Food Fight:
The Citizen's Guide to a Food and Farm Bill

2. Why the Farm Bill Matters

If you eat, pay taxes, care about the nutritional values of school lunches, worry about the plight of biodiversity or the loss of farmland and shrinking open space, you have a personal stake in the tens of billions of dollars annually committed to agricultural and food policies. If you’re concerned about escalating federal budget deficits, the fate of family farmers, a food system dominated by corporations and commodities, conditions of immigrant farm workers, the state of the country’s woodlands, persistent hunger and poverty, or the marginalization of locally raised organic food and grassfed meat and dairy products, you should pay attention to the Farm Bill. There are dozens more reasons why the Farm Bill is critical to our land, our bodies, and our children’s future. Some include:

• The twilight of the cheap oil age and onset of unpredictable climatic conditions.
• Looming water shortages and crashing fish populations.
• Broken rural economies.
• Euphoria over agricultural expansion for the production of biofuels and bioplastics.
• Escalating medical and economic costs of child and adult obesity.
• Record payouts to corporate farms that aren’t even losing money before subsidies.
• Over 35 million Americans, half of them children, who don’t get enough to eat.

The Farm Bill matters because it makes some big corporations scandalously rich and drives other farmers out of rural areas—not just here, but in other countries too. The Farm Bill makes us fat and produces a vulnerable food system. The Farm Bill legalizes and supports polluting and destructive practices, then spends millions trying to put bandages on damage inflicted by past and present programs. The Farm Bill artificially sets prices and interferes with fair markets, while officials tout the virtues of “free market” and “fair trade.” Its consequences include poverty, rural exodus, and famine.

Although subsidies do provide a critical safety net in some years to family farms that continue to grow commodities crops, the big players and beneficiaries in the farm lobby are corporate agribusinesses, grain distributors, food processors, oil companies, absentee landlords, tractor dealers, and gasohol producers. What started as an ambitious temporary effort to lift millions of Americans out of the desperate economic and ecological conditions in the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, slowly devolved into a corporate boondoggle during the great family farm exodus of the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. As a result of the Farm Bill, citizens pay a national food bill at least three times: (1) at the checkout stand; (2) in taxes that subsidize commodity crop production; and (3) in environmental cleanup and medical costs related to the consequences of industrial commodity-based agriculture.

Most analysts, most farmers, and even many legislators agree that our present course leaves us unprepared for the urgent challenges we face in the early twenty-first century. The stakes are high. And they get higher with each passing year. The silver lining is that Americans actually do have a substantially large food and farm policy program to debate. Conditions for change have perhaps never been better, as market dynamics and public awareness rapidly align to create uncertainty about farm politics as usual. Indeed, the Farm Bill matters because it can serve as the economic engine that drives small-scale entrepreneurship, on-farm research, species protection, nutritional assistance, school lunches, regional development, and habitat restoration, to name just a few. Our challenge is not to abolish government supports altogether, but to ensure that those subsidies we do choose to legislate actually serve as valuable investments in the country’s future and allow us to live up to our obligations in the global community. How we get there will be a work in progress. But most observers agree that the era of massive giveaways to corporations and surplus commodity producers must yield to policies that reward stewardship, promote healthy diets, secure regional economies, and do no harm to family farms or hungry kids and their families.

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