President Obama visited Iowa yesterday, and took the opportunity to remind everyone, especially agricultural swing state voters, that Congress, or as Obama would prefer it, the “Ryan Congress” (who’s this John Boehner guy you speak of?) can’t decide whether they want to undermine farmers through legislation, or through inaction. This was both disingenuous (what, campaign talk that isn’t 100% true? Outrage!) and important. Because the Farm Bill is the most important omnibus piece of social engineering that Congress has debated since the Affordable Care Act, and everybody there is getting it all wrong. Of course, we quite promptly shifted our attention on to the very important things, like Joe Biden saying “y’all” and the Romney campaign crying slander.
On these pages though, we will take a moment to parse the problem that farmers actually face. Most urgently, of course, it’s a drought. According to the USDA, the worst drought since the 1930s. Secondly, and only slightly less crucially, it’s a broken system of food production, created by consistently throwing bad policy after bad, Farm Bill after Farm Bill, for the past thirty years, and really, long before that. Up until recently, this bad policy was usually cooked up in the dark kitchen of K Street, far away from the light of national campaign rhetoric, which of course only encouraged the problem. The fact that this epic drought has put the Farm Bill debate into the headlines is the result of hard work by many concerned people to drag farm policy into the bright light of public discourse.
So why is the 2012 Farm Bill still all wrong? Mainly because it continues crop insurance policies that primarily benefit insurance companies, by giving farmers the money to buy their products, and America’s largest agribusinesses, by rewarding them for expanding vast monocultures of corn or soybeans. This expansion, in many areas, requires plowing up new tracts of marginal farmland. These same vast monocultures, and especially these marginal areas, are incredibly vulnerable to current drought conditions, meaning that insurance subsidy payment amounts, tied to the cost of crop insurance, and therefore necessarily rising as drought increases crop failures, will have been essentially set higher by the same piece of legislation that authorizes them.
Besides being bad on its own, continuing crop insurance subsidies leaves less money for programs that actually impact the majority of farmers, the environment, and our food system in positive ways. More money for conservation programs, programs that promote research into and adoption of sustainable agriculture practices, and programs that create more and better markets for nutritious fruits and vegetables (rather than the processed carbohydrates and salty meats that are cheaply available thanks to corn and soybean subsidies).
Note: I have intentionally left aside the issue of SNAP and Food Stamp program changes that form the bulk of expenditures in the Farm Bill because of the misinformation and hyper-partisanship surrounding them. That Farm Bill debate has completely stalled, and that both parties have abdicated responsibility for addressing serious structural issues in America’s food production system in favor of name-calling surrounding a difference of just $12 billion in cuts (out of more than $770 billion in scheduled funding) over the next ten years is, sadly, another typical low point for our dysfunctional legislature.
Louis Wertz 