Who Does The USDA Represent?
Alan Guebert writes about the FY 2007 USDA budget.
The agricultural programs are hit especially hard – evidently for political expediency. (i.e. the total budget doesn’t really “cut” much – but it does eliminate some programs that don’t fit with the ideology.) Guebert notes:
Now the White House wants a second, bigger helping. The 2007 proposed USDA cuts add up to 8 percent of Bush’s total cuts although farm program spending next year will be less than 0.5 percent of the federal budget.The biggest cut, weighing in at $1.1 billion, uniformly slices farm program payments, including the Milk Income Loss Contract program, 5 percent across the board.
Another, however, is long overdue: a hard, $250,000 cap on farm payments any individual can receive. Today’s soft cap of $360,000 is a complete sham.
The needed cap, however, faces a short shelf–life. Last year, the Senate knocked an identical idea in the head by a 53 to 46 count. GOP Southern reps and senators (who, incidentally, chair both ag committees) shot it down to protect their market–fried rice and cotton producers.
The notion of capping market assistance programs is obviously DOA. So… where to cut?
... the Conservation Security Program faces another $30 million cut; 2007 funding, at $342 million, now stands at less than half of what Congress approved in the 2002 Farm Bill. The Value–Added Producer Grant Program to spur farm–related businesses takes a 49 percent pop, down to $20.3 million from $40 million.Also, sustainable ag research and education is pared 21 percent, the Farm and Ranch Land Protection Program 48 percent; the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program 35 percent.
Guebert then discusses how popular the programs on the chopping block are with producers (and those of us that might be concerned about land use) are:
Last year’s nationwide USDA dog–and–pony show on 2007 Farm Bill priorities again proved that conservation was the No. 1 issue for producers in the upcoming Farm Bill debate; 739 of 1,846 witnesses at the 41 meetings named it their top priority.The second item most requested (by 514 witnesses) was, naturally, rural development. Energy was the mentioned by 110 witnesses.
And yet the White House, with Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns’ blessing, is again aiming to cut conservation, rural development and energy programs in its 2007 budget plan. Why?
The short answer is evident: Your agency, the USDA, doesn’t represent you.
A bigger lesson to learn here: Republican administrations and Congressmen will continue to pursue cuts to popular programs that assist all producers for a very simple reason. Quite frankly, there are no consequences to slashing them. How long has it been since anyone in Iowa actually voted on agricultural issues, or held politicans that did not stand with producers accountable for the bills they sponsored, lobbyist money they collected, or votes they cast?
Anyone who knows an answer to this can post in the comments section, but I’m guessing that the answers will be pretty sparse.
- Sousy
February 16th, 2006 at 9:46 am
Also, don’t forget, that USDA is looking to cut 300,000 people from food stamps, 60,000 kids from school breakfast/lunch, and two other food & nutrition programs from their budget (CSFP & CFNP).
There will be serious consequences to cutting these programs in a time of growing hunger, poverty, and food insecurity.
The USDA REALLY doesn’t represent America’s poor.
February 16th, 2006 at 11:11 am
The USDA REALLY doesn’t represent America’s poor.
The USDA is really an odd conglomeration of many different functions – on one hand, it serves to promote American agriculture, on another it serves to regulate American agriculture, and on a third hand, it serves to manage nutritional and hunger alleviation problems.
(This is one part of the federal government that could use a little ‘reinventing’, to borrow the old term.)
February 16th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
The reason that the USDA has food & nutrition under its control, and not HHS, is because it is much easier to get rural votes for food stamps, etc. and urban votes for ag programs if it’s all lumped together. Kind of a “I’ll scratch your back…” kind of thing.
February 16th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
The three main titles in the USDA budget are I. Ag II. Conservation, and III. Food & Nutrition. Because Food Stamps are an entitlement, food & nutrition makes about 2/3rds of the budget.
February 16th, 2006 at 9:52 pm
Good entry, Sousy—heck, a bunch of good entries (sorry I haven’t been contributing much lately).
It’s interesting that you bring up the USDA. I was just reading a bit about it in a book by Richard Manning (Against the Grain). I’ll quote a bit of it because I think it adds to what you’ve already posted.
“[In the 1920s] the Bureau of Home Economics of the USDA, by then already a fully equipped propaganda machine for the ‘scientific diet,’ began urging women via home economists to eat more wheat—attempting to persuade them, in food historian Harvey Levenstein’s words, ‘to start chomping their way through the wheat surplus.’ Indeed, this effort characterizes the USDA’s course throughout the twentieth century. The agency formally had two charges: expanding markets for farm products and attending to nutrition. These roles were at odds with each other, because increasingly in the U.S. ‘farm products’ meant surplus commodities—wheat and corn—and consumption of large amounts of these subverts nutrition. Repeatedly, the USDA settled this conflict by ignoring nutrition.”
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“[In the period just before WWII] the term ‘balanced diet’ came into popular usage, and the USDA issued a series of pronouncements, continuing to this day, prescribing proper intake levels of carbohydrates, protein, and fat (in ratios weighted, then and now, toward whatever happens to be in surplus).”
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“U.S. policy has stated time and again that agriculture does not grow commodities in order to feed people. For most of the century and a half of its existence, the role of the USDA’s nutrition arm has been to get people to eat more of whatever commodity happens to be in surplus. One of the blunter statements of this conflict came in 1979 when the USDA began drafting a new set of dietary goals for Americans. Harvey Levenstein summarizes a pivotal development in that effort: ‘Bob Bergland, Carter’s secretary of agriculture, even resurrected the long-spurned idea of the 1930s that nutrition and health, not selling food, should be the goal of federal farm policy—though at some future time, he cautioned, and he was out of office before that future arrived.’ Tying food to the health and well-being of humans is heresy within our—and all—political systems.”
Elsewhere in the book, Manning mentions that sustainable ag research and education is systematically underfunded in favor of ever more research related to 4 basic monocrops (wheat, corn, rice, and sugar). As he says “We grow wheat, corn, rice, and sugar not because that is what people want or need, but because that’s what we know how to grow well. We know how to grow these crops well because commodities built the culture of agriculture , a spinoff of which is investments in research and development. Worldwide, the money spent on agricultural research has been spent almost exclusively on these crops. It is not a stretch to say that advances in other crops have come only because something learned about the mainline commodities proved, by chance, to be applicable to a forgotten or orphan crop.”
It’s stunning really. Especially when you consider that ag research is not limited to increasing yields or more efficiently planting and harvesting monocrops; the research also includes the development of corn starch as a replacement for sugar, preservatives, additives, artificial flavorings, artificial colors, ethanol, etc. The overwhelming majority of ag research in the U.S. and worldwide has been devoted, essentially, to finding ever more uses for monocrop commodities that are not particularly nutritious or healthy in order to support and sustain agribusiness in perpetuity for the sake of the industry’s profitability. In fact, many of the discoveries (corn syrup in particular) are ridiculously unhealthy. So the government is, in a sense, subsidizing obesity and diabetes (and any number of other health problems—not to mention environmental crises) in order to sustain the profitable existence of corporate agribusiness.
And think about this—the organic farming movement has been growing for nearly three decades with almost no government assistance at all. In fact, it’s even more remarkable than that. It’s not just that they’ve had little or no government support; they’ve also had to overcome all of the obstacles put in place by legislatures and government agencies (especially the USDA) that prop up the bloated industrial ag oligarchy. Organic ag, in a way, actually gives some weight to the idea that the government shouldn’t be in the business of supporting agriculture at all (not that that means there should be no regulation or oversight). Eswpecially when you consider the fact that most of the governments’ ag-related efforts go toward furthering the erosion of human and environmental health.
February 17th, 2006 at 8:13 am
Wow… great post, Loq!
You’re right on in the idea that subsidy policy has really kept a certain monoculture firmly in place – corn in particular. (Cheap corn keeps American Agribusiness afloat in many different ways, it seems – from corn syrups to cheap animal feed to ethanol subsidies for growing… more corn.)
With regards to ethanol, it will be interesting to see if there will be a move to grow more switchgrass, which supposedly produces a higher amount of ethanol output per corn input. (And ethanol production from switchgrass is supposedly vastly more efficient than corn – probably because the entire plant can be used, unlike corn.)
February 17th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
I’ve been hearing a lot about switchgrass being used as an alternative to corn in producing ethanol. Sorry for beating Manning’s drum yet again, but I just finished reading the book earlier this week and he addressed ethanol in a small section of the book. I’m all but recommending the book to you (and anyone else) I guess by referring to it so much here. But the fact is, it’s relevant to this discussion.
I think like most people I’d been swayed by the rhetoric that ethanol derived from corn is a positive alternative to oil. But as I was reading, I came across this:
“Because it derives from corn, ethanol production requires the energy and petrochemicals that feed tractors, transport trucks, and distilleries directly, and fertilizers indirectly. In fact, several studies that have examined the issue conclude that the production of ethanol consumes more energy than it yields. The more optimistic appraisals find a net gain only when the value of co-products such as corn oil are taken into account, and even then a unit of energy is consumed for every 1.24 units of ethanol energy produced. The most favorable says it takes 1.3 units of energy to produce one unit of ethanol energy. This real-world mathematical deficit must be papered over with subsidy. Every dollar of profit ADM [the nation’s largest purveyor of ethanol production] makes on ethanol costs American taxpayers eleven dollars.’
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“About the same time that then president George H. W. Bush proposed standards favoring ethanol, he received a $400,000 check from ADM. In 1994, Bill Clinton got a $100,000 check … In 1992, Andreas-related checks [Andreas is ADM’s CEO] were the top money source for the Republicans, and the third-highest for the Democrats. Days after receiving the $100,000, Clinton ordered that ethanol be added to 30 percent of the gasoline in the nation’s nine most polluted cities, despite information from within his own administration that showed gasohol causes new pollution problems … ADM was a leading donor to George W. Bush’s campaign in 2000, a favor later repaid when one of the first acts of his administration was to refuse to grant California a waiver to rules requiring oxygenated gasoline. California argued it could meet fedeeral clean-air standards without additives to gasoline, of which there are two [MTBE and ethanol—MTBE had already been banned in CA which meant that the only alternative was ethanol].”
Here again it’s evident that favorable treatment for commodities (in this case ethanol) is based on political considerations rather than human or environmental health and well-being. Even fiscal well-being is jeopardized; the evidence being that it takes eleven taxpayer dollars to produce one dollar of profit for ADM.
So I’m sort of curious about this conversion to the idea of using switchgrass to derive ethanol rather than corn. I’ve heard some things about how the cellular make-up of switchgrass better lends itself to production of ethanol compared with corn. But it would be interesting to find out just how much energy it takes to convert switchgrass into ethanol (taking into account all of the factors mentioned above—fuel for tractors, transportation, and distilleries, along with fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and the like).
These things are typically presented as a panacea when first mentioned in the public sphere. No one but a few experts know anything about the next new great solution to the big problems facing the world so everyone buys the vague but optimistic rhetoric of politicians and other advocates of the next new great solution. The rhetoric is repeated again and again until it becomes conventional wisdom in the popular mind that the new great solution is to some degree infallible. Then, over time, little chinks in the armor trickle out: a study in an obscure scientific journal discovers a few potential problems with this proposed panacea. A few special interest magazines might pick up on the report and do a story or two. Eventually more mainstream media outlets cover the story and a sort of debate begins about the prospects of this new great thing actually solving the big problem it was supposed to solve. The next phase consists of a series of salvos from advocates of the new great thing [generally those who stand to benefit from the profitable adoption of the new great thing as the solution to the big problem] against the critics and skeptics who have found some problems with the new great thing. And on and on.
So at this stage I’m mostly skeptical about the prospects of switchgrass actually providing a feasible alternative to oil. It probably is more energy efficient than corn-based ethanol; I wouldn’t doubt it, anyway. But I’d also imagine that switch grass is more cost efficient to plant, harvest, and convert into ethanol than corn. Honestly, looking at how politics and business works it’s more than likely a case of switchgrass being that much more profitable as an ethanol commodity than even corn. That means it might not be any more energy efficient than corn-derived ethanol or any more environmentally safe. My guess is that it’s more of a political/business opportunity than a feasibly sustainable alternative to oil or even corn-based ethanol.
On a related note, GWB also mentioned the possibility of wood chips being used to create ethanol. That sure sounds like yet another example of finding a government-subsidized use of a surplus commodity (this time from the timber/lumber/construction industries). There’s a continuation of a historical pattern evident here.
February 17th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Yup – using wood to create ethanol would be a double-whammy of dumb uses of resources. (Wood easily produces methanol, which would require another step to process, I’m sure. Either that or we literally get “blind drunk”, one of the two.)
I’ve been reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse lately, and I’ve become convinced that one of the most important things we can do – even more important that getting “cars on ethanol” like we see in the political sphere – is to get our agricultural sector off of such heavy reliance on oil. Right now, oil is used for everything – fuel for equipment, the base for fertlizers (not to mention the production of them), and heavily used in nearly every input imaginable.
Something that Diamond noted (and compared to past civilizations) – our brand of modern agriculture is by very definition unsustainable. Considering the political issues in the middle east, I can imagine several worst-case scenarios. What would happen if political unrest/conflict shut down the oil taps in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuala?
Considering the wide use of petroleum products everywhere in our society, we would be forced into making some very hard choices. Do we choose cheaper gasoline or cheaper food? How would we deal with reduced crop yields without the benefit of modern inputs – or with the increasing expense of such inputs?
For some reason, it makes more sense to me to focus social efforts on weaning the agricultural sector from over-reliance on oil. A simple start might be to use subsidy policy to encourage the purchase (or retrofit) of existing equipment to run on ethanol/biodiesel products. In the long run, I imagine one large tractor running on ethanol/biodiesel to be a better step than having 5 cars running E85.
February 17th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
So at this stage I’m mostly skeptical about the prospects of switchgrass actually providing a feasible alternative to oil. It probably is more energy efficient than corn-based ethanol; I wouldn’t doubt it, anyway. But I’d also imagine that switch grass is more cost efficient to plant, harvest, and convert into ethanol than corn.
To comment on this, I have to admit that I don’t know much about the pros/cons – just that switchgrass uses “the whole plant” instead of the seed, so you’re bound to have a little bit of a headstart. The reason that corn is a natural ethanol product is pretty simple: heavy subsidies mean it’s cheap to buyers. I heard from a of the farmer/shareholder in an ethanol co-op that while it’s neat that the ethanol plant might be profitable enough to create 10 or so jobs in the community, he doesn’t think the investment he made is going to see a profit on his share in the ethanol plant is going to see a profit anytime soon. The price of corn is just too low to see his prices affected in any significant way.
February 17th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
Great point about fertilizers being petroleum-based. Hell, extend the connection to plastics as well—obviously that extends far beyond the ag sector. And besides just fueling the eqipment used in agriculture, oil is a necessary lubricant. That’s another question I’ve been wondering about: sure we’re talking about finding alternative energy sources to replace oil, but where is the talk about finding alternative lubricant sources to replace oil?
The further down the line you go the more it seems that very little of the global economic system is sustainable. Agriculture, for sure, but also mass production of goods transported throughout the world. The most logical solution is to shift to more localized production and consumption whenever possible. Conservation and limiting consumption as well. I have a hard time seeing a choice like this being made on a large social scale. Individuals and even small groups or communities, maybe, but not regionally or nationally in the U.S. It would take a fundamental shift in consciousness and ideology, personal and public on a massive scale almost simultaneously, and certainly a radical reconception of self and other. This isn’t likely to happen when the oil crisis still appears to be more than a generation away (acknowledging that, like you said, a crisis in Venezuela or Iran or any other major oil producing nation could bring the crisis right to the forefront of our lives in the blink of an eye). People don’t tend to change until there is a true crisis, until their own personal patterns of living are no longer possible at all. As long as oil is relatively affordable along with the goods and services made available through the utilization of oil people aren’t likely to change their ways or to push for political or economic changes that would change the dynamics of how they live their lives. Even with rehtoric of an impending crisis most people don’t seem to react until there’s a direct connection to their own lives that they can clearly identify and conceptualize.
So to some extent it’s most likely that we won’t deal with our unsustainable systems (agriculture and others) until they are no longer functioning. That could very well end up causing some extreme problems for several generations, including violent conflicts in every region of the globe and subsequent massive human famine, disease, and death on a scale that is almost inconceivable. The more positive possible alternative that also seems feasible (although by no means assured) is that local movements in the U.S. and around the world will “trickle” up. Movements like the organic farming movement, the slow living movement, movements in which a few people begin changing their lives, the way they eat, the way they travel, the way they provide for their livelihood, and the way they interact with others in their families and their communities. Generally, a change in the consciousness of our limitations as humans, even as societies, and the delicate balance between humanity and the earth itself. In some ways, you could say that what is necessary is for people to mature emotionally, socially, and politically and to “spread” their maturity to others. Without that there will be no “trickling up” of sustainable economic and political choices because there will be nowhere from which sustainability could trickle up from.
Part of that maturity consists in being patiently dedicated to fostering those values inherent within sustainable social, economic, and political ideas and practices on individual and local levels in the next generation. It has to be a multigenerational process. It’s simply not going to spread like wild fire because nothing associated with anything that could be considered mature comes about without sustained and disciplined effort. I think there’s a real danger in focusing too much on a given election; in fact, there’s a danger in putting our faith in others rather than in ourselves. That’s not to say we don’t interact with and support others, just that if we define ourselves and our dreams by the successes or failures of the others we associate with or support (from near and far) then we remain outsiders even to ourselves, void of identity or purpose. This, I think, is the driftless state of our culture and the nihilism that presents itself as apathy, victimization, and narcissism. If, as a society, we remain in our immature, nihilistic cocoon then we’ll only change after catastrophes (and the changes will be as reactionary and hysterical, and therefore ineffective if not downright harmful, as they were after 9/11). It’s difficult to imagine that there will be a widespread change that leads to the nation becoming more mature and sophisticated personally and publicly so the task is generally for those willing to continue striving to improve their lives and the world around them to find the motivation within themselves knowing that there isn’t likely to be many externally identifiable measures of success.