It is really simple. The subsidy game which started out to help the
family farm has over three generations morphed into guaranteed
government finance for large agribusiness. Quite simply the banks do
not wish to lend to an independent operator if they can lent to a
government based stream of income. With that reality, the best
strategy is to keep buying farms to acquire more government money.
The result is obviously stupid and has driven the depopulation of
the farming industry of owner operators and a rising reliance on
underpaid illegal immigrants.
This group of citizens are stepping up to scream because they know
that quality is been driven out by subsidized industrialized food
that generally inferior.
Celebrity chefs and
food movement leaders tell Congress: ‘This farm bill stinks’
By Twilight Greenaway
Wendell Berry, Dan
Barber, Rick Bayless, and Mario Batali are among 70 food movement
leaders who signed a letter asking Congress to invest in healthy
food.
Mario Batali, Dan
Barber, Rick Bayless, and Alice Waters have had it with our food
system. These well-known chefs — along with a group of 70 food
movement celebrities, including Michael Pollan, Will Allen, Laurie
David, Robert Kenner, and Wendell Berry — have set down their sauté
pans for just long enough to sign onto a letter asking Congress to
invest in healthy food.
It’s a timely
statement by this star-powered group, as the Senate Agriculture
Committee’s draft of the 2012 Farm Bill — a package of federal
farm and food legislation representing nearly a trillion dollars —
looks like it could finally hit the Senate floor this week.
And they have a point.
As we’ve reported in the past, the Senate draft probably won’t
improve the big picture of the food landscape as-is. In the draft,
farm conservation efforts and nutrition assistance both face deep
cuts, while the industrial farm lobbies have ensured that the biggest
commodity farms continue to rake in subsidy payments. (Don’t
believe me? Take a look at this graphic, which ran with Sunday’s
New York Times op-ed on the subject. It shows that a full 76 percent
of the subsidy dollars distributed between 1995 and 2010 went to a
mere 10 percent of the nation’s farms.)
Signed, sealed,
delivered
The letter signed by
Batali, Waters, and co. was initiated by the Environmental Working
Group (EWG) and describes the Senate bill as “falling far short of
the reforms needed to come to grips with the nation’s critical food
and farming challenges.” The letter continues:
It is also seriously
out of step with the nation’s priorities and what the American
public expects and wants from our food and farm policy. In a national
poll last year, 78 percent said making nutritious and healthy foods
more affordable and accessible should be a top priority in the farm
bill. Members of the U.S. Council of Mayors and the National League
of Cities have both echoed this sentiment in recent statements
calling for a healthy food and farm bill.
Instead, the bill
“would spend billions to guarantee income for the most profitable
farm businesses in the country” in the form of unlimited crop
insurance. These subsidies, it reads, “will encourage growers to
plow up fragile areas and intensify fencerow-to-fencerow cultivation
of environmentally sensitive land, erasing decades of conservation
gains.” As an alternative, the letter points to a recent report by
the Government Accountability Office that suggests shifting more of
the cost of crop insurance premiums over to big commodity farmers —
a move the EWG says could save as much as $2 billion. This money,
they add, should:
… go to provide full
funding for conservation and nutrition assistance programs and
strengthen initiatives that support local and healthy food, organic
agriculture and beginning and disadvantaged farmers. These
investments could save billions in the long run by protecting
valuable water and soil resources, creating jobs and supporting foods
necessary for a healthy and balanced diet.
Indeed, these are
important suggestions. And they’re more in-line with the hopes many
food reformers who’ve signed on probably had for this year’s farm
bill — the optimism that many activists held onto as the 2008 bill
came to a close and they started looking ahead to this one. Of course
all that was before last fall’s Secret Farm Bill negotiations,
which kicked the process into gear within the private offices of a
handful of lawmakers, and kept it insulated from many of the loudest
voices in the good food movement.
If the Senate chooses
to listen to the requests put forth in the letter, it may be driven
to support whatever progressive amendments appear once it hits the
floor. This one, for example, was announced yesterday from Sen.
Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and would restore funding for proposed
SNAP (“food stamps”) cuts by reducing federal subsidies for crop
insurance companies.
The dark clouds over
the process
Of course, it’s a
little hard to get excited about efforts to improve on the Senate
draft, with the sounds of ultra-conservative Tea Party groups — the
same groups that killed House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio)
highway bill earlier this spring — sharpening their knives in the
next room.
As we’ve been
reporting for the last few months, the Senate’s draft of the bill
is a comparatively moderate approach in today’s polarized political
landscape. And if Tea Party groups like Heritage Action and Club for
Growth have their way, there may be no new farm bill this year at
all. The GOP-controlled House Agriculture Committee has yet to
produce a draft of the bill, but when they do, they’ve already
announced that they intend to annihilate SNAP. Its efforts mirror a
more general budget bill by the House that would cut the benefits of
a whopping 1.8 million Americans and cut free school lunch for
280,000 children. (To make matters worse, the House has apparently
not even put the farm bill on its summer agenda.)
A recent blog entry on
The Hill called “Conservatives target farm bill” doesn’t paint
a promising picture either. It reads:
Conservative groups
have made it official — they hate the Senate farm bill and will
push Tea Party fiscal hawks in Congress to defeat it.
Heritage Action and
Club for Growth on Tuesday told The Hill they will “key vote” the
Senate farm bill that is coming up for passage in early June,
punishing members on their annual scorecards for voting in favor of
the bill.
All that said, it’s
always worth pushing for the change you hope to see while there’s
still a chance to make a difference — especially when it so clearly
reflects the will of so many Americans, like this fight to reform the
food system does. If nothing else, the EWG’s letter does project a
united front within the movement, and that’s something we may need
even more of in the months and years ahead.
Update: Clare
Leschin-Hoar reports over at Take Part that the EWG letter will soon
be complemented by a Kickstarter effort “to raise approximately
$100,000 to place a one page advertisement in the Washington Post to
further promote awareness of the bill’s importance, and to pressure
lawmakers to listen to constituents over the interests of ‘big
ag’.” Stay tuned.
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