A New Era Could Be On the Way

A migrant worker harvests grapes in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

U.S. farm policy subsidizes the production of cheap calories instead of healthy foods. This explains how as a country, we are getting fatter and hungrier at the same time—a seeming contradiction that is borne out by statistics.¹ It’s even the same people who are most at risk for both hunger and obesity. One in three U.S. children born since 2000 is at risk of contracting Type-2 diabetes, a diet-related condition associated with being overweight. Most of these children are poor.² Meanwhile, food insecurity—a technical term for living with the ever-present threat of hunger—has increased by 25 percent since 2000.

Is cheap food really cheap? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the annual costs of treating obesity and diabetes are more than $250 billion.³ Other researchers estimate that obesity accounts for 30 percent of the rise in health care costs in the United States.⁴ The costs of treating other chronic diseases associated with diet, such as heart disease and certain types of cancers, must also be considered.

Michael Pollan, author of a number of books on the U.S. food system, says, “Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.”⁵

Health care reform, covered in more depth in Chapter 2, may make it difficult to ignore the consequences of our national agriculture policies. “When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet,” says Pollan, “the movement to reform the food system—everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches—will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn’t really ever had before.”⁶

Another reason that existing farm policies are becoming ever more unsustainable is climate change. If climate change continues unabated, we can expect turbulent conditions in the U.S. food system. The food system is a top user of fossil fuels, second only to cars, and it is emissions from fossil fuels that are accelerating climate change.⁸ Petroleum is used at every stage of the industrialized food chain. It’s the base of the fertilizers and pesticides required to grow food, and it’s used throughout the transport of crops from fields to grain elevators to processing plants to supermarket shelves. In 2008, the soaring cost of food around the world and here in the United States was due partly to a spike in oil prices.

Food prices eventually stabilized and then began to drop as the demand for oil fell with the onset of the global recession. But it’s unlikely that oil will remain cheap permanently. Once the recession is behind us and the world economy has another growth spurt, oil prices will begin to rise as demand outstrips supply. Coming to grips with our dependence on fossil fuels must include the agricultural sector. One can hardly argue that other sectors of the economy must change but agriculture can be left alone.

“What taxpayers and farmers really want are profitable farms that protect the environment and people,” writes Loni Kemp, a co-chair of the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture. U.S. farm policy can help to achieve both objectives by supporting more sustainable forms of agriculture and emphasizing conservation practices instead of overproduction. Restructuring in this way offers a range of benefits. It could make it viable for more people in rural America to farm. The U.S. food system would be more diverse and healthier. Water quality, air quality, and soil quality would all improve. Emphasizing conservation practices could give a strong boost to a burgeoning local food movement and reduce agriculture’s carbon footprint by lowering the distances foods are shipped from field to market.

Farm communities in the United States might then become places where more people seek to live, rather than places they feel it necessary to leave to earn a living, and this could help usher in a new era of rural growth, reducing hunger and poverty along the way.

Issues