aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Imagine scrapping the Farm Bill

Annie Myers went to an NYU panel entitled ”The Farm Bill 2007: Understanding the Political, Agricultural, and Nutritional Impact” and came away wondering why we don’t rethink the Fram Bill from the ground up:

We who are up for it sludge through the Farm Bill, and the best of us - whether we’re organizations, institutions, or just crazy individuals - come up with proposals that cut subsidies, end subsidies, fund specialty crop research, or at least somehow cut down on this CORN production, that we’ve all learned from Michael Pollan is a major reason for why we’re stingy, fat, and hated.

What we DON’T consider, is scrapping the Farm Bill altogether. It’s demonstrably ridiculous, in and off itself. To address 3 million square miles of land with 1 Farm Bill simply doesn’t make sense. Agriculture is regional, for one thing. Not only are the culture and politics different in Iowa than in New York, but the land is too, and the climate. A bill with provisions for avocados in California should not be legislating the cows in Maine. Nutrition and Hunger and Agriculture and Trade may be much like adults playing Twister - mischievously intermingled, entirely inseparable, and always (somewhere) hurting - but these forces of the economy need not share the same budget and bed. Money to support agricultural research should not detract from Emergency Food Programs, and whomever pens provisions for popular exports should not simultaneously sign off on subsidies deemed illegal by the WTO… we need to think bigger than a Farm Bill proposal.  We need to take the twister-playing issues in the Farm Bill and get them interacting through a different game: synchronized swimming, perhaps, or a maypole dance.

In response to my concerns, [NYU Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health professor Marion] Nestle said that election funding really has to change.  As long as we have the Iowa Caucus, she said, no presidential candidate is gonna stick their neck out for truly progressive agricultural policy.  Maybe she’s right.  I’m not sure what we need.  But we can at least take the new, trendy interest in the Farm Bill further than the “Buy this!  Buy that!  Vote with your dollar!” mantra, and foster some truly innovative, political thought.  If people did it in the ‘30s, and the ‘70s, we can sure as hell do it now.

I think Nestle’s exactly right. And so long as Annie’s looking for a new hero - “with all due respect [to Michael Pollan] we need a new one,” she says - I point back to a hero of mine.

Eric Schlosser closed his keynote speech at last year’s Food, Ethics and the Environment Conference at Princeton with the same optimism expressed in Annie’s last sentence.

But on the way there he made a vitally important point of a kind with both Annie and Nestle’s:

I think that changing the world by what you buy is only going to go so far. And it only works to a point. And after that point I think it is delusion that as consumers we are going to change that system fundamentally or we are going to change the world.

Missing from the discourse, missing from the dialog over the last twenty-five years have been a couple of other phrases. One of them is “corporate responsibility” and the other one is “collective responsibility.” And I stand here honestly saying that I’m not pure, my purchases are not ideal, and maybe some of you in this room are pure but it’s hard to be pure in this country in the year 2006. But ultimately the problems that...I’ve tried to outline are not due to individual faults. They’re really not. They have been caused by big systems. Systems of belief, systems of production, systems of making a profit. And without looking at them from a systemic approach there is no possibility of meaningful change...what we do as consumers isn’t going to make a profound difference. And I think we cannot allow this movement surrounding ethical eating to focus only on our personal responsibility and on consumer power.

Emphasis mine. I’m with Annie! The only way to meaningful change is to take on and fight the system.