My first piece is up on the Slow Food Nation blog, part one of a two part interview with Dan Imhoff, author of Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to the Farm Bill. We spoke about the intent of the Farm Bill, whether or not it continues to serve its purpose, and how we can do better (in part 2, tomorrow!)
I can’t tell you enough what a privilege it is to be writing with so many other wonderful writers on food issues. I have enjoyed every piece put out on the blog so far, and encourage you to keep an eye out there, as new posts are coming along nearly every day.
Please enjoy this excerpt, then check out the Slow Food Nation blog:
Paula: Congress just recently passed a five-year Farm Bill, why is it such an important piece of legislature?
Dan: The Farm Bill determines what crops we grow, where we grow them, under what conditions, how cheap different types of foods are in the marketplace, how well we take care of our land and waterways and wild habitats, and it ultimately determines our health and our nutrition.
Paula: What was the original purpose of the Farm Bill, and did that original version of the Farm Bill work?
Dan: It started out of desperation. Our soil was blowing away, literally, and we were also witnessing, I think, the end of the agrarian era in American history and we were massively moving towards cities and an industrialized economy. Then we had the Depression, and there were lots and lots of people out of work and hungry. The farmer had only one way to try to get ahead in this new economy and that was to plant as much as possible, but the irony was that the more that they planted, the less it was worth. And ultimately they planted so much, so radically, in places that have never been plowed, that they created the Dust Bowl. The early programs were designed to try to compensate farmers fairly to give parity, and they tried to peg the value of any given commodity, whether it was peanuts, cotton or rice, with a real value in an urban environment. And for decades, the rural versus urban parity was just way out of whack. So they tried to set some price floors, and give a fair price so that the farmer could actually get his or her money back. A lot of these programs were loan based, and if you couldn’t pay back your loan at the end of the season because the price was too low, you just gave your crop as payment, and so the government got into the grain storage and distribution business. This goes all the way back to Confucian times, and Biblical and Egyptian practices.
Paula: When and how did it change?
Dan: For many decades, in order to be eligible for programs, you had to put a certain percentage of your land aside in conservation. And this encouraged you not to plant marginal land, and it restricted the supply somewhat to try to [keep] prices at a certain level, [so as] not to over saturate the market. In the 70s, I think that we just had this idea that we were going to become the grain exporter of the world and that we just needed to expand and produce as much as possible regardless of how we produced it.
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