US food subsidies & obesity

[Grant Lee <grantlee@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[from the NYT]

"The shift from an agricultural-support system designed to discourage
overproduction to one that encourages it dates to the early 1970's -- to the
last time food prices in America climbed high enough to generate significant
political heat. That happened after news of Nixon's 1972 grain deal with the
Soviet Union broke, a disclosure that coincided with a spell of bad weather
in the farm belt. Commodity prices soared, and before long so did
supermarket prices for meat, milk, bread and other staple foods tied to the
cost of grain. Angry consumers took to the streets to protest food prices
and staged a nationwide meat boycott to protest the high cost of hamburger,
that American birthright. Recognizing the political peril, Nixon ordered his
secretary of agriculture, Earl (Rusty) Butz, to do whatever was necessary to
drive down the price of food.

Butz implored America's farmers to plant their fields ''fence row to fence
row'' and set about dismantling 40 years of farm policy designed to prevent
overproduction. He shuttered the ever-normal granary, dropped the target
price for grain and inaugurated a new subsidy system, which eventually
replaced nonrecourse loans with direct payments to farmers. The distinction
may sound technical, but in effect it was revolutionary. For instead of
lending farmers money so they could keep their grain off the market, the
government offered to simply cut them a check, freeing them to dump their
harvests on the market no matter what the price.

The new system achieved exactly what it was intended to: the price of food
hasn't been a political problem for the government since the Nixon era.
Commodity prices have steadily declined, and in the perverse logic of
agricultural economics, production has increased, as farmers struggle to
stay solvent. As you can imagine, the shift from supporting agricultural
prices to subsidizing much lower prices has been a boon to agribusiness
companies because it slashes the cost of their raw materials. That's why Big
Food, working with the farm-state Congressional delegations it lavishly
supports, consistently lobbies to maintain a farm policy geared to high
production and cheap grain. (It doesn't hurt that those lightly populated
farm states exert a disproportionate influence in Washington, since it takes
far fewer votes to elect a senator in Kansas than in California. That means
agribusiness can presumably ''buy'' a senator from one of these
underpopulated states for a fraction of what a big-state senator costs.)

But as we're beginning to recognize, our cheap-food farm policy comes at a
high price: first there's the $19 billion a year the government pays to keep
the whole system afloat; then there's the economic misery that the dumping
of cheap American grain inflicts on farmers in the developing world; and
finally there's the obesity epidemic at home -- which most researchers date
to the mid-70's, just when we switched to a farm policy consecrated to the
overproduction of grain. Since that time, farmers in the United States have
managed to produce 500 additional calories per person every day; each of us
is, heroically, managing to pack away about 200 of those extra calories per
day. Presumably the other 300 -- most of them in the form of surplus corn --
get dumped on overseas markets or turned into ethanol."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/magazine/12WWLN.html?pagewanted=1&8hpib