Thoughts on the Farm Bill
To paraphrase Michael Pollan, Americans are made of corn. As a population, we are being sickened by a food supply that is pumped full of corn and soy products, subsidized by the Federal government. The piece of legislation responsible for so much controversy over how the American food industry conducts the majority of its business is the Farm Bill. Spread across close to 1,000 pages, it includes important programs like Food Stamps and the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act, but it also includes subsidies for corn, soy and other foods.
When corn subsidies were first written into the bill during the 70’s, farmers were looking for help in assuring a stabilized price when bringing their food to market. Today, the situation is much different. This specific piece of the Farm Bill has incentivized the production of corn on a massive scale where it is mostly being grown by enormous farms. There is of course, a limit to how many ears of corn the American consumer’s in interested in purchasing. So, with this excess of cheap corn on their hands, the food industry found an alternative way to market and sell it to the same consumers. By adding value to the corn (in the form of salt and sugar, or in livestock feed), they could continue to produce a lot of cheap corn and then sell it the form of other products. The majority of corn that is subsidized by the government ends up in one of two places; first is high fructose corn syrup which is the main ingredient in most sodas, but it’s also used in countless other food products for added sweetness. And second, because the quality of corn is so poor, the corn could only be used to feed animals such as cows, chickens and pigs, regardless of whether corn is in their natural diets, which in all of the examples given, is not. The nutritional energy of the corn then goes into America’s food supply in the form of meat or milk, so that by eating a hamburger, we are unknowingly eating corn.
This model of agribusiness, enhanced by the US Farm Bill, affects public health in two ways. First, an accumulation of cheap calories in the market translates into more calories being sold to the consumer. Since the corn subsidies began, Marion Nestle has illustrated this effect in her writings that these calories have ended up in Americans’ fat tissue. Secondly, due to the cheap cost and abundance of empty calories, it has forced healthful and nutritious fruits and vegetables to appear relatively higher in cost. Often, the cheapest calorie a person can buy in a store with a dollar is in a candy bar. Time may tell, but these two outcomes may be modest in comparison to the ecological damage that this policy has on our environment in terms of soil degradation, monoculturation, increased antibiotic resistant pathogens and an agriculture system completely dependent on oil.
Moving forward, the Farm Bill needs to extrapolate the public health and environmental issues. In light of the rising health care costs associated, which can be traced back to the subsidized calories entering the market, corn subsidies should be capped at an amount reasonable to support a small farmer, not for large-scale farming operations. Second, there is a need for incentives that that protects soil and encourages sustainable farming practices, rather than using up our resources (e.g. land, fossil fuels) for short-term, seasonal profits. Third, institutional purchases through the Commodity Distribution Program and Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act could be rewritten to mandate a certain percentage of food be purchased from food grown within a reasonable mile radius of the institution or population.
In conclusion, the Farm Bill needs to be updated to include considerations of its affects in the short-term and the long-term. In making amendments there are two components, the first considers the net amount of subsidized calories gown. The second aims to improve the methods with which food is grown.
