The Human Cost of Farm Subsidies

We Americans like prices to be cheap, and we don't tend to look at the full cost of what we are buying. A case in point is illustrated by an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled "You Are What You Grow."

"A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. . . .

"Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. . . . Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

Contrary to what one might assume, the reason for this disparity, as Michael Pollan explains in the article, is not the free market but rather government subsidies. The Farm Bill comes up for renewal every five years, but with little fanfare. It has primarily been seen as a chance for big-city congresspeople to trade a vote with a rural representative. Yes to corn subsidies, yes to a freeway project.

Pollan points out that things are a bit different this time. Public health officials realize that the obesity epidemic will not abate until farm subsidies quit making unhealthy foods unnaturally cheap. And some who watch the wave of illegal immigration realize that this problem will not subside until Mexican farmers are no longer put out of business by subsidized wheat and corn from the U.S. Even free trade hawks realize that global free trade agreements will be stalled until the issue of subsidies to U.S. and European farmers is resolved.

"Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

"That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent."

. . . .

"To speak of the farm bill’s influence on the American food system does not begin to describe its full impact — on the environment, on global poverty, even on immigration. By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities — or to the United States. The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s. (More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico’s eaters as well as its farmers.) You can’t fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural agriculture in Mexico."

Yet any changes will no doubt be attacked as an assault on the free market. Let's begin focusing on fair trade, fair prices for farmers here and elsewhere, and healthy food for all.

It's Official: "Abstinence Only" Does Not Work

Our local Portland newspaper, The Oregonian, has its faults--tending to be biased toward anything corporate, and acting as the Portland Police Bureau's mouthpiece in the ongoing problem of brutality in that agency--including a number of cases that received no coverage.

However, they tend to be right on the target on social issues, and an editorial in today's edition hit the nail on the head.

"Oregon never embraced the "abstinence-only" movement funded by the Bush administration. It never decided, as a matter of state policy, to fight teen pregnancy and promiscuity by treating premarital sex as a sin and contraceptives as contraband.

"Oregon instead supports comprehensive sex education that encourages abstinence without enshrining it. The approach has paid off. The state's pregnancy rate for girls under 18 has plummeted by almost 50 percent since 1990 and remains well below the national average, equaling fewer young families stuck in poverty and thousands of abortions prevented.

. . .

"The federal government threw about $1.5 billion into abstinence-only programs over the past decade, with a sharp increase in spending under the Bush administration. These programs teach teenagers to abstain from sex until marriage. They avoid facts about contraceptives, under the theory that this information undermines the abstinence message.

"Unfortunately, the programs don't do much good. A much-anticipated national study, authorized by Congress in 1997 and released this month, found that abstinence-only programs don't keep teenagers from having sex."

The study stated that about half of students lost their virginity by age 18, and that percentage did not change in areas that had abstinence-only education. I've seen other, more anecdotal, evidence that sexual activity among teens is actually significantly higher in the Bible belt, where schools are most likely using abstinence-only approaches. Pregnancy, STDs, and abortions certainly occur at higher rates in those states.

The editorial also mentions the fact that I have seen in other places--but rarely in the corporate media: today's teens are statistically less likely to get pregnant than their parents' generation. This is presumably my generation--Generation X or the 13th Gen. This is worth keeping in perspective. The 24-hour media sometimes make things seem worse than they really are.