Disappointed With Farm Bill Subsidies, Reformers To Step Up Fight
As the 2007 farm bill takes final shape in Congress, an unprecedented wave of Bay Area activism aimed at forcing substantial change finds itself washing up on the shores of political reality.
“I think we had a chance to make it a really great farm bill, and it turned out to be the same old pork-belly politics,” said Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services for the Berkeley Unified School District.
Cooper has been a vocal part of a broad coalition of nutrition, food, farm and environmental interests that mounted a national crusade this year, for the first time, to try to alter the direction of the nation’s farm policy.
They argued that traditional crop subsidies, the heart of the bill, are as much about food as farming and have led to industrialized agriculture, pollution and widespread obesity and diabetes.
Now, with the Senate ready to vote next week on a bill that basically keeps the subsidies intact, responses by advocates for change range from disappointment to fury, plus a few faint cheers for extra money dispensed to California produce farmers, organic farming, conservation, and fruits and vegetables for schoolchildren.
“I’m not a happy camper. We didn’t get a food and farm bill, we got a fat bill,” said Dan Imhoff, a Sonoma County author whose book “Food Fight” advocates farm bill reform. “It’s agribusiness as usual. It’s high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oil for all, and it’s at the expense of the land and the people and the taxpayers.”
A handful of key advocates for change said Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, all Northern California Democrats, have proved disappointments, at least so far.
“I don’t understand why they have so far failed to support serious reform for the (subsidies), which could be of enormous benefit to California farmers and more importantly to California eaters,” said UC Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan. His best-selling book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” laid out the case against subsidies and made Pollan the reform movement’s de facto leader.
The bill does contain a record $1.6 billion to $2 billion for California’s fruit and vegetable growers. But, compared with $42 billion for corn and other commodity subsidies, Pollan said, “That’s not going to make fruits and vegetables as available as fast food.”
Pollan and others are keeping up the pressure, hoping that a Senate floor fight might yield last-minute changes next week and that Pelosi would use her power to make them stick with a House-Senate conference committee.
“That’s why I spoke in her district on Friday night,” said Pollan, who appeared at a dinner at Fort Mason sponsored by the nonprofit group Food From the Parks and urged the 160 people present to keep the phone calls and e-mails coming.
Some Bay Area leaders in the movement for change, like Kari Hamerschlag, until recently policy director of the California Coalition for Food and Farming, choose to emphasize the bright spots in the farm bill: $10 million for community food programs over five years, $80 million for organic farm research (plus more for farmers going organic) and a new policy encouraging federal nutrition programs to buy locally produced foods.
“These programs are important,” if small, models for the future, she said.
School lunches will get more money under a fruit and vegetable snack program that’s been expanded to $1 billion. That sounds like a lot, Cooper said, but spread over 30 million school lunches served in the United States, 180 days a year, “it means I could give each child four-fifths of an apple a day more.”
The subsidies, she said, are “a big part of why school lunches are so bad.” That Congress left them intact, she added, is “to the detriment of our children, and it’s not OK.”
Whatever happens in the Senate next week, the Northern California reformers intend to keep fighting, although the next farm bill won’t come before Congress for five years, and Americans have notoriously short attention spans.
Cooper said the country can’t afford to wait five years.
“We could double the number of kids with diabetes by the time of the next farm bill,” she said. “If middle America started making this an issue in the presidential campaign, we could make some progress.”
The silver lining of the 2007 debate is that more Americans are aware of the issues at stake, Imhoff said.
Pollan said people ask him about it all the time, “and this is the least sexy issue in America. A year ago, who would have thought it?”
He thinks all the activism has put Congress on the defensive and that the old system is “very close to falling apart.”
Cooper, though, thinks it needs a bigger push to engage mainstream America.
“It might take Oprah getting involved,” she said.
E-mail Carol Ness at cness@sfchronicle.com.
© 2007 The San Francisco Chronicle
To see how corporate (and cruel) animal agriculture benefits from government subsidies, just check out this chart, http://www.pcrm.org/magazine/gm07autumn/health_pork.html
“I don’t understand why they (Feinstein, Boxer, Pelosi)have so far failed to support serious reform for the (subsidies), which could be of enormous benefit to California farmers and more importantly to California eaters,” said UC Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan.
It’s especially surprising, given that farmers and agribusiness interests vote overwhelmingly Republican. Why do Democrats want to reward Republican voters with subsidies that are wholly unjustified in the first place?
Too many corporate famers get way too much money in subsidies.
I live out here in the land of big corn & big soybeans and I will tell you that it burns me to see these fat cats (and most farmers are FAT)gettting government check when they don’t need it to make a substancial living with out the checks. I don’t blame them for taking them, they aren’t that stupid, but then they turn around and complain about how the government wastes their tax dollars (like they pay taxes anyway!)
WmC,
How about a billion dollars to the California economy in 2003-2005 as a reason to continue to support the giveaway status quo?
Go to http://farm.ewg.org/sites/farmbill2007/index.php and see that big farmers, even in California get most of the payments. And don’t think they aren’t smart enough to line pockets on both sides of the political scale.
You’ll also see that many small farmers receive a pittance through these programs and they think that their tiny allowance makes these programs benefit them. This thinking makes small farmers, the Farm Bureau, and virtually every farm group in the country line up in favor of subsidies.
In reality these subsidies tilt the scales even more in favor of industrial farming. Left high and dry are small farmers in the U.S. and throughout the world where cheap, subsidized products are dumped - often in the form of “food aid”.
Boxer and Feinstein play up the fact that they support more money for organic farmers. But they’ve left the sacred cows alone. The supposed “reform” being talked about will limit payments to $300,000 per individual, but as you can see on the EWG site, most of the giant farms have already got around this by spreading payments out to the wife, the kids, etc.
Now we have ethanol plants sprouting throughout California so that more subsidized corn will be grown here and sold at artificially cheap prices to enrich the grain brokerage companies. These corporations will sell the ethanol to the usual gasoline companies who will continue to gouge consumers at the pump.
So far the biggest changes in the farm bill are a nod to fruits and vegetables of about 2% of the new total spent with a similar tilt of the head to organic farming.
Is either of these good? I’m not so sure these dollars won’t put specialty crops on the slippery slope of farm subsidies. If the dollars are there the corporations will follow. Will this only progress to an eventual outcome of spending $42 billion to subsidize these crops as well as ever increasing amounts on grain and cotton?
Yes, the farm bill is a huge disappointment–essentially more corporate welfare for the large corporations (I thought these guys were supposed to be for capitalism and free markets–if so, why do they accept these subsidies? Nothing free market about them in the least!) And the Congress isn’t concerned because the average American, fatted on fast food, doesn’t have any idea of what’s going on with these subsidies, AND, Congress’ pockets are lined by the corporations…not the average American.
But let’s keep on fighting–and at the same time, focus on building your own local food system with things like CSAs, Farmers’ markets, etc.
We need bio-diesel subsidies for soybeans, peanuts, and switchgrass.
What is your opinion concerning the Wheat Board? Do you think that it helps farmers or hurts farmers. Do you think that it is an unfair advantage or the leveling of the playing field?
Wes Jackson compared modern agriculture to mining. It’s just extracting a resource for as much short-term profit as possible. Apparently, there’s more profit in growing grains to produce calorie-dense foods that feed a nation of compulsive over-eaters.
I think the “what came first? the-chicken-or-the-egg conundrum applies here. If people demand fattening foods, then agribusiness will supply. If agribusiness can make more money on such foods, then they’ll persuade people to keep consuming them. Also, the weight-loss industry has a lot to gain (irony intended) by keeping the vicious cycle intact.
Once again, the small farmer, the consumer, and the environment suffer the consequences.