The Structural Agricultural Problem.
So I have though about this a lot and of course feel the need to finally write it down a few minutes after devouring a Plum which traveled across the country from California to me.
Our agriculture is a mess. Ethanol has of course exacerbated this problem by encouraging even more people to grow corn, but it is not the cause of it. Corn Syrup certainly is. We grow so much corn to the exclusion of so much else that we've gotten ourselves trapped. Corn Syrup sweetens our food more than basic sugar (The stupid Cuban embargo is probably part of this but not all). I once saw someone refer to soda/pop/cola whatever you call it as nothing more than Corn Juice and well it pretty much is. We grow corn to drink, corn to feed our cows and pigs, corn feed our cars. What this means is that we have little agricultural diversity. I look at other countries, those ones we condemn for providing subsidies (subsidies which we do provide to cotton, tobacco and given Ethanol and other things to corn as well) and they have a richer diversity of agricultural produce.
What do we have? California. Lucky for us, California is a large state with a huge diversity of produce, but it can't feed us all in this country. We cannot feed ourselves a healthy balanced diet just from our own production. We still have apples in New York and Washington, but I've spent the last ten years watching Orange groves in Florida be demolished to give way to the newest McMansion developments which now stand largely empty thanks to stupid housing policies and mortgage policies. A totally free market just seems to lead to a lot of waste and the "corrections" which we wait for to deliver us from corporate stupidity usually punish us, the regular people and not the corporate people who got us into this mess. So I guess free markets work great for CEOs, but not for us, but then again, the Federal budget is chock full of "programs" which are subsidies in other names which often just like corporate pockets. If subsidies are bad for markets than I would have to say, that maybe for profit (which of course goes directly to big Agribusiness concerns like Archer Daniels Midland) but for providing a rich, varied and healthy diet to the citizens of this country subsidies might be just the answer. Of course, the subsidies we provide for cotton which is useful I will admit and tobacco which ends up costing on the production side to grow it and from the ruined soil it leaves behind, to the massive health costs we have to pay for people dying from smoking the leaves of this plant. Can you imagine if all of our tobacco fields were turned over to grow veggies? We'd probably cut cancer and emphysema deaths while providing a boost in health veggie consumption which might help us slim down since we are the fattest nation on Earth because of these unhealthy consumption patterns.
So perhaps, we need to just yank the subsidies from ADM, R.J. Reynolds and other big Agricultural corporations, and redirect them to healthy diverse agriculture production. In this way we might also reduce the carbon footprint of having to transplant basic produce which we can produce everywhere but only produce in California and then truck across country. Imagine Iowans able to eat lettuce, and onions and fruit produced in their backyards rather than the infinite fields of corn. Imagine our cattle able to eat other than just corn to fatten them up. They'd be less fatty and more healthy. Well I guess this is just a pipe dream because too many Senators and House members are committed to these subsidies for their home districts/states to the detriment of a sane nationwide agricultural policy.
Labels: agriculture subsidies corn agribusiness health
posted by travellinguist @ 8:15 AM
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