The Food Police (15 page)

Writing a letter to Obama, whom he ironically called “Farmer in Chief,” Michael Pollan cried, “Bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited … are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute.” Pollan proceeded to lay out a buffet of prescriptions to resuscitate the farm sector. Compiling the fashionable demands of the food elite, the Obama administration was, among other things, to support food diversity, use
federal
policies to promote
regional
food economies across the world, utilize agricultural policy to impose environmental standards, revamp school-lunch programs, forgive loans to culinary students in exchange for government support, and renew the 1960s-era policies requiring government purchases of grain.
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Reading Pollan’s farm policy proposal, one is struck by the vision of an all-encompassing government that knows
no bounds so long as its purpose is to provide us fashionable food. Lurking behind the compassion and glowing rhetoric is a deeper reality of food totalitarianism. It isn’t bad enough that the government does current farm policy poorly. It must do more, more, more.

Pollan isn’t alone in his unease with the present state of farm policy. I share it. We have a federal farm policy that is largely an anachronistic throwback to the past, surviving today mainly through the political power of the farm lobby. Where I part with Pollan and his fellow foodies is in their conclusion that “like so many government programs—what subsidies need is not the ax, but reform that moves them forward.”
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What makes the food police think the government will get it right this time? They like to talk about market failures but are apparently blind to the abundance of government failures. If the process is so corruptible by corporate interests and mega farms, as they claim it is, then Uncle Sam is incapable of working in our food interests, and all the preaching of hope and change is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

While I am no fan of farm subsidies, I am at least honest enough to tell you that most of what we’re told about them cannot withstand scrutiny. Farm policy is like an old leaky faucet. It’s annoying and a bit costly but, in the end, relatively benign. By all means, fix the faucet, but don’t tell me it’s a flood requiring a new en suite! If the food police cannot accurately diagnose the consequences of current policies, we should shudder at their prescriptions for the future. We have a bunch of journalists, chefs, and cookbook authors playing armchair economist without having apparently mastered Econ 101.

One of the constant refrains is that farm policies make
food “too cheap.” Pollan tells us that because of fossil fuel use and farm subsidies, “[c]heap food is food dishonestly priced.”
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Modern food production supposedly causes environmental and health externalities and cheapening food serves only to increase the costs borne by third parties. Bittman writes, “Direct subsidies to farmers for crops like corn … and soybeans … keep the prices of many unhealthful foods and beverages artificially low.”
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The food elite seem to think that all farm policies serve to
lower
the price of corn, soybeans, rice, and wheat. Wrong.

Are farmers such dolts as to advocate policies that primarily
lower
the prices they get paid? Ethanol policies, for example, are hated in many quarters precisely because they
increase
corn prices rather than decrease them—and with dubious environmental benefits. Some of the food police know this. One of their compatriots notes, “Diversion of food to biofuel has contributed to an uncontrolled price rise.”
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Strange, I thought farm policy was keeping corn prices too low, not too high.

What about the roughly thirty million acres of farmland that, through the federal Conservation Reserve Program, farmers are paid
not
to farm? Or the government programs such as food stamps that pay people to eat more food? By far the largest budgetary outlays of the Farm Bill (about seventy cents out every dollar spent) go toward food-assistance programs such as food stamps and school lunches.
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These programs drive the price of food up, not down. I’m not denying that some farm policies (such as spending on agricultural research) lower food prices, but there is such a dizzying mix of farm programs and supports that for the food police to say conclusively that farm policies unilaterally lower food prices
and make them “too cheap” is misleading at best and outright dishonest at worst.

Even the farm commodity programs for corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice that are held in utmost contempt by the food elite have questionable effects on retail food prices. To avoid violating international rules that could provoke retaliatory trade barriers, the U.S. government has increasingly converted farm subsidies to so-called decoupled or direct payments, which are unrelated to the current volume a farmer produces (a trend that might be reversed in future farm bills). With these decoupled payments, the farmers simply get a check from the government that has nothing to do with the amount of corn or wheat or cotton they’ve planted that year. While these decoupled payments likely grow farmers’ bank accounts, they at least let supply and demand function and, as a result, have only small effects on crop prices.
⁷

Even the countercyclical payments that go to farmers when prices fall below a price floor have been found to have an effect “on production [that] appears to be negligible.”
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Another recent study determined that “U.S. farm policy, for the most part, has not made food commodities significantly cheaper and has not had a significant effect on caloric consumption.”
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The research shows that completely eliminating U.S. farm commodity programs is likely to have only a small impact on crop prices and production, and could even increase prices for some commodities such as wheat and corn while increasing the production of beef and pork.
¹⁰
That’s right: getting rid of all current farm programs might
increase
meat production—you know, the sinful process rejected by environmentalists and animal welfare activists alike.

When it all shakes out, what
if
government policies increase the volume of food produced and, on the net, lower food prices? There are benefits of overproduction. After all, it is much riskier to have too little food than too much. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, there are more than a
billion
starving people in the world today.
¹¹
Those concerned about equity should be happy to reduce the price of a necessity for the poor and starving. Moreover, there are positive externalities associated with knowing the cashier, the mechanic, and drivers on the street are well fed and free from worrying about their next meal.

What about us relatively rich folk who can afford to pay more? Even we need to ask what we would get in exchange for the higher prices desired by Pollan and others. A serious defender of the externality argument would have to do the hard work of actually trying to calculate the size of the third-party costs (both positive and negative) rather than run around claiming the sky is falling. In actuality, the food police use the jargon of economics to give an ideological agenda the appearance of real science.

Simply screaming that an externality exists is not proof that something should be done. After all, Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase taught us that when Farmer Jones’s cows trample Sally’s field, there is a clear incentive for Sally to negotiate with Jones rather than run to Uncle Sam. Moreover, it is not as though Farmer Jones is an uncaring louse. He is keenly interested in the quality of the land he leaves his children and in their ability to earn a future living. Even beyond his family, Mother Nature has instilled in him and all of us the guilt, compassion, and empathy that cause us to treat
our neighbors more benevolently than wielders of textbook definitions of externalities claim.

None of this is to say there aren’t some negative environmental consequences that come from agricultural production, organic and conventional alike.
¹²
But we seem to forget that gasoline is already taxed, as is almost all food eaten away from home; ethanol, biodiesel, and “green energy” are subsidized. Truly earnest advocates of externality-fixing taxes would have to take into account these preexisting food and energy subsidies and taxes, international trade distortions, constantly changing market prices, and all the complex interactions among poverty, health, environment, and food quality to derive an optimal tax/subsidy policy that would likely be obsolete the moment it was computed. Even still, an honest appraisal would have to keep open the possibility that new government action is apt to
cause
an externality rather than solve one.

We are also told that greedy agribusinesses manipulate and capture all the benefits of farm programs. Here’s Pollan again: “More even than the farmers who receive the checks (and the political blame for cashing them), these companies [Cargill and ADM] are the true beneficiaries of the ‘farm’ subsidies that keep the river of cheap corn flowing.”
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It might have done some good actually to look at the economic research studying the true beneficiaries of farm policy. One of the first things students of Intro to Ag Econ are taught is that commodity payments largely flow to the owners of fixed assets, such as landowners, not necessarily to producers. One study estimated, for example, that government payments are responsible for about 45 percent of the total value of Iowa farmland.
¹⁴

So, current landowners definitely benefit. Who else? One prominent agricultural economist estimates that “for every dollar of government spending on farm subsidies, farmers receive about 50 cents, landlords receive about 25 cents, domestic and foreign consumers receive about 20 cents, and 5 cents is wasted.”
¹⁵
Funny—those evil agribusinesses, the supposed “true beneficiaries,” aren’t even mentioned. In fact, another study found that farm subsidies have “a negligible influence … on the prices of other inputs, such as fertilizers, chemicals, and machinery.”
¹⁶

Here we can plainly see the food elite’s schizophrenia about farmers. In one breath they speak of the Jeffersonian ideal and the importance of family farms, and romanticize production agriculture. In the next they lament how farmers get massive subsidies from the federal government—in truth only about 40 percent of farms receive government payments—and claim they are either incapable of considering, or unwilling to consider, the health of their land and our children. Indeed, one of Pollan’s heroes in
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
thinks most farmers are just plain dumb. As he puts it, “Part of the problem is, you’ve got a lot of D students left on the farm today.”
¹⁷
The truth is, according to USDA data, “[t]he education level of farm operators is very similar to the educational profile for U.S. householders.”
¹⁸
Yet we are somehow supposed to believe that the food police residing in residential Berkeley or New York City are more concerned and knowledgeable about the quality of the land in Farwell, Texas, than the flesh-and-blood people who own that land. We must believe that despite large and influential farmer-led commodity groups, farmers are merely subject to the whims of the greedy agribusinesses
and don’t realize that the policies for which they fight are only handouts for agribusinesses.

The food elite’s trick is to divide farms into the good and righteous and the bad and villainous. The food police can maintain their hypocrisy by demonizing “factory” or “corporate” farms. But the reality is that 97 percent of all farms in the United States are family farms.
¹⁹
For all practical purposes, there is only one kind of farm in America: the family-owned farm. The food police must be awfully paranoid to worry so much about the few corporate farms—or is it rather a useful scare tactic to throw around the word
corporate
without any context? As if the people who own corporations don’t have families, too.

It is true that some family farms are quite big. These large-scale family farms represent only about 7.5 percent of all farms in the United States, but they produce most of the food, accounting for more than 60 percent of agricultural output.
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But why are they presumed less righteous or wholesome than small farms? If you’re concerned about food security, you should be concerned about those who produce the food. A lot of large farmers do well financially, but so do many small farmers. Even small family farmers have average incomes that outpace that of nonfarm households, and they are much more likely to have extra off-farm incomes than their larger family farm counterparts.
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The statistic we’re frequently shown as demonstrating the injustice of farm programs is that large family farmers receive more subsidies than their smaller brethren. This is of course true in total dollar payouts. What you’re almost never told is that as a
proportion
of their agricultural output, small family
farms receive more government handouts as compared with large family farms. Small farms get
five times
more government subsidies relative to the value of their output than large farms.
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One study concluded, “Careful examination reveals that … agricultural subsidies appear to be … subsidizing small farmers
relatively
more than large farmers.”
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So, at least in terms of agricultural output, small farmers are doing less and the government is giving more. Still, many people think large farms get too much, which is exactly why there have been various forms of farm payment limits since the 1970s.
²⁴

Again, it must be emphasized that, as a group, farmers large and small do relatively well financially.
²⁵
If equity and fairness are the concerns, we should redistribute money away from farmers of all types, large and small, and toward nonfarmers. Or just get out of the business of trying to pick winners and losers altogether and let the market reward those who produce what consumers want.