Down on the farm: the problem with government subsidies

A BREAKFAST FREQUENTLY served at my son's school--where over half the children receive government-supported meals--consists of commercially produced French toast sticks and syrup. The list of ingredients on the package for this meal is as long as this paragraph. It includes not only partially hydrogenated soybean oil and high fructose corn syrup, but also more mystifying additives like gelatinized wheat starch, calcium caseinate, lecithin, guar gum and cellulose gum. The story of how these items arrive at a school cafeteria and are designated as food is a long and complicated one involving the interaction of farmers, government policy makers and the food industry.

The modern story of why we eat what we eat begins in the 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt faced the challenges of the Depression. He saw that many farmers were poor and that one in every five people in the country was undernourished. Farmers and other Americans were too vulnerable, he believed, to the cycles of boom and bust. When crop production was high, prices were too low to support farmers. When crop production was low, farmers didn't have enough to feed themselves, let alone the rest of the nation.

Farmers' vulnerability was the impetus for Roosevelt's reform. "An unprecedented condition calls for new means to rescue agriculture," Roosevelt said as dust storms devastated fields in Oklahoma. The program included a subsidy system to ensure farmers' income and to "reduce the gap between huge surpluses and disastrous shortages." This system was designed to create greater reserves of food that could "help iron out extreme ups and downs of price." Originally more than 100 distinct crops qualified for support.

When Roosevelt signed the Agriculture Adjustment Act and Farm Relief in 1933, he believed he was saving the family farm. At the time, 21 percent of Americans earned their living from farming and one in four Americans lived on a farm. Today that number is less than 2 percent.

In the decades that followed, the industrialization of farming changed the subsidy system dramatically. In the 1970s, under Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, farm policy sharpened its focus on creating cheap raw materials. It turned farmers from tenders of the land into managers of agribusinesses. Due largely to Butz's reforms, today the bulk of farm subsidies go to producers of only five crops: wheat, soybeans, corn, cotton and rice, and the food economy is based on processed foods and additives derived from corn.

The subsidy program is not so much a means of stabilizing family farms as a way of supporting agribusinesses. Seventy percent of the $21 billion in subsidy payments goes to 10 percent of farmers. In 2005, Riceland Foods Inc. received almost $16 million. Some family farms receive as much as $700,000. Eighty percent of eligible farmers receive an average of $704. In other words, a lot of the money goes to subsidize a very small number of farmers.

American farmers are, as Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, puts it, "the most productive humans who have ever lived." A small number of farmers grow the food that feeds a nation and many other people around the

world. Yet we do not eat much of the food they grow in the form in which they grow it. More than two-thirds of farm products go into livestock feed, and much of the rest must be transformed through manufacturing into the products we consume.

The rise of processed food is linked to what the surgeon general has called an "obesity epidemic" and the rise of lifestyle-related diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. Processed foods offer cheap calories and little nutrition. Our bodies have long been good at digesting apples but hardly know what to do with guar gum or partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. The problem has perhaps most directly affected the poor: calorierich food is inexpensive, while the price of fresh foods is increasing. As Kimberly Burge of Bread for the World aptly puts it, "Calories are cheap in the United States--it's nutrients that are expensive."

We can see, then, how and why a rather unhealthy breakfast is prepared at my son's school. The production of the wheat and corn in his breakfast are subsidized by the government. The elements are processed and then sold back to the government as part of a nationwide nutrition program.

Schools that attempt to bring high-nutrient food to children can find themselves scolded by the Department of Agriculture for failing to deliver enough calories. Activist and writer Bill McKibben is one of many who sees something wrong here. "Having 'nutrition' programs ride on the back of an unsound agricultural policy--basically, tossing the scraps of a crappy food system to the poor--is in nobody's interest in the long run," he says.

Besides encouraging the use of processed food, the subsidy program has had surprisingly negative effects on rural areas. Supporters of subsidies--especially members of Congress-argue that subsidies bring much-needed funds into economically struggling areas. But subsidies do little to stop the trends affecting those areas. As large farms become larger and small farms disappear, the population dwindles. Corporate farmers have little incentive to shop locally, so local economies begin to disappear too. Tamela Walhof, a regional organizer for Bread for the World, says many rural residents have to drive an hour and 15 minutes to the grocery store and bus their children two and half hours to school. Poverty in rural areas outpaces that of urban areas. And poverty in rural areas is more intractable--90 percent of persistently poor counties (counties with high poverty levels for 30 years or more) are rural.