Health and the Farm Bill

This is a story of unintended consequences and the fact that important health policies are found in unexpected places. 

We often hear families of modest means complaining that they can't afford to feed the kids healthy foods recommended by health promoters because those foods are too expensive.  While they don't really prefer happy meals and hot dogs, they can fill their kids' stomachs more cheaply with those foods than with the much more expensive fruits and vegetables.  This is not an excuse for bad behavior.  It is a fact that fruits and vegetables are more expensive than meat and grain-based food.  The question is why?

Back in the throes of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt's New Deal was concerned about rural poverty among the large segment of the population living and working on farms.  Because farming at that time was subject to booms and busts from weather and fluctuating crop prices, unrelated to anything the farmers could control, it was a very difficult occupation.  As a way to provide stability and security to this important sector of the U.S. economy, the federal government began to put in place price supports, crop insurance, and programs to guarantee distribution of farm goods.  Because field crops such as corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans were nonperishable, able to be stored, a portion of the crops could be held back from the market, keeping up prices in the boom years, avoiding shortages when crop yields were slim.  These crops were easier to support than other farm products with a limited shelf life, such as fruit and vegetables.

The intent of the New Deal programs was to assure that farmers had adequate support, to guarantee as much as possible, a stable and reliable food supply for Americans, while also helping those farmers become solidly middle class.  Here is the unintended consequence part:  Once price supports were in place, and subsidies for certain crops, and once there was an infrastructure for crop insurance, farming became attractive to corporate agriculture.  Over the years, family farms have been swept up by corporate giants, who only found this business attractive when much of the risk was removed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Over the years, subsidies and price supports have continued, so that there is now built into the farm economy a significant bias toward those field crops. Only 7% of farm production comes from fruit and vegetable farming, while the lion's share is from grains and soybeans.  The bias has been entrenched by years of tradition, but also buttressed by the political clout held by the corporations, never even envisioned by the family farmers.  This means that corn, wheat and soybeans are sold by the ag corporations for less than they actually cost, courtesy of the taxpayers.  This has lead to relatively cheap foods made from grain, soybean oil, and corn-based sweeteners.  Even meat is cheaper because it is less costly to feed cattle and chickens in factory farms where they are fed grain crops rather than maintaining land on which animals forage.  Meanwhile, relative to the price of corn, wheat, rice and and soybeans, the cost of fruit and vegetables has continued to increase.

The other related problem is that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a schizophrenic mission: to promote prosperity in the farm sector while also promoting the availability of healthy foods for Americans.  Those two goals are partially in conflict.  While the USDA has done some good things for healthy nutrition, the pull of industry lobbyists and powerful farm state politicians has overshadowed the goal of promoting healthy Americans.  Up until recently, this has meant that the U.S. school lunch program foods have not been as healthy as they might have been; for years, school lunch menus have favored meat and bread, but shorted fresh fruit and vegetables.

These farm policies are contained in what is called the Farm Bill, a piece of legislation which is renewed every five years; the most recent version of the Farm Bill was passed in 2008, and it will be up for renewal in a few years.  So here is the challenge.  What if instead of spending hundreds of billions of dollars to support corn, wheat, and soybeans, we used our tax dollars to subsidize fruits and vegetables?  If the government was underwriting the cost of those foods, farms, and especially corporate farms, would respond to the incentives.  Furthermore, consumers would respond if apples, oranges, grapes and broccoli were a third to a half as expensive, while bread, grain-fed meat, and foods high in corn-based sweeteners and soy oil were more expensive in a similar proportion.

Often these background forces are more powerful than public education in molding consumer health behavior.  Health promoters need to pay attention to the provisions of the Farm Bill.  It is hugely important health policy.