Farm Bill? Food Bill?--Food Fight! Call for a Peoples Farm and Food Bill

Wednesday night’s “Food Fight!” hosted by Michael Pollan, author of Omnivore’s Dilemma featured a panel of researchers, farmers, farmworkers and activists including George Naylor, Carlos Marentes, Ken Cook, and Ann Cooper. Panelists addressed the 2007 Farm—and Food—Bill. Pollan warned the sold-out crowd they would likely leave more confused than when they went in. Why?

Because the Farm Bill is a multi-billion dollar legislative stew that reads like Cyrillic alphabet soup. Here's the recipe:

Start with $31 billion in subsidies and foreign agriculture, add $26 billion in Food Stamps, around $9 billion in school breakfasts and lunches, and another 4.6 billion in Women, Infants and Children programs ; season with $8 billion in conservation and add a pinch for research, food safety and rural development. Cook for a year and a half until all contents are hopelessly unrecognizable. Now invite Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, a few giant retailers, the biofuels industry and the rest of their gang over for a feeding frenzy until satiated. Leave the slops for community groups working overtime on shoestring budgets to establish farmers markets, Community Supported Agriculture, local grocery, processing and retail store development. Let them fight over the crumbs for nutrition and health education with the food banks. Call in Afro-American, minority, organic and young farmers and invite them to elbow their way to the remaining dregs. Let them all fight the environmentalists to lick the spoon. Forget about the migrant workers who pick, pack and process our food, they can eat after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sends them home.

No wonder the Farm Bill is confusing. It’s supposed to be. It has to convince the U.S. taxpayer to cough up $20 billion every five years or so to finance the production of cheap cattle, hog and chicken feed for the meat and poultry industry. It must finance the massive, monocultural production of corn for high-fructose sweetener so that the food industry can concoct what food activist Hank Herrera calls “MESSes” (manufactured edible substitute substances) on the cheap. It is confusing because it must make sure that subsidized, antibiotic and hormone-saturated meat from gargantuan, polluting, confined animal feedlot operations (CAFOS), and manufactured foods transported from far away are more accessible than locally-grown fresh fruits & vegetables, dairy and range-fed beef. It must convince us that the poisonous junk we buy in the supermarket is good for our health and the environment. It must obscure the social and environmental costs of this industrial food system so that communities pay for them separately without holding the agri-foods industry accountable. That’s a big job!

Luckily, there was plenty of straight talk from panelists. Ann Cooper, the Director of Nutritional Services at Berkeley Unified Schools spoke passionately on how the Farm Bill is poisoning our children’s school lunches. Thanks to our industrial diet of manufactured food, high in salt, fat, and sweeteners, one in three children (and one in two Afro-American and Latino children) will develop Type 2 Diabetes by the time they are eighteen years old. Largely because of diet-related diseases, this generation of children will not outlive their parents. Carlos Marentes, a farm labor organizer from El Paso, Texas, spoke of the tremendous labor subsidy that poor, dispossessed farmers from Latin America provide the agri-foods industry. We keep agricultural products cheap for industrial food processors through our taxes… migrant workers pay with cheap labor, their livelihoods—and often—with their lives.

The beacon through the Farm Bill’s “perfect storm” was George Naylor, president of the National Family Farm Coalition. (Michael Pollan refers to him as his “Virgil”). An Iowa corn and soybean farmer, George likes to cut straight to the chase. He maintains that at the end of the day, it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure the farmer gets a fair price for their product. Here’s his revolutionary idea: Rather than the taxpayer, make THEM pay! Who? Why, ADM, Cargill, Tyson and the rest of the corporate agri-foods gang, of course. Make them pay the fair price for agricultural products. Use this savings to build local food systems across the country that ensure smallholder livelihoods and supplies fresh, healthy food. And, let's have a grain reserve to tide us over in the bad crop years that global warming brings us.

But won’t all that make food more expensive at the checkout counter? Maybe. But as fuel prices rise, local food will become cheaper, so maybe not. We would surely be paying less taxes to the agri-foods industry, less in cleaning up after industrial agriculture, less in health and medical care, less in the loss of environmental services... Maybe we wouldn’t feel like we had to subsidize the oil industry to grow inefficient fuel crops instead of food. Maybe we wouldn’t build a $2 billion, 700-mile fence to keep migrants out because agri-industry wouldn’t be using the subsidies from our tax dollars to destroy peasant food systems abroad, either.

A Peoples Food and Farm Bill? The possibilities are endless.

Contact your congressperson soon! The 2007 Farm Bill will likely be voted on in August.
Check our website

http://www.foodfirst.org/issues/usfarmbill

to see Farm Bill proposals from the National Family Farm Coalition, the California Food and Justice Coalition, and the California Coalition for Food and Farming, and The Center for Popular Research, Education and Policy.

The Ecology Center is circulating a petition for a People's Farm Bill www.ecologycenter.org

Also check out panel commentator Daniel Imhoff’s excellent book—Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, to keep from getting queasy as you see how the stew is made…

Respond to eholtgim at foodfirst dot org