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Is A Sustainable Food Strategy on Obama's Menu?
A PRIUS in every garage and a farmers market in every neighborhood! This is our moment! This is our time for slow food! Or so, people hope from President-elect Obama.
Obama has raised hopes he will inspire Americans away from fool's gold-en arches and toward farmers markets and community supported agriculture (where people buy a share in a farm's annual harvest). Obama is the most healthy eater to enter the White House in a long time, unlike George H.W. Bush who castigated broccoli as he craved pork rinds, unlike ravenous Bill Clinton, who gained 30 pounds in his first presidential campaign, and unlike the junior George W. Bush, who, pun intended, butchered the meat of his message on food. He once said, "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."
Obama purchased peaches, pears, apples and nectarines from farmers markets on the campaign trail. Grass-roots organizing in farmers markets helped him turn Indiana from a red state to a blue state and cruise to victory in Wisconsin. Physician Rob Stone told the Los Angeles Times, "Obama's played Bloomington like a violin. Last summer, his people put out a table at the local farmers market and they've been showing up every weekend."
In Madison, the Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal featured Joe Melloy, Jim Witkins and their Obama table at the farmers market, where they gave out $1,000 worth of Obama buttons and bumper stickers they paid for themselves. "You don't wait for the cavalry to arrive," Melloy said. "You are the cavalry."
The
grass-roots cavalry as well as wealthy food gurus want to see Barack
and Michelle Obama become American Gothic, even creating a symbolic
White House farm. Michael Pollan, author of the best-selling "In
Defense of Food," wrote an open letter to the next president in The New
York Times magazine decrying fossil-fuel-sucking, disease-promoting
agribusiness, and calling for more support of local foods and farming
that relies more on the sun than "
Obama told Time magazine he read Pollan's analysis that "our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil . . . contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector . . . creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity."
But Obama could not withstand the blowback from agribusiness. His campaign issued a statement that he "was simply paraphrasing" Pollan and did not "blame farmers" for obesity. He calculated he could not risk being framed again as an elitist, this time about bitter farmers clinging to corn and combines. In 2007, Obama complained at an Iowa farm stop about the price of arugula at Whole Foods when there was not a single Whole Foods in the whole state of Iowa.
Obama's nomination of former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack for Agriculture secretary further leaves unclear if he has a food strategy. Vilsack is a relatively open-minded farm-belt politician on alternative energy. But Monsanto's vice president of global plant breeding, Ted Crosbie, said Vilsack has "a very balanced view of agriculture."
The problem is that agribusiness is grossly unbalanced, flooding Capitol Hill with $1 billion of lobbying efforts the last 11 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, reaping $177 billion in subsidies the last 12, according to the Environmental Working Group. There is so little accountability in farm payment programs that the Government Accountability Office reported in October that the United States Department of Agriculture paid out a total of $49 million to 2,702 potentially ineligible people whose adjusted gross income was more than $2.5 million and derived less than 75 percent of their income from farming, ranching, or forestry.
The result is government waste and grossly unbalanced supermarket shelves, full of sugars, starches, and fats that are cheap to produce but costly to our bodies and our healthcare system. Can a community organizer from Chicago support community supported agriculture? First, he must display the courage to defend what the likes of Michael Pollan have to say, without apology.
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13 Comments so far
Show AllWe can analyze what we think the Obama administration will or won't do about agriculture, global warming, energy, food security, public health, and the ecology of the Earth - all intimately tied to food and ag policy - but the important thing for us to do, is to ORGANIZE ourselves into a STRONG MOVEMENT to push our society and our "leaders" into policy choices.
The actual power of organized groups of people is tremendous - if people can organize. Are we getting organized?
The Organic Consumers Association, RAFI, the Cornucopia Institute, and many other excellent organizations, need people power and funding to push the policy debate toward sanity, sustainability, and survival.
Let's get organized!
Yes, let's get organized, but with accurate information. Organic Consumers Association has great values and some great policy positions, but they haven't been on board on below cost price gains (Timothy A. Wise and Elanor Starmer, Industrial Livestock Companies’ Gains from Low Feed Prices, 1997-2005, 2.5 billion each for Tyson and Smithfield). So let's get all these groups on board. They share the good values.
And what about Congress's menu and the business's menu?
Terrance Mitchell
Redfield, South Dakota
The hippies ad this problem figured out. Corporations were of course, against it
Too bad wealthy food gurus like Pollan advocate strange solutions like wanting more hunting on public lands.
Aholes with guns have already caused enough problems.
Obama knows what a vegan is but he'll never advocate a logical food solution.
Meat eating is like Israel. Its the problem but no one pays attention to it or is serious about changing the status quo.
Organization has to globalize no less than the corporations have done. Human rights organizations in Brazil are documenting the agribusiness for fuel - growing exponentially. US petrochemical and ag corporations line up with equipment manufacturers. It is extremely difficult to wrap one's mind around the sheer scale of the monoculture.
this is a little dated but good intro:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/16/news/international/brazil_soy.fortune/index.htm
The 2008 report is not yet translated, but detail papers are up. Do scan for the pictures - this is hundreds of thousands of sq. miles ... becoming the 'green desert'.
www.social.org.br
"Daryl E. Ray" has some good articles on that "Brazil" stuff (Column 18, 11/10/00; #19, 11/17/00; more March 06, etc.). Search the words in quotes or see It's like the US did to the Europeans early in our history. We had more and more land for agriculture, moving westward. They couldn't do anything about it. We should be cooperating with Brazil to get more money for both, not trying to run each other out of business. Do you see OPEC vowing to destroy each other with below cost oil? We should not have deliberately lost money on farm exports 1981-2006, subsidizing our other (non farmer) competitors, foreign processors and livestock feeders who buy our grain.
George H W Bush did something right. He's about as healthy as any octagenarian out there!
Ya know, Big Ag/Food isn't all bad. Orange juice, California and Florida mid-winter produce, vitamins, Gorton's frozen fish... Last time I took the family to the farmer's market, we came home with two "Shoo-Fly Pies"! I have to admit fast-food/white bread... is entrenched in the US and spreading around the world, but the advances in farming, refrigeration, transportation... from the 19th to mid 20th century really improved our health. Guess we have to strike the appropriate balance.
I vacilate between organizing and falling down under the yoke.
Unfortunately anyone in the White House can have the best of organic without saying so, without supporting it, without acknowledging that's what theyre doing .
Remember Ophra with Beef??? & spin that out!!!!
The writer has good values and understands a bunch of the key issues, but fails in the same way most progressives have failed (ie. in lead up and follow up to 2008 farm bill), to get at the biggest issues. It's a false paradigm that has become entrenched. It explains the big picture, fitting the pieces together neatly, but with key falsehoods that make key resulting solutions false.
Here we see it. "The problem is ... agribusiness ... flooding Capitol Hill with $1 billion of lobbying efforts the last 11 years, (TRUE) reaping $177 billion in subsidies the last 12, according to the Environmental Working Group (FALSE).... The result is government waste and grossly unbalanced supermarket shelves, full of sugars, starches, and fats that are cheap to produce but costly to our bodies and our healthcare system (TRUE this is the result, but FALSE, it's NOT the result of those subsidies). Ok, let me sort the true from the false in this paradigm. The "agribusiness" that put in the lobby money was not the farmers who got the subsidies. The farmers lost massively then got subsidies to compensate for most but not all of the losses. For the commodities and years USDA-ERS studied, no program commodity made a profit above full costs for the years covered, even including subsidies, and corn, wheat, rice, cotton, soybeans, grain sorghum, barley and oats lost money EVERY year 1981-2006 EXCEPT 1996 (if these commodities are added together, net/acre x acres) without subsidies. Some never made a profit. IN CONTRAST the agribusinesses that gave the lobby money didn't get any of the subsidies! Gee, how's that? Why's that!? Yea, many progressives don't know, (ie, if they get info from Environmental Working Group or many others). No, the fat cats get paid secretly from below cost gains (as the US deliberately loses money on exports for their special benefit, (ie. 1981-2006)
In summary, those getting the subsidies, lost money doing it, and those benefiting didn't get subsidies. They got low, below farmers' costs purchase prices, and made huge, multibillion dollar gains, huge record profits, secretly, hidden, not on the government payroll, not blamed (or even mentioned) by most progressives.
"There is so little accountability in farm payment programs ... paid out a total of $49 million to 2,702 potentially ineligible people" (TRUE but). Again, on average farmers lost massively under the farm program, and the bigger the farm, the bigger the losses, in a directly proportional way, except for some economies of size. And again, FALSE, they're NOT the true beneficiaries. Sure, there are rules for certain kinds of rich people not to get compensated for massive farm losses, but they did have those losses. The big farms getting bigger subsidies did have directly proportional bigger losses, again except for some economies of size.
What the rich do in farming is "tax loss farming." We've known about this for decades. It diversifies their money (and Iowa farmland went up last year, it hasn't crashed). Farmers have a lot of tax write-offs, as another compensation for giving away their grain at massive losses to corporate agribusiness and foreign countries. But, as with all tax losses, the richer, in higher tax brackets, get bigger write offs. (at one time the benefits were 15% in the 15% bracket and 70% in the top, 70% bracket) For example, Ingolf Vogeler, in "The Myth of the Family Farm: Agribusiness Dominance of US Agriculture" had a chapter on tax loss farming.
a personal reconnection to one's own immediate, living food source...one's own hand delivering one's food from the living world to the mouth...that is the beginning and the end...personal feeding of one's self with one's own harvest...
theinitiate
All I can say is, for the last few years, since we bought our house, we've grown a garden. We've made it bigger every year. I have been reading more about it, to learn methods which have less impact. My sisters also do the same and both have a good bit of knowledge, which we share. I've been reading about agribusiness, genetically modified seed andthe negatives they bring. Next,is to start canning maybe some freezing. My mom did both and of course my grandmother, peaches, tomatoes corn,etc. In my area, I've been suggesting to those who have unused land to grow their own food. Start small and practice. See, my real worry way down deep, is that any organized, well planned transition to localized food supply, may not happen. Why? Because I do believe that those in power will never let go with out a fight. I just can't see the big food corps giving in,(nor the big oil, big coal, or big anything). I hope I am wrong. But over all i do my best to work for positive change. But i am trying to be ready- if that's even possible-in case it's not so positive... Change will come, but I think it will be painful because of those who will fight it. NOthing is more permanent than chang...