Are US Farm Subsidies Killing You?
A friend complained to me on the phone the other day that at current prices (then $1.69 per pound in his store), he could not afford to buy apples. In fact, many American families cannot afford to buy fruits and vegetables. Somehow, though, they can afford Coke, Pepsi and Doritos. No doubt, they are partly to blame for their priorities, but the person in question is not someone who has a cell phone, broadband internet or cable television. He does not have a lot of electronics, never eats in restaurants and works hard. What about people like him? At least in part, one most point to American government farm subsidies that encourage people to eat unhealthy foods and do little or nothing to encourage healthy eating.
This should be obvious to anyone who’s paying attention, as it’s a simple matter of connecting the dots, but it escaped me until recently. We know, of course, that obesity is a major problem in the United States and is a growing problem worldwide. Chief causes are sedentary lifestyles and ready availability of high-calorie, low-nutrition foods. We also know that government subsidies to farmers are generally bad policy and are pushed through by legislators from agricultural regions. This is a non-partisan issue. Conservative Republicans love a farm subsidy as much as any spend-happy proponent of big government. This has cost Americans a fortune in both direct and indirect subsidies.
The indirect subsidies are perhaps the most egregious. The most clear example is the fortune that the US government has spent and continues to spend to build dams and draw down aquifers to supply water to farmers who are growing the same crops that farmers get paid not to grow in other regions (this may have changed somewhat in actual execution since 1996, but fundamentally this practice still exists). These are some of our biggest public works projects and most make no sense economically and are environmentally disastrous, resulting in runoff that is actually toxic to crops downstream. Anyone who is not outraged about the damage these subsidies are doing to the environment and to everyone’s pocketbooks except a few lucky folks who benefit should read Mark Reisner’s classic Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
Other indirect subsidies include efforts by corn-state senators to push requirements that Americans put ethanol in their gas tanks. This is pure pork barrel sold under the guise of decreasing dependence on foreign oil (and sometimes air quality issues). The truth is, for most of the history of these subsidies, the process was so inefficient that ethanol was not a break-even technology. In other words, it took more than one BTU of petroleum inputs to make one BTU worth of ethanol. The process has gotten more efficient, but some leading experts still assert that it is a net-loss process. If you count up all the petroleum inputs including pesticides, fertilizers, diesel to run tractors and ship the corn to distilleries and ethanol to market and so forth, it still takes more BTUs of petroleum than we get back out in BTUs of ethanol. Meanwhile, the ethanol is more expensive and takes money out of the pockets of US consumers. Why? Because corn-state senators want to foist this on all of us to prop up the corn and ethanol industries in their states.
Direct subsidies were, of course, eliminated by the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996. Well, of course NOT! That act actually replaced subsidies based on production with fixed amounts based on past subsidies, grandfathering in most recipients with the result that they now get paid whether they produce or not. By the year 2000, direct subsidies to farmers had tripled over 1996 levels to $22 billion. They are projected to reach $190 billion by 2012 [1].
What does this have to do with health? According to Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the Carolina Population Center of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “We put maybe one-tenth of one percent of our dollar that we put into subsidizing and promoting foods through the Department of Agriculture into fruits and vegetables” [1]. And here we get back to my friend who can’t afford apples. The government heavily subsidizes corn and soybeans. Good healthy foods in themselves, but of course Americans don’t eat much corn and soy in their natural forms. They consume this mostly through high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in Coke, Mountain Dew and other junk food, and in high-fat tortilla chips. Recent studies have linked HFCS consumption to obesity, which of course is linked to diabetes, which has an enormous impact on our health care system. So in short, we pay double – once to sell cheap HFCS and once to fix up the diabetics after the fact. Europeans, by the way, aren’t much better, it’s just that they subsidize beet sugar to prop up their farmers[1].
With soy, since tofu is not exactly a nightly food on most dinner tables, most typical Americans eat it in the form of hydrogenated oils, a particularly unhealthy form of saturated fat[1]. Furthermore, what humans don’t eat goes to make cheap pork and beef. Not that beef is bad for you per se, but Americans eat too much meat and sugar, but not enough vegetables. Government subsidies encourage these unhealthy choices when they should be encouraging the opposite or at the very least encouraging nothing at all. In other words, agricultural subsidies might not be bad if we subsidized the right things, but we don’t. We subsidize precisely the unhealthy foods that are overly prevalent in the American diet. Even if you are a healthy eater, why should you pay the bill for this?
I don’t know what regular people like us can do except that old standby: contact your legislators (January 3, 2006, by the way, is National Write to Congress Day).
1. “The Fat of the Land: Do Agricultural Subsidies Foster Poor Health?”, Environmental Health Perspectives, Volume 112, Number 14, October 2004.
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