So we’ve got this drought in the Midwest and its attendant spiked food prices forecast for the next three years. We’ve got the existing farm bill scheduled to croak on September 30th.
And we’ve got two new farm bills in Congress waiting to entrench our problems.
The drought is assuredly caused in part by global warming, just as last weekend’s tornadoes in Queens and Brooklyn were, just as all of the wackjob weather we’ve seen for the past few years has been, just as the wackjob weather surely to come will be.
And rather than work to protect our national food supply by making it less vulnerable to climate change, both the Republican and Democratic farm bills make our meals more vulnerable. They also accelerate the threat.
The United States sends billions of public dollars to the growers of a few high-impact crops (corn!) through elaborate, Byzantine subsidies. Those crops—and more specifically the unceasing monocropping that sucks ever more nutrients out of the soil without putting any back—kills soil. Crop rotation can fix that problem, but our massive industrial agricultural machine doesn’t allow time for that. Instead, we use astonishingly large amounts of fossil fuel-based fertilizers each year (which accelerates climate change and whose use kills the microorganisms that make soil vital) and continue to monocrop corn and a few other grains (which means a single weather trend or a single pest can wipe out entire agricultural regions, as we’re seeing in this parched summer).
The best way to adapt to climate change, agricultural scientists say, is to promote healthy soil. But the two proposed farm bills (not written by scientists or farmers, duh) strip money from the budget of the Conservation Stewardship Program’s efforts to create fertile soil and forces farmers to spend it on additional crop insurance. And those subsidies that push a few high-impact crops that further weaken our soil will continue, those synthetic fertilizers whose production creates tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases will increase, and the possibility that large swaths of the American public will be unable to afford healthy meals looms closer and closer over us.
So what’s our gist? – Rather than address the source of the problems that already threaten our national health, Congress is exacerbating the situation and proposing a fake fix that funnels public money into the hands of their buddies in private insurance companies. But hey, they all play racquet ball together, they’ve known each since way back, it’s no big deal! Anyway, they’re not the ones comparison shopping at the grocery store.
And guess who’s creating the legislation that holds so much sway over the quality of our lives. You can bet it ain’t your elected representative.