We as college students read quite a bit of information every day. Our classes require us to do a lot of reading by a plethora of different authors on an abundance of different subjects. Have you ever had an assigned reading that was 663 pages? Probably not! That’s how long the current US Farm Bill is! Imagine reading something like that for a class. It wouldn’t be too bad if it was coherent and well put together, but the farm bill isn’t. Nestle makes the farm bill out to be “so big and so complex” that no one can really “grasp its entirety.” Some parts you can grasp, and those include fertilizer and rampant pesticide use, favoring big agriculture over all others. It also includes stuff like food stamps and crop insurance, which take up around 90% of the funding. The bill also states the fruits and vegetables are not a staple food, but rather a token for supporting grains. Excuse me but that doesn’t sound right! The bill doesn’t even address some of the important things when growing food, like the environment, protecting organic farmers and local growers. Rather it seeks to maximize the inputs to receive reciprocal outputs through a ridiculous amount of subsidies given to large farms.
I think that this farm bill almost demands a restructuring. In our food studies class, we always examine how big agriculture is doing a lot of things wrong. They externalize costs to the environment while utilizing harmful chemicals on a mono crop that has no fail safes. So why are we giving them so much money? The farm bill has allowed this by going about the wrong way throughout history. The farm bill gave “incentives for making farms larger,” that lead to “increasingly dependent on pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer.” What they should have focused on is the smaller farms to promote an agriculturally diverse growing situation where biodiversity thrives. This has been proven to be much less harmful to the environment while allowing a safety net of food as it is less vulnerable to stressors.
So what does this farm bill mean for the average day to day consumer? Since the surplus of calories were being produced, they tried to create a market for those calories. Marketing firms decided to put food everywhere we stop, promoting snacking so that it would be “normal for children to regularly consume fast food, snacks and sodas,” which in turn led to an uptake of excess calories. This food system then, promotes obesity through an excess of food and high caloric food intake. Not to mention that the regulation on these sugar high caloric snack are completely inadequate. This is a huge problem! So not only did the politicians in Washington focus on sales of product over citizens health, but negatively affected it.
So what can we do to fix all this farm bill humdiggery? I agree with Nestle on several of her points. She says we must support the farmers that help them grow specialty crops, support the environment by practicing conservation and return valuable nutrients to the soil. She also agrees that a large part is supporting human health and linking nutrition to agricultural policy. I agree with this in many parts, however I think she left out the attention to what we are growing. I think biodiversity and a multifaceted approach to our current agricultural system needs to be taken. This includes fading out monocrops and substituting a biodiverse crop. We also must support local foods and farmers while paying them equally. Subsidies shouldn’t go to the biggest farm, that’s complete rubbish! Subsidies should be given to smaller farmers who grow organically to provide local food. Honestly there are so many things wrong with the current farm bill I could go on for hours about the problems surrounding it. Ill try to sum it up in a brief sentence: The current disparity between the US farm bill and people in the US stems from a lack of attention to nutrient diverse foods while promoting a capitalistic approach to food systems that has resulted in an ignorance of how our food is grown and the separation we have from it.
How can we change this? I think we need to start where the decision are made for us, or politics. I think when we address that the average age of the senate is 62 and they are 90% white old men, we see that there is an old way of thinking for a new age. This isn’t going to work. We need to elect officials that are not controlled by Monsanto, who are more aware of what the hell is actually going on in our country so we can make changes not only to our environment, but our food system as well. We need to pull our collective head from our buttocks, vote smart, vote with an understanding, and get involved in local politics.
https://blogs.uoregon.edu/foodsystems/files/2013/09/59.2.nestle-11hesnk.pdf