharla, is listed as a 50 percent owner of T-Bone Farms – Tester is listed as owning the other 50 percent. T-Bone farms received $12,186 in direct payments in 2012. The Tester’s total subsidies for 2012 were $21,281. Their total from 1995-2012 is $505,536

EWG’s estimate of the farm subsidies and conservation payments Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and his wife. Elaine Hatch, received is based on the share information provided in financial disclosure forms regarding Ms. Hatch’s share of Edries N Hansen Properties LLC which received $2,530 in direct payments and $50,000 in conservation reserve program payments in 2012 is $10,506. The estimated amount of subsidies to Ms. Hatch from 1995-2012 is $49,722.

http://www.ewg.org/release/members-congress-received-238k-farm-subsidies

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

Blame Farm Subsidies, Not Nutritionists, For America's Obesity Problem
By Ben Goldfarb
December 30, 2011

Earlier this week, PolicyMic pundit Cameron English opined that federal dieticians are culpable for America's obesity epidemic. According to English, nutrition guidelines espoused by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) ignorantly emphasize unhealthy, carbohydrate-heavy diets. While English is right to point a finger at governmental error, he's looking at the wrong policies: Blame for the country's obesity crisis should fall on agricultural subsidies in the farm bill.

The farm bill is the unwieldy, recondite piece of legislation that defines how America grows and eats its food. The iteration of the bill that has governed our food regime since 2008 provides for $412 billion of spending, and most of it goes toward food stamps for poor Americans. But $60 billion has also been paid out to farmers in the form of agricultural subsidies, subsidies which have helped hook the U.S. on fattening, processed food.

The problem with the farm bill isn't the disbursement of subsidies per se; it's that the bulk of payments are forked over to growers of a few huge commodity crops — mostly corn, wheat, soybeans — in a handful of Midwestern congressional districts. (You can guess the reasons for this, I'm sure — they involve the outsized political influence of the Big Agriculture lobby, venal congressmen trying to fill campaign coffers, and the indifference of the rest of the legislature.) Additionally, while most cattle ranching isn't highly subsidized itself, the beef industry is still among the primary beneficiaries of government largess, as low crop prices allow ranchers to feed their livestock cheap grain and so keep their own costs down. A subsidy for corn growers, therefore, serves as a de facto subsidy to the beef industry.

And, while some subsidies represent insurance in the event of crop failure, a large proportion take the form of direct payment for acreage planted — i.e., farmers get paid to plant no matter how much money they're already making. Unsurprisingly, then, the allocation of subsidies tends to be highly iniquitous: Since 1995, 74% of payments have gone to the largest and wealthiest 10% of farming operations, even as 62% of farms received no subsidies at all.

While corn growers are raking in taxpayer dollars, fruit and vegetable farmers (termed "specialty crops" by the twisted language of the farm bill) are not allowed to receive any direct payments whatsoever — the result of lobbying by enormous, consolidated fruit and vegetable companies. Understanding why these companies would lobby against subsidies to their own industry is, like most of the farm bill's provisos, guaranteed to make your brain hurt; suffice to say that the rules are in the interests of Big Ag and despised by small and mid-sized farmers of fruit and veggies. More to the point, it produces a glaring hypocrisy: USDA nutritionists recommend a vegetable-heavy diet that is totally incompatible with how federal subsidies are actually allocated.

The profligate handouts to grain have led to overproduction: Farmers this decade producenearly 4,000 calories per American per day, or 500 more than they did only thirty years ago. Some of this overproduction winds up overseas, undercutting farmers in developing countries and leading to famine; some of it winds up in our gas tanks in the form of ethanol, an environmental disaster in its own right. But a lot of it ends up in the bellies of Americans: We eat 200 calories more per day than we did in the 1970s.

Why do we eat more? Because agricultural and food processing companies have figured out ingenious ways to sneak their overproduction into our bodies. Food laureate Michael Pollan has spent a career revealing how companies turn excess grain into calories: By feeding corn to cattle to produce cheap hamburgers, by blowing formerly 8-ounce soft drinks into 20-ouncers, and by adding high fructose corn syrup to just about everything. And the really big bucks are in transforming corn into "value-added" products, the kind of packaged, chemically-altered food with 70 unpronounceable ingredients listed on the wrapper found in supermarkets and bodegas throughout America.

Flooding shelves with highly processed, calorie-rich products has been how the food industry makes its money, and it's arguably the biggest contributor to obesity. After all, people don't shop with a battered copy of the USDA's food guidelines in hand, consulting with federal dietary standards every time they reach for a loaf of bread. Instead, they buy what's cheapest, what provides the biggest caloric bang for their buck, what they can most efficiently feed their families on. The USDA's food standards, imperfect though they may be, don't call for a Big Mac and a Coke per day. Yet that's what we eat, because those products are easier to find and cheaper to buy than the recommended fruit and vegetables.

Fortunately, distortionary subsidies to commodity crop growers might not be long for this world. The farm bill is up for renewal in 2012, and in these days of fiscal conservatism, billion-dollar Big Ag subsidies are suddenly unpopular. Although the details of this next farm bill are being finagled behind closed doors, there's talk that direct payments to farmers will be eliminated. Not only would the end of direct payments help prevent agricultural overproduction, it would also favor fruit and vegetable growers, who have forever survived without federal assistance and so might be better prepared to compete in a subsidy-free world. Then again, the political power of Big Ag might just trump the austerity zeitgeist: As pundit Aaron Wee noted on PolicyMic last month, direct payments may simply be replaced with additional crop insurance, leaving unchanged the net cost of subsidies.

Reducing agricultural subsidies should be a cross-aisle issue: Environmentalists hate Big Agriculture, and Republican politicians hate unnecessary government expenditures (except to campaign contributors within their own congressional districts, which is why we have the subsidies in the first place). While cutting out subsidies wouldn't be a panacea for the obesity issue, it would certainly ameliorate some of the systemic hypocrisy and perversity that has made us overweight. Here's to hoping our next farm bill looks substantially different than the last one.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

Farm bill: Why don’t taxpayers subsidize the foods that are better for us?

By Tamar Haspel

February 18, 2014

Read the farm bill, and a big problem jumps right out at you: Taxpayers heavily subsidize corn and soy, two crops that facilitate the meat and processed food we’re supposed to eat less of, and do almost nothing for the fruits and vegetables we’re supposed to eat more of. If there’s any obligation to spend the public’s money in a way that’s consistent with that same public’s health, shouldn’t it be the other way around?

The problem dates back to the bill’s inception in the 1930s, when farms raised livestock and grew a mix of crops, including staple crops (corn, wheat, oats, barley) and what the bill calls “specialty crops” but what the rest of us know as fruits and vegetables.

From the 1930s to 1980, subsidies alone weren’t substantial enough to significantly change the mix of crops on farms, according to Vincent Smith, professor of economics at Montana State University and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “In 1980, we introduced crop insurance subsidies of substance that began to change the ways in which farmers manage risk, and to discourage diversification,” he says. And then we increased them until they became very substantial, and farmers, at least to some extent, farmed to the bill the way teachers teach to a test.

What’s important about how we subsidize farms isn’t necessarily the overall dollar amount — it comes to 5 percent to 10 percent of the market price of most of the subsidized crops — it’s that it takes some of the risk out of farming grains and oil seeds, but not fruits and vegetables.

Farming is inherently risky. Weather, insects and disease, over which you have limited control or none at all, can wipe you out. One of the ways farmers manage risk is to plant variety. Okay, powdery mildew got your strawberries, but the broccoli’s going gangbusters. For farmers, crops that are given guaranteed protection from both losses and price drops are lower-risk propositions.

Farmers, like the rest of us, have bills to pay and children to feed. (Full disclosure: My husband and I farm oysters and have benefited from the farm bill’s conservation program.) A guaranteed source of income is attractive. That’s one of the reasons that, of the 300-million-plus acres planted with food (other than grass, hay and forage for animals) in this country, half are corn and soy. Another 50 million are wheat. Only 14 million are devoted to fruits and vegetables, from peas (1.2 million acres) to mangosteens (1 acre, which I’d dearly love to visit).

The 2014 iteration of the farm bill, signed into law this month, changes the way farmers are subsidized, and if you’ve read one thing about it, it’s probably been that direct payments — annual checks based on production history — have been discontinued. But calling the two programs that replace them “crop insurance” isn’t quite accurate, says Smith, because there are no premiums and no policies. Farmers choose between Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) and receive payments when price (for PLC) or revenue (for ARC) drops below a benchmark.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that PLC and ARC will cost about two-thirds of what direct payments cost, but the accuracy of that estimate depends on assumptions about the future price of commodities, something any commodity trader will tell you is notoriously hard to predict. Any analyst who could do it accurately would make his fortune in commodity futures, quit his analyst job and buy a lovely home somewhere sunny, where they grow less corn and more mango­steens.

PLC and ARC, together with a few other commodity programs, are slated to cost $44.4 billion over 10 years. Traditional crop insurance will continue, with government paying 65 percent of the premiums, and that’s another $89.8 billion, for a total of $134 billion for commodities over a decade.

And how does the bill help specialty crop growers? Robert Guenther, senior vice president of the United Fresh Produce Association, counts the ways. There’s help with research, provisions to include produce in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and school lunches, export enhancements, grants and a few other things. Total expenditure: $4 billion over 10 years. There is almost no insurance, and there are no subsidies, but many fruit and vegetable growers wouldn’t have it any other way.

“We’ve taken a different approach from the commodity growers,” says Guenther. He explains that specialty crop farming, because of its variety, doesn’t lend itself to the same kind of regulation. And he says many farmers prefer the flexibility that comes with independence to the conformity required by regulation, even if the regulation comes with cash. Asking the Agriculture Department to compare Washington apples with Florida oranges, and regulate appropriately, would be asking a lot. (There are also contractual agreements, outside the scope of the farm bill, that reduce risk for many specialty growers.)

It’s worth noting that, although producing more vegetables at lower prices looks good from a public health perspective, it’s not in the interest of the farmers already growing vegetables. Specialty growers supported the rules that, until now, prevented commodity growers from devoting some acreage to fruits and vegetables; this year’s farm bill allows commodity farmers to use up to 15 percent of their acreage for specialty crops without losing benefits. Because growing interest in local produce gives them a market, some will undoubtedly do that, and one study, published last year in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, concluded that “the removal of the planting restriction may have a non-trivial impact on U.S. fruit and vegetable production.”

I asked Guenther what he thought about the competition. “As long as these growers are willing to play by the same rules that current producers play by, they’re welcome to join the club,” he replied.

The extent to which the farm bill has shaped agriculture is hard to quantify, and the degree to which changing it can reshape it is hard to predict. According to Patrick Westhoff, director of the Food and Agriculture Policy Research Institute, “If you subsidize something, you get more of it.” Neither Westhoff nor Vincent Smith, however, is convinced that if you stop subsidizing it, you get much less. But a 1 percent decrease in the 160 million acres of corn and soy translates to an 11 percent increase in the 14 million acres of fruits and vegetables. (Whether that would translate to increased consumption is, of course, another question.)

There might be a way to promote production of fruits and vegetables while also protecting the interests of the farmers already growing those crops. Although specialty growers haven’t pushed for commodity-like plans, Guenther says they would like to see more focus on insurance. Smith points out that most of the risk to specialty crop growers comes from weather, and many private weather insurance products are available now that can cover a wide variety of crops. Many farmers don’t buy them because they’re not subsidized. If we were to change that, says Smith, “it would probably increase production, and there would be some price effect.” How much? “Anybody’s guess.”

Changes to the farm bill can have consequences both here and abroad, and we have to proceed cautiously. We can’t pull the rug out from under farmers whose choices have been influenced by the bill, and we have to consider the price and supply of the grains and oilseeds that feed the developing world. But we also need to move away from a system that requires taxpayers to spend billions underwriting a system detrimental to public health.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

How Agriculture Controls Nutrition Guidelines.

 

[bagger]

Blame Farm Subsidies, Not Nutritionists, For America's Obesity Problem

By Ben Goldfarb

December 30, 2011

Earlier this week, PolicyMic pundit Cameron English opined that federal dieticians are culpable for America's obesity epidemic. According to English, nutrition guidelines espoused by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) ignorantly emphasize unhealthy, carbohydrate-heavy diets. While English is right to point a finger at governmental error, he's looking at the wrong policies: Blame for the country's obesity crisis should fall on agricultural subsidies in the farm bill.

The farm bill is the unwieldy, recondite piece of legislation that defines how America grows and eats its food. The iteration of the bill that has governed our food regime since 2008 provides for $412 billion of spending, and most of it goes toward food stamps for poor Americans. But $60 billion has also been paid out to farmers in the form of agricultural subsidies, subsidies which have helped hook the U.S. on fattening, processed food.

The problem with the farm bill isn't the disbursement of subsidies per se; it's that the bulk of payments are forked over to growers of a few huge commodity crops mostly corn, wheat, soybeans in a handful of Midwestern congressional districts. (You can guess the reasons for this, I'm sure they involve the outsized political influence of the Big Agriculture lobby, venal congressmen trying to fill campaign coffers, and the indifference of the rest of the legislature.) Additionally, while most cattle ranching isn't highly subsidized itself, the beef industry is still among the primary beneficiaries of government largess, as low crop prices allow ranchers to feed their livestock cheap grain and so keep their own costs down. A subsidy for corn growers, therefore, serves as a de facto subsidy to the beef industry.

And, while some subsidies represent insurance in the event of crop failure, a large proportion take the form of direct payment for acreage planted i.e., farmers get paid to plant no matter how much money they're already making. Unsurprisingly, then, the allocation of subsidies tends to be highly iniquitous: Since 1995, 74% of payments have gone to the largest and wealthiest 10% of farming operations, even as 62% of farms received no subsidies at all.

While corn growers are raking in taxpayer dollars, fruit and vegetable farmers (termed "specialty crops" by the twisted language of the farm bill) are not allowed to receive any direct payments whatsoever the result of lobbying by enormous, consolidated fruit and vegetable companies. Understanding why these companies would lobby against subsidies to their own industry is, like most of the farm bill's provisos, guaranteed to make your brain hurt; suffice to say that the rules are in the interests of Big Ag and despised by small and mid-sized farmers of fruit and veggies. More to the point, it produces a glaring hypocrisy: USDA nutritionists recommend a vegetable-heavy diet that is totally incompatible with how federal subsidies are actually allocated.

The profligate handouts to grain have led to overproduction: Farmers this decade producenearly 4,000 calories per American per day, or 500 more than they did only thirty years ago. Some of this overproduction winds up overseas, undercutting farmers in developing countries and leading to famine; some of it winds up in our gas tanks in the form of ethanol, an environmental disaster in its own right. But a lot of it ends up in the bellies of Americans: We eat 200 calories more per day than we did in the 1970s.

Why do we eat more? Because agricultural and food processing companies have figured out ingenious ways to sneak their overproduction into our bodies. Food laureate Michael Pollan has spent a career revealing how companies turn excess grain into calories: By feeding corn to cattle to produce cheap hamburgers, by blowing formerly 8-ounce soft drinks into 20-ouncers, and by adding high fructose corn syrup to just about everything. And the really big bucks are in transforming corn into "value-added" products, the kind of packaged, chemically-altered food with 70 unpronounceable ingredients listed on the wrapper found in supermarkets and bodegas throughout America.

Flooding shelves with highly processed, calorie-rich products has been how the food industry makes its money, and it's arguably the biggest contributor to obesity. After all, people don't shop with a battered copy of the USDA's food guidelines in hand, consulting with federal dietary standards every time they reach for a loaf of bread. Instead, they buy what's cheapest, what provides the biggest caloric bang for their buck, what they can most efficiently feed their families on. The USDA's food standards, imperfect though they may be, don't call for a Big Mac and a Coke per day. Yet that's what we eat, because those products are easier to find and cheaper to buy than the recommended fruit and vegetables.

Fortunately, distortionary subsidies to commodity crop growers might not be long for this world. The farm bill is up for renewal in 2012, and in these days of fiscal conservatism, billion-dollar Big Ag subsidies are suddenly unpopular. Although the details of this next farm bill are being finagled behind closed doors, there's talk that direct payments to farmers will be eliminated. Not only would the end of direct payments help prevent agricultural overproduction, it would also favor fruit and vegetable growers, who have forever survived without federal assistance and so might be better prepared to compete in a subsidy-free world. Then again, the political power of Big Ag might just trump the austerity zeitgeist: As pundit Aaron Wee noted on PolicyMic last month, direct payments may simply be replaced with additional crop insurance, leaving unchanged the net cost of subsidies.

Reducing agricultural subsidies should be a cross-aisle issue: Environmentalists hate Big Agriculture, and Republican politicians hate unnecessary government expenditures (except to campaign contributors within their own congressional districts, which is why we have the subsidies in the first place). While cutting out subsidies wouldn't be a panacea for the obesity issue, it would certainly ameliorate some of the systemic hypocrisy and perversity that has made us overweight. Here's to hoping our next farm bill looks substantially different than the last one.

100% right.Farm bill needs to be completely flipped to organic fruits and vegetables and the corn farmers can fend for them selves.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

The farm bill drove me insane
America’s top nutrition thinker tried to unpack the most important food law. It was a mistake.
By Marion Nestle
03/17/16 04:55 AM EDT

In fall 2011, in an act of what can be described only as hubris, I had the bright idea of teaching a course on the farm bill.

For nearly 25 years, I had been writing and teaching about food politics and policy at New York University, and I knew that the farm bill dictated not only agricultural policy, but also such things as international food aid and feeding the hungry in America. It had to be one of the most important laws affecting food systems—if you care about such matters, likely the most important. With the 2008 farm bill up for renewal, I wanted to know more about it, and professor that I am, I thought: What better way to learn something than to teach it?

Big mistake. From the minute I started preparing the course, I could see that the farm bill was going to be too big, bloated and sprawling for any one human mind to absorb, certainly not mine. At one point, I tried to catalog the hundreds of programs it covers, each with its own set of arcane stipulations and invested lobbyists. Beyond the obvious—that its agricultural programs are heavily slanted to benefit Big Agriculture—its details defeated me. My students, most of them enrolled in graduate programs in nutrition, food studies, public health, public policy or law, were deeply invested in farm bill issues but they too were soon overwhelmed. The bill not only lacked an overarching vision, but seemed designed to obfuscate how the programs actually worked.

I came away from this experience convinced that agricultural policy in our country is not only hazardous to public health and the environment, but also to American democracy. Democracy requires informed citizens. I suspect that few citizens, let alone members of Congress, have the vaguest idea of what is in this bill and how it works in practice. Even lobbyists and congressional staff are likely to know only the pieces they are paid to understand.

This is a shame, because the farm bill matters. It is crucial to practically everything about our food system: what crops get subsidized, how much foods cost, how land is used and whether low-income Americans have enough to eat. Whether you are rich or poor, much about your food choices is shaped by what’s in this bill’s 357 printed pages.

Given its stunning importance, you might think it would start with some kind of principle. Alas, you would be wrong. On the first day of class, I asked the students to tell me what they thought a rational agricultural policy should promote. They quickly came up with a handful of goals: provide sufficient food for the entire population at an affordable price; produce a surplus for international trade and aid; ensure an adequate income for farmers; provide farm workers with a living wage and decent working conditions; protect farmers against bad weather, volatile markets and climate change; promote regional, seasonal, organic and sustainable food production; conserve soil, land and forest; protect water and air quality, natural resources and wildlife; and raise farm animals humanely. Taken together, they describe a food system designed to promote the health of people and the planet.

A vision as idealistic as my students suggested would be a tall order by any standard, but the 2014 farm bill doesn’t even come close. If you examine how its incentives line up, you quickly see that it strongly favors the industrial agriculture of the Midwest and South over that of the Northeast and West; methods requiring chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides over those that are organic and sustainable; and commodity crops for animal feed and ethanol rather than “specialty” crops (translation: fruits and vegetables) for human consumption. Because its benefits are proportionate to production levels, it promotes crop overproduction. This makes food hugely competitive and forces the manufacturers of processed foods and drinks to do everything possible to encourage sales of their products. The result is a food environment that encourages overeating of highly caloric, highly processed foods, but discourages consumption of healthier, relatively unprocessed foods.

As a result of today’s intense public and professional interest in food issues, we now know a lot about how social forces drive food decisions. We know that overeating leads down the line to ballooning health care costs; we know that industrial farming depletes the soil and water that will someday be needed to feed our grandchildren. If you were to design a national food policy based on public health, it would be the antithesis of the farm bill. How did this happen? Politics, of course.

THE CURRENT SITUATION can be traced to decisions made by Congress in 1906. That was the year Upton Sinclair wrote “The Jungle,” a muckraking account of Chicago’s meat-packing plants. With an urgency that seems incredible in the light of today’s partisan government, Congress immediately passed two laws dealing with food safety and assigned their regulation to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The USDA put one of its departments in charge of the law dealing with animals and a second department in charge of the law dealing with adulteration of food products. The second eventually became the Food and Drug Administration, which moved its public health functions to the Public Health Service. But USDA ran the food stamp program and, when no other agency wanted dietary guidance, took it on as well, thereby causing endless conflicts between USDA’s historic mandate to promote industrial agriculture, and its newer mandate to advise the public about diet and health. The farm bill focuses mainly on the meat-and-dairy mandate—production of animal-based foods and the commodity crops that feed animals and yield ethanol. For the health and sustainability functions it acquired later—regulation of organic agriculture, development of dietary guidelines every five years (jointly with the Department of Health and Human Services), publication of food guides for the general public andoversight of food assistance to low-income Americans—the USDA can be a most uncomfortable home.

Organic production methods, for example, are not merely an alternative way of growing food. They constitute an explicit critique of industrial farming: They reject chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and genetic modification. For years, the USDA websites included a dismissive disclaimer that organic production methods were no better than conventional methods, despite their well-established benefits for soil quality. It no longer uses that statement, but its Organic Standards Board—which sets the rules for what can be marketed as “organic”—is under constant pressure from large agricultural producers to weaken restrictions on which chemical “inputs” are acceptable; this would allow companies to use industrial methods but sell products at the higher prices claimed for organics. USDA’s attempts to achieve détente between organic and GMO producers have gone nowhere to date.

The most blatant conflicts of interest, however, show up in the USDA’s dietary advice. For years, the Dietary Guidelines have induced the wrath of lobbyists whenever they implied that eating less beef would be a good way to reduce consumption of saturated fat. Last year, the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee caused a firestorm when it suggested that meat-eating was environmentally unsustainable, given the disproportionate contribution of farm animals to greenhouse gases and climate change. Pressure by meat industry lobbyists got Congress involved and forced the USDA and HHS to announce well in advance that the Dietary Guidelines would not even mention the word “sustainability,” as indeed, they did not.

The guidelines do, however, suggest eating more fruits and vegetables, advice that the USDA repeats in its MyPlate food guide for the general public. This guide illustrates the idea that half the plate—50 percent—should be fruits and vegetables. But USDA’s farm bill policies have historically allocated less than 1 percent of farm support funds for promoting these foods, with nearly all of the remaining 99 percent used to support commodity crops. The 2014 farm bill, although increasing allocations for organic and fruit-and-vegetable production and marketing, still does so at a token level. If you were to create a MyPlate meal that matched where the government historically aimed its subsidies, you’d get a lecture from your doctor. More than three-quarters of your plate would be taken up by a massive corn fritter (80 percent of benefits go to corn, grains and soy oil). You’d have a Dixie cup of milk (dairy gets 3 percent), a hamburger the size of a half dollar (livestock: 2 percent), two peas (fruits and vegetables: 0.45 percent) and an after-dinner cigarette (tobacco: 2 percent). Oh, and a really big linen napkin (cotton: 13 percent) to dab your lips.

Recently, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group opposed to eating foods of animal origin, filed a lawsuit against USDA and HHS because the Dietary Guidelines had dropped advice to limit consumption of dietary cholesterol, for which eggs are the largest source. The lawsuit alleges that much of the research behind that decision was paid for by the egg industry, which obviously has a vested interest in encouraging people to consume more eggs.

If you want a clear portrait of how the USDA’s conflicts shape policy, just compare two of America’s major federal nutrition programs—SNAP and Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC. SNAP is the larger of the two: It provided debit cards for food purchases to 45 million low-income Americans last year, is governed by the farm bill and takes up nearly 80 percent of its funding. SNAP is in the farm bill for two reasons. Along with other food assistance programs, food stamps developed in the 1930s as a means to dispose of surplus commodities. Most such programs are still regulated by USDA but through child nutrition legislation, not the Farm Bill. SNAP comes under farm legislation for the second reason: political “logrolling.”

Since the mid-1960s, the American political system, divided as it is by urban and rural regionalism, hasn’t ensured enough votes in Congress to pass either farm supports or SNAP as bills on their own. Logrolling unites them in a “You vote for mine and I’ll vote for yours” marriage, an unholy alliance that neither Big Agriculture nor advocates for the poor can afford to see changed.

One result is that SNAP, whose nearly $80 billion budget makes it by far the largest of federal food assistance programs, encourages participants to use their benefits to purchase whatever foods they like, regardless of health consequences. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and both the food industry (for reasons of profit) and advocates for the poor (for reasons of politics) want to keep it that way. Perversely, SNAP can even provide an incentive to drink sodas. Because purchases made with SNAP dollars are not taxed, the program effectively reduces the cost of sugar-sweetened beverages in states that tax such drinks. The cost discount doesn’t apply to healthier untaxed foods.

In contrast, the much smaller WIC program provides for purchases of a specific package of foods, all of them healthy. In creating WIC, Congress required research on its effectiveness. This research consistently demonstrated health benefits from the WIC approach, and program advocates have managed to stave off most attempts to junk up the WIC package.

LINKING AGRICULTURE POLICIES to health policies would help to resolve these conflicts, and leading commentators on our food system such as Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, Ricardo Salvador and Olivier de Schutter have called on the president and Congress to create a national food policy, something we don’t have—but badly need. They’ve offered specific suggestions for what such a policy would entail. They point out that unless we pay much closer attention to the way agriculture is linked to diet, public health and the environment, our society will continue to suffer from widespread obesity, food insecurity, chronic disease, soil degradation and food safety scares, as well as the abandonment of rural America.

That the farm bill requires reform is a given. How to reform it is quite another matter. In light of the current lack of bipartisan efforts to govern, starting from scratch on the Farm Bill is beyond contemplation. Even piecemeal efforts to tweak existing programs toward fruit-and-vegetable support run up against political resistance. The only hope I see for meaningful change is grass-roots advocacy—a uniting of the many groups working on farm bill issues to create one loud voice for improving the bill, program by individual program.

That’s the real reason I taught the class: to encourage students—the future of American democracy—and future participants in the food movement to get political and advocate healthier and more sustainable food policies.

The food movement has one enormous advantage for anyone who wants to advocate policy change: everyone eats. Food is the easiest way of explaining to fellow citizens how conflicts of interest in federal agencies, corporate contributions to federal officials or food-industry funding of research can affect their lives. Thousands of grass-roots groups throughout our country are working to promote local and regional foods, farmers’ markets, urban farming, farm-to-school programs, animal welfare, farmworkers’ and restaurant workers’ rights, and to increase food security for everyone. These groups continue the long and distinguished history of social movements in the United States, and are part of the tradition that brought us better civil rights, women’s rights and environmental protection. They are our hope for a counterweight to Big Agriculture, although still relatively weak, they are growing in power and influence.

Farm bills are up for consideration every five years or so. We need to start work on the next one right now.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

Long article, but a pretty good read: The great FLOTUS food fight.