Used under creative commons license from USDAgov.

Aerial views of drought-affected farms.

We are in the midst of the worst U.S. drought since the 1950s, and some regions are to the point of the Dust Bowl-era 1930s. As expected, prices of corn, soybeans and wheat have increased significantly, causing a rise in food prices and putting a difficult squeeze on many livestock farmers.

Fortunately the Obama administration and Congress have stepped up and decided to ... purchase meat from livestock farmers to donate through food assistance programs? Open up sensitive environmental lands for haying and grazing? And if Congress gets its act together, possibly pass a livestock disaster aid bill?

Addressing the economic challenges of the drought will of course be welcomed by farmers throughout the Midwest. Yet, comparing the policy actions of today to other times of agricultural crisis, these initiatives appear woefully unimaginative and small. Policymakers are clearly missing the forest for the trees, and prefer to make a lot of noise about small policies rather than address structural issues.

It would be one thing if the food and agricultural economy tended to hum along fine and economic calamities were rare, but that is clearly not the case. If it isn't a drought, it's been a flood, or exploding energy costs, or food safety concerns, or Wall Street speculators, or skyrocketing land values. Our food system—the most important of production systems—is disturbingly vulnerable to events well beyond the control of farmers. And perhaps the most chronic of problems occurs when farmers produce an abundance of crops, when everything goes well, and commodity prices are driven down below the farmers' cost of production.

What is missing in current policy discussions is the recognition of the inherent volatility in the agricultural economy. Merging the biological system of farming into our economic system comes with challenges, and we top those challenges off with the fact that we have little room for error—we all need to eat, usually multiple times a day. A short supply of television sets causes disgruntlement; a short supply of food causes starvation and riots.

Many decades ago, events came together to remind the nation of the vulnerability of our food supply. The Great Depression caused the price of agricultural commodities to tank, and that was coupled with the hardships of the Dust Bowl. Policymakers recognized that this was not simply a blip in the economic charts. The oversized influence that the banking system had on farmers was unacceptable, the price levels of commodities were devastating and tillage practices were contributing to the loss of soil. The long-term viability of U.S. agriculture was on the line.

Today's policymakers probably would have responded to the events of the 1930s with a "Cash for Clunkers"-type of program for farmers, but the Roosevelt administration and many in Congress knew that these issues couldn't be solved with Band-Aid policy solutions. They used banking regulation and grain reserves to return economic power back to farmers, supported good tillage practices, and in turn created a platform for decades of productive and profitable agriculture.

Over the past 40 years we have slowly abandoned the supply-management systems that provided farmers with a fair price for their commodities. We now have an arcane system that spends billions of dollars on farmer support when commodity prices are below the cost of production, and spends billions of additional dollars on food support when food prices are too high. This works fine for grain traders and other agribusiness entities that can buy low and sell high, but is a lousy deal for taxpayers and historically hasn't addressed the core challenges for farmers either.

It's past time for policymakers to get back to addressing some of the root causes of these food and agriculture crises. Congress could very well come back in September and pass a livestock disaster aid bill and be very proud of itself, but that will do nothing to address the long-term market distortions that are causing excessively high prices right now, as well as the excessively low prices less than a decade ago.

Seventy-five years ago the Farm Bill focused on creating an economic platform that supported a safe and abundant food supply. Now the Farm Bill is little more than a money grab between interest groups—much of the funding going to noble causes such as anti-hunger, family farmers, conservation and food safety—but nonetheless a money grab. These taxpayer-funded Band-Aids are getting expensive and do nothing to address the structural challenges in food and agriculture. A functional market allows farmers to get a fair price for their commodities and allows consumers to pay a fair price for their food. We need to demand that policymakers provide the tools for markets to function well, and let them know that the continual practice of seeking cover behind emergency payments is unacceptable.

This post originally appeared August 20, 2012 on The Huffington Post.

Used under creative commons license from Rajesh_India.

Farmers throughout the country are experiencing one of the worst droughts in 50 years. It’s times like these that federal farm policy is most appreciated. After all, regardless of crop yields we all still need to eat, and having a thriving agricultural economy that sustains our natural resources and provides farmers with an adequate income is the best way to protect our food supply now and into the future.

Two of the primary titles of the Farm Bill, the commodity and crop insurance titles, are specifically intended to support a profitable and stable farming economy. The political process, however, tends to create policies that often deviate from the stated intentions. Crop insurance and many commodity programs have been designed to support large-scale commodity production, and thereby have created disincentives for smaller-scale and diversified cropping systems, as well as ineffective support systems for organic and direct-marketing farmers. The end result is that the crops grown in the U.S. have little correlation to the foods needed for a healthy diet.

U.S. agriculture is continuing a longstanding trend toward bigger, more industrial farms with less crop diversity, and federal farm policy often contributes to this trajectory. While this trajectory’s footprint on the agricultural landscape is clear, the impact on the U.S. diet is not well studied. After all, health advocates have plenty of other policies in USDA’s purview to keep an eye on, from food stamps to school lunch to food safety. Why should public health advocates spend time advocating for particular farm commodity programs when the path from farm (to grain buyer to food processor to retail store) to consumer is so convoluted?

Despite the difficulty in drawing parallels between farm policies and public health, these policies impact our eating habits in ways that are rarely considered. The food industry often counters that changes in the price of corn have a rather small impact on the overall cost of a box of cereal or a pound of hamburger, and thereby have minimal impact on buying decisions. This perspective, however, fails to consider the multiple points at which corporations are making decisions that impact what we eat. Changes in the relative costs of different commodities encourage food processors to reformulate a processed food product, restaurants to tweak their menu, and perhaps most importantly, marketers to promote food products that are most profitable. It’s no accident that grocery stores dedicate valuable shelving to a mindboggling array of soda pop, cereal and snack foods—these foods use low-cost commodities like corn and wheat and provide enormous profit margins. While we consumers generally have the final say in what we put into our bodies, economic and policy drivers throughout the food chain have more impact on our decisions than what we realize.

In this series, we’ll be taking a look at the different plans for commodity programs and crop insurance that are on the table for the current Farm Bill. We’ll attempt to assess the impacts that changes in these programs may have on how we eat. Although the cause-and-effect relationships are poorly documented, we’ll do our best to draw from existing studies—along with a healthy dose of common sense.

Stay tuned over the next several weeks as we look at emerging farm policy.

 Distressed corn field in Central Iowa near Ames. 

In the first blog in this series, I discussed how drought has affected me. As I walked through a Central Iowa corn field near Ames this summer, I surveyed another corn crop destroyed by the heat and dry conditions, (see photo) I wondered if this farm could survive.

I thought back to the farm I grew up on and how in the long run it did not survive. That is, it did not have “resilience” to withstand weather onslaughts, unfavorable markets and aggressive bankers.

So what the heck is resilience? An old term, but coming back into its own, at least in academic circles. And it is a good one for the times, perhaps for the rest of our rocky future.

And rocky it will be. Climate change, population pressures, decline of resources, both physical and financial, the list goes on. But first resilience.

Dr. William Reese at the University of British Columbia, in his challenging paper “Thinking Resilience” defines resilience as “the capacity of a system to withstand disturbances while still retaining its fundamental structure, function and internal feedbacks” (see also Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Walker, B., and Salt, D. Island Press, N.Y. NY. 2006.)

Fancy words, but what does it mean? Reese uses a good analogy, the brittleness of a system. Can the system spring back like the ability of a car’s shock absorbers to smooth out a pothole (those of you who to drive the streets of Minneapolis can appreciate that ability).

Our modern agriculture is full of these potholes. The universal failure of pesticides (even with genetic engineering) which, over time, drives resistance of the very pests they want to control, and causes even greater crop losses than before. Or even bigger, the failure of long-term solutions to food production in the face of further increases in population and resource demand.

The field I stood in most likely has had all of the latest technologies: fertilizer placed by GIS precision planter, $300 a bag of multi stack genetically engineered seed corn, with Bt for rootworms and corn borers, and Roundup-Ready for weed control, tiling for drainage, treatment with glyphosate herbicide and of course it would have been harvested with a GIS controlled 16 row $300,00 harvester. Counting land costs, it will cost $866 per acre to grow assuming no harvest costs; yes, you read right, $866, more than your typical fast food worker might clear in a month! (Iowa’s minimum wage is $7.25/hr.)

The perception is that government and crop insurance will cover a farmer’s loss in the case of a crop failure. This is not correct. Given the many parts of the crop insurance program, the possibility that Congress will modify the program to make it more like previous crop disaster programs. But even if crop farmers are covered, animal farmers and ethanol producers will face economic crises because of the corn costs, which could rise toward an unheard-of $9.00 per bushel. Will the federal government, in a time of belt tightening, cover the disaster?  It is likely that the farming community will feel a financial loss that will take years to recover from.

Probably the big farm I visited will survive to live another day. What about the small, diversified farmer who even with several enterprises, will not have enough water for the CSA or grass for the dairy cows? Through no fault of their own, they will not be resilient enough to make it, especially if they have debts.

This is how brittle our world has become. Science, which works to make agriculture more efficient and productive, fails in the face of major disasters. Free trade will not save us, nothing to trade at world competitive prices. The variability in our natural ecosystems, which should be appreciated and managed, instead is ignored as we try to keep the system in its optimal configuration (e.g.,175-250 bushels/acre, completely mechanized, to feed into efficient hog or poultry confinements or ethanol distilleries).

Of major concern is that food production per capita is declining in spite of huge costs for inputs (and huge profits for the providers of inputs). And to make matters more complicated, our political and educational systems are showing the signs of brittleness and lack of resiliency. Congress stalemates and states are in the red. The once upon a time “land grant” universities now are operating largely to serve the profits of corporations, offering little in the way of solutions for resiliency, but more and more on ways to continue on the same broken treadmill.

Now that sustainability as a concept seems to be co-opted as a green wash term, we need to revisit the concept of resilience. This year’s drought is a good place to start. The next blog will visit the causes of climate change, and especially the role of human activity in accelerating what could be a major turning point in the world’s history.

In many arenas, agriculture and trade policy have as much to do with human rights and democracy as they do with crop yields and commodity prices. In November, Minnesotans will be faced with a choice to protect human rights and democracy by voting against two constitutional amendments on the ballot—one would ban people of the same sex from marrying and the other would prevent citizens without a government-issued ID from voting.

We are convinced all Minnesotans should oppose these amendments. Respect for human rights includes fairness for all people in marriage laws, and requiring voter ID will deprive many rural citizens, immigrants and military personnel the opportunity to vote.

Even beyond the amendments’ calls to restrict rights and limit participation in the democratic process, IATP takes issue with governing by constitutional amendment—it’s reckless and risks putting the interests of corporations over those of individuals.

Read the full letter, and sign up to stay connected to IATP's future work on these issues.