At 3:09 PM -0400 10/11/03, Doug Henwood wrote:
But are "progressives" against rich-country farm subsidies?
***** New York Times Magazine October 12, 2003
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions of Obesity
By MICHAEL POLLAN
Sometimes even complicated social problems turn out to be simpler
than they look. Take America's ''obesity epidemic,'' arguably the
most serious public-health problem facing the country. Three of every
five Americans are now overweight, and some researchers predict that
today's children will be the first generation of Americans whose life
expectancy will actually be shorter than that of their parents. The
culprit, they say, is the health problems associated with obesity.
. . . Since 1977, an American's average daily intake of calories has
jumped by more than 10 percent. Those 200 or so extra calories have
to go somewhere. But the interesting question is, Where, exactly, did
all those extra calories come from in the first place? And the answer
takes us back to the source of all calories: the farm. . . .
The rules of classical economics just don't seem to operate very well
on the farm. When prices fall, for example, it would make sense for
farmers to cut back on production, shrinking the supply of food to
drive up its price. But in reality, farmers do precisely the
opposite, planting and harvesting more food to keep their total
income from falling, a practice that of course depresses prices even
further. What's rational for the individual farmer is disastrous for
farmers as a group. Add to this logic the constant stream of
improvements in agricultural technology (mechanization, hybrid seed,
agrochemicals and now genetically modified crops -- innovations all
eagerly seized on by farmers hoping to stay one step ahead of falling
prices by boosting yield), and you have a sure-fire recipe for
overproduction -- another word for way too much food.
All this would be bad enough if the government weren't doing its best
to make matters even worse, by recklessly encouraging farmers to
produce even more unneeded food. Absurdly, while one hand of the
federal government is campaigning against the epidemic of obesity,
the other hand is actually subsidizing it, by writing farmers a check
for every bushel of corn they can grow. We have been hearing a lot
lately about how our agricultural policy is undermining our
foreign-policy goals, forcing third-world farmers to compete against
a flood tide of cheap American grain. Well, those same policies are
also undermining our public-health goals by loosing a tide of cheap
calories at home.
While it is true that our farm policies are making a bad situation
worse, adding mightily to the great mountain of grain, this hasn't
always been the case with government support of farmers, and needn't
be the case even now. For not all support programs are created equal,
a fact that has been conveniently overlooked in the new free-market
campaign to eliminate them.
In fact, farm programs in America were originally created as a way to
shrink the great mountain of grain, and for many years they helped to
do just that. The Roosevelt administration established the nation's
first program of farm support during the Depression, though not, as
many people seem to think, to feed a hungry nation. Then, as now, the
problem was too much food, not too little; New Deal farm policy was
designed to help farmers reeling from a farm depression caused by
what usually causes a farm depression: collapsing prices due to
overproduction. In Churdan, Iowa, recently, a corn farmer named
George Naylor told me about the winter day in 1933 his father brought
a load of corn to the grain elevator, where ''the price had been 10
cents a bushel the day before,'' and was told that suddenly, ''the
elevator wasn't buying at any price.'' The price of corn had fallen
to zero.
New Deal farm policy, quite unlike our own, set out to solve the
problem of overproduction. It established a system of price supports,
backed by a grain reserve, that worked to keep surplus grain off the
market, thereby breaking the vicious cycle in which farmers have to
produce more every year to stay even.
It is worth recalling how this system worked, since it suggests one
possible path out of the current subsidy morass. Basically, the
federal government set and supported a target price (based on the
actual cost of production) for storable commodities like corn. When
the market price dropped below the target, a farmer was given an
option: rather than sell his harvest at the low price, he could take
out what was called a ''nonrecourse loan,'' using his corn as
collateral, for the full value of his crop. The farmer then stored
his corn until the market improved, at which point he sold it and
used the proceeds to repay the loan. If the market failed to improve
that year, the farmer could discharge his debt simply by handing his
corn over to the government, which would add it to something called,
rather quaintly, the ''ever-normal granary.'' This was a grain
reserve managed by the U.S.D.A., which would sell from it whenever
prices spiked (during a bad harvest, say), thereby smoothing out the
vicissitudes of the market and keeping the cost of food more or less
steady -- or ''ever normal.''
This wasn't a perfect system by any means, but it did keep cheap
grain from flooding the market and by doing so supported the prices
farmers received. And it did this at a remarkably small cost to the
government, since most of the loans were repaid. Even when they
weren't, and the government was left holding the bag (i.e., all those
bushels of collateral grain), the U.S.D.A. was eventually able to
unload it, and often did so at a profit. The program actually made
money in good years. Compare that with the current subsidy regime,
which costs American taxpayers about $19 billion a year and does
virtually nothing to control production.
So why did we ever abandon this comparatively sane sort of farm
policy? Politics, in a word. The shift from an agricultural-support
system designed to discourage overproduction to one that encourages
it dates to the early 1970's -- to the last time food prices in
America climbed high enough to generate significant political heat.
That happened after news of Nixon's 1972 grain deal with the Soviet
Union broke, a disclosure that coincided with a spell of bad weather
in the farm belt. Commodity prices soared, and before long so did
supermarket prices for meat, milk, bread and other staple foods tied
to the cost of grain. Angry consumers took to the streets to protest
food prices and staged a nationwide meat boycott to protest the high
cost of hamburger, that American birthright. Recognizing the
political peril, Nixon ordered his secretary of agriculture, Earl
(Rusty) Butz, to do whatever was necessary to drive down the price of
food.
Butz implored America's farmers to plant their fields ''fence row to
fence row'' and set about dismantling 40 years of farm policy
designed to prevent overproduction. He shuttered the ever-normal
granary, dropped the target price for grain and inaugurated a new
subsidy system, which eventually replaced nonrecourse loans with
direct payments to farmers. The distinction may sound technical, but
in effect it was revolutionary. For instead of lending farmers money
so they could keep their grain off the market, the government offered
to simply cut them a check, freeing them to dump their harvests on
the market no matter what the price.
The new system achieved exactly what it was intended to: the price of
food hasn't been a political problem for the government since the
Nixon era. Commodity prices have steadily declined, and in the
perverse logic of agricultural economics, production has increased,
as farmers struggle to stay solvent. As you can imagine, the shift
from supporting agricultural prices to subsidizing much lower prices
has been a boon to agribusiness companies because it slashes the cost
of their raw materials. That's why Big Food, working with the
farm-state Congressional delegations it lavishly supports,
consistently lobbies to maintain a farm policy geared to high
production and cheap grain. (It doesn't hurt that those lightly
populated farm states exert a disproportionate influence in
Washington, since it takes far fewer votes to elect a senator in
Kansas than in California. That means agribusiness can presumably
''buy'' a senator from one of these underpopulated states for a
fraction of what a big-state senator costs.)
But as we're beginning to recognize, our cheap-food farm policy comes
at a high price: first there's the $19 billion a year the government
pays to keep the whole system afloat; then there's the economic
misery that the dumping of cheap American grain inflicts on farmers
in the developing world; and finally there's the obesity epidemic at
home -- which most researchers date to the mid-70's, just when we
switched to a farm policy consecrated to the overproduction of grain.
Since that time, farmers in the United States have managed to produce
500 additional calories per person every day; each of us is,
heroically, managing to pack away about 200 of those extra calories
per day. Presumably the other 300 -- most of them in the form of
surplus corn -- get dumped on overseas markets or turned into ethanol.
Cheap corn, the dubious legacy of Earl Butz, is truly the building
block of the ''fast-food nation.'' Cheap corn, transformed into
high-fructose corn syrup, is what allowed Coca-Cola to move from the
svelte 8-ounce bottle of soda ubiquitous in the 70's to the chubby
20-ounce bottle of today. Cheap corn, transformed into cheap beef, is
what allowed McDonald's to supersize its burgers and still sell many
of them for no more than a dollar. Cheap corn gave us a whole raft of
new highly processed foods, including the world-beating chicken
nugget, which, if you study its ingredients, you discover is really a
most ingenious transubstantiation of corn, from the cornfed chicken
it contains to the bulking and binding agents that hold it together.
You would have thought that lower commodity prices would represent a
boon to consumers, but it doesn't work out that way, not unless you
believe a 32-ounce Big Gulp is a great deal. When the raw materials
for food become so abundant and cheap, the clever strategy for a food
company is not necessarily to lower prices -- to do that would only
lower its revenues. It makes much more sense to compete for the
consumer's dollar by increasing portion sizes -- and as Greg Critser
points out in his recent book ''Fat Land,'' the bigger the portion,
the more food people will eat. So McDonald's tempts us by taking a
600-calorie meal and jacking it up to 1,550 calories. Compared with
that of the marketing, packaging and labor, the cost of the added
ingredients is trivial.
Such cheap raw materials also argue for devising more and more highly
processed food, because the real money will never be in selling cheap
corn (or soybeans or rice) but in ''adding value'' to that commodity.
Which is one reason that in the years since the nation moved to a
cheap-food farm policy, the number and variety of new snack foods in
the supermarket have ballooned. The game is in figuring out how to
transform a penny's worth of corn and additives into a $3 bag of
ginkgo biloba-fortified brain-function-enhancing puffs, or a dime's
worth of milk and sweeteners into Swerve, a sugary new ''milk based''
soft drink to be sold in schools. It's no coincidence that Big Food
has suddenly ''discovered'' how to turn milk into junk food: the
government recently made deep cuts in the dairy-farm program, and as
a result milk is nearly as cheap a raw material as water.
. . . The political challenge now is to rewrite those rules, to
develop a new set of agricultural policies that don't subsidize
overproduction -- and overeating. For unless we somehow deal with the
mountain of cheap grain that makes the Happy Meal and the Double Stuf
Oreo such ''bargains,'' the calories are guaranteed to keep coming.
Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, teaches at
the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at
Berkeley.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/magazine/12WWLN.html> *****
--
Yoshie
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