Food Fight:
The Citizen's Guide to a Food and Farm Bill

1. Somewhere in America’s Heartland…

Somewhere in America’s heartland, the sun rises over a 10,000-acre cornfield. By season’s end, that field, blessed with some of the world’s deepest glaciated topsoil, a subterranean aquifer of ancient snow melt, and an eye-popping arsenal of John Deer equipment and petroleum products, will yield a bumper crop of 200 bushels per acre.

Somewhere in Mexico, a dozen campesinos make their way across a desert landscape toward the 1952-mile wide border shared with the United States. For the past ten years, U.S. distributors have exported government-subsidized corn to Mexico at well-below world market prices. Dumping is the economic term for this, and by accepted rules of international trade, the practice is “trade distorting” and illegal. Corn farming, long a primary occupation of Central American farmers, has become a curse of poverty. If these refugees successfully navigate the perilous border crossing, survive bandits, and manage to evade or abide by “La Migra” (the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service), they may find employment in fields, orchards, vineyards, factories, restaurants, or private homes. The lucky ones can then send dollars home so their families can buy the under-priced American corn that forced them north in the first place.

Somewhere inside the vats, pipes, and tanks of a wet mill processing facility, manufacturers transform mountains of corn kernels into dozens of value-added materials. Cornstarch, corn meal, corn oil, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and other additive ingredients find their way into breakfast cereals, snacks, chicken nuggets, sodas, salad dressings, and thousands of other highly processed and industrially packaged foods. Not far away, in a confinement animal feedlot operation (CAFO), 10,000 cows stand ankle-deep in their own manure as they munch away on raw corn, processed meal, and antibiotic-laced “energy and protein units” to keep pace with the world’s voracious demand for meat, dairy products, and fast food. And at a gas station near you, “flex fuel” vehicle owners righteously fill their tanks with E85 ethanol fermented from surplus bushels of U.S. corn. Depending on how the numbers are crunched, however, it may require almost as much energy to synthesize liquid biofuels from cornstarch as they produce. This “net energy balance” could drastically improve with technical advances or the evolution of cellulosic ethanol, which ferments stalks, grasses, and other fibers rather than food and feed grains, but market-ready innovations are still possibly years away.
In clinics and hospitals across America, physicians, nutritionists, and public health officials struggle to connect the dots of emerging epidemics: obesity, type II diabetes, coronary disease, and other dietary- and food system-related maladies. For the first time in modern history, the next generation may die younger than its parents due to dietary deficiencies. News headlines warn of surging incidences of lethal virulent diseases, such as E. coli infections, mad-cow disease, and avian flu, which can be transported from meat and poultry operations to humans.5 Accounts of mass slaughtering of poultry and bans on beef exports, to contain these outbreaks, no longer shock or surprise.

Elsewhere across the country, biologists confront the realities of broad-scale pesticide and nutrient contamination of the nation’s waterways.6 This has negatively impacted fish and wildlife in a majority of our creeks, streams, rivers, and lakes. Pesticides and other farm chemicals also move up the food web, particularly affecting infants, children, women, and the elderly. Somewhere along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, shrimp fishermen return to port with empty nets, due to a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. This oxygen-starved, lifeless area has grown to the size of several small New England states. Spring runoff from the Mississippi River, loaded with nitrogen-based fertilizers from Corn Belt farms, fuels massive algae blooms that later suck the oxygen out of the water as the algae decomposes. Meanwhile in climate research stations at the extremes of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, alarmed scientists monitor glaciers melting three times faster than computer models had projected, linking the earth’s warming to twentieth-century industrial activities, including “green revolution” agriculture.

Inside the heartland’s grocery chains, mothers and fathers wander the aisles, shopping for the 50 percent of meals that are still eaten and prepared inside the home. The produce sections along the periphery feature an abundance of “fresh” fruits and vegetables with an astounding tally of food miles.7 Most are imported from low-cost producers out of state or out of country to provide a year-round cornucopia of berries, apples, tomatoes, salad mixes, green beans, and other seasonal crops. The interior shelves are stacked with thousands of packaged, preserved, pre-prepared, and frozen foods: most contain derivations of corn, soy, and sugar. Rather than supporting the regional economy, the lion’s share of the cash residents spend on their weekly food bills leaves the region and the state. This gives rise to another modern food system phenomenon: food deserts.

Elsewhere in cities, rural areas, and communities across America, millions of children and adults depend on food stamp and nutrition assistance programs to fight off hunger and poverty. What money they can budget often buys foods high in calories and processed ingredients. But such food leaves them nutritionally impoverished. For school children, nutritional deficiencies can lead to life-long problems.

In the Byzantine halls of the U.S. Department of Agriculture inside the Washington D.C. Beltway, $4 billion in subsidy checks will be appropriated to help cover the production costs and incentivize this massive U.S. corn output. This record payout may only ensure, however, that farmers will break even on expenses and stay in the game to farm corn yet another season. Without direct payments, loans, and other supports that eliminate or reduce the risk in commodity agriculture, the acreage dedicated to growing corn—along with cotton, soybeans, wheat, and rice—would be far smaller. In the mean time, in communities throughout the world, similar chain reactions are set in motion as both the direct and indirect consequences of America’s Farm Bill policies.

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