And In The Darkness Bind Them

Q: What are the three hottest issues in Washington?

A: Health care, the economy, and global climate change

Let's get a policy solution that can solve them. What's going to happen? Everybody's going to get a little thinner, along with the wallets of some cooperate agro-businessmen. Who wins? the globe, sick people, small to medium sized family farmers. . . everybody.

On June 27th of 2009 the journal Health Affairs collaborated with a leading nutrition expert at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to publish and estimate of the social healthcare costs of obesity. Here are the numbers. with more than a quarter of Americans obese, the treatment of the health complications and illnesses associated with obesity cost a whopping $147 billion a year in medical expenses, nearly double what it did in 1998, and about 10 percent of the nation's medical spending.

Do people need to eat less and more healthily and exercise more. Yes. However, before we reduce obesity to a purely individual moral problem, we have to face facts. The diet of our society has been constrained and mutated by federal government interventions in agricultural production causing market distortions that have caused social double-chin. Subsidies for producers and tariffs on lower priced international foods keep a few rich agro-businessmen and their lobbiests in business and the rest of us counting calories and paying the price. Simply put, it is hard to become healthy because healthy food is expensive and high calorie, low nutrient food is cheap.

The economy is contracting and where do people feel it the most: at the grocery store. When you get sacked and your grocery's for the week for your family cost 200 bucks, it doesn't feel good. When prices first spiked at the store, pundits blamed federal ethanol production subsidies for straining the food suppy, and hence raising prices. But there are bigger forces at play than this and over a longer time frame.

Agriculutral subsides were introduced during the great depression as sort of bail out for farmers. In 1935, the number of farms in the United States peaked at 6.8 million as the population edged over 127 million citizens. The majority of these being family farms, meaning about 6-12 people per farm, that is about 45 million of the 127 million citizens. The New Deal introduced agricultural subsides as a way to bail out mainstreet. However, now we live in a world where less than 1% of people claim farming as an occupation, 2.3% of the biggest farms account for more than 50% of sales in agricultural products (USDA, 1997 Census of Agriculture data), medium-sales ($100,000-$249,999) and large-scale farms received 78 percent of commodity-related government payments in 2004, and most farms—61 percent in 2004—receive no government payments and are only indirectly constrained and influenced by these price distorting projects. Most 'farms' are owned as a lifestyle with other sources of income. Most 'farmers' are either in retirement 14.1% of farms, or live on farms as a residence and lifestyle 40.4%. Agricultural subsides are actually hurting real Rockwell family farmers by making their large competitors so much more economically viable. In essence, these subsides and the price distortions caused by tariffs are just being pocketed by the largest farm companies.

Note that the largest cooperate farms are generally held in trust by families, and therefore live under the sentimental mantel of 'family farmers' which is purposefully perpetuated by populist politicians, the media, and even the US census bureau.

But without tariffs we would be overrun with the imported cheaper food of other countries. Wait, THAT'S AWESOME! The US would still produce food, but we would buy a lot more food from other nations because its cheaper and just as delicious or more delicious (have you ever had a Spanish tomato, or Thai basil?). In return, foreign national traders would be stuck with the dollars we gave them for the food and would be happy to buy our exports with those dollars. In the end, we, who are better at designing micro chips, computers and financial services and not very good at making corn, can buy our corn from them and they can buy our microchips, computers, and financial services. Both the poorer communities in agricultural economies, and richer communities in sophisticated information/design economys become wealthier. All this amounts to a real bottom up (rather than top down federal fiscal or monetary) economic stimulus plan. I seem to recall a much talked about presidential campaign that promised that bottom up thing. . . hmmmm.

Lastly, although everybody talks about cars when they talk about global climate change, and a few smarter people talk about building efficiency and healthy urbanism, in fact the IPCC also states that from 1850 to 1998, about 136 (+ 55) Gt carbon has been emitted as a result of land-use change, predominantly from forest ecosystems. For comparison, 270 (+ 30) Gt carbon has been emitted as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning and cement production (Bierregaard, Richard; Claude Gascon, Thomas E. Lovejoy, and Rita Mesquita (eds.) (2001). Lessons from Amazonia: The Ecology and Conservation of a Fragmented Forest.). If you break down burning fossil fuels into its constituent parts like cars, planes, electricity production, and then separate cement production, the percentage biggest contributor of CO2 to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution is land use changes. The biggest contributor in the biggest category? Agriculture. It turns out a swamp or a forest holds down a whole hell of a lot of CO2, and a corn field that is regularly harvested and replanted, almost none.

So, get rid of the tariffs and subsidies and what do we get? Cheaper, higher nutrient food, freer farmers, more prosperous small and local farms, a huge decentralized market driven plan to create millions of CO2 sinks called forests, swamps, bogs, and marshes, and a bottom up economic stimulus plan. Nobody but a few agro-business men and the purse of the federal government get hurt, and these two have been hurting the rest of us for long enough.