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food bill April 27, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : economics, politics , trackback

Michael Pollan argues in an article at the New York Times that a fairly large number of the hot-botton topics in the US today are linked to one (rather unwieldly large) piece of legislation. The topics include:

-Immigration
-Environment
-Globalization
-Obesity

The legislation? The Farm Bill (2002 Bill — 421 glorious pdf pages).

“The devil is in the details, no doubt. Simply eliminating support for farmers won’t solve these problems; overproduction has afflicted agriculture since long before modern subsidies. It will take some imaginative policy making to figure out how to encourage farmers to focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for food processors and on rebuilding local food economies, which the current farm bill hobbles. But the guiding principle behind an eater’s farm bill could not be more straightforward: it’s one that changes the rules of the game so as to promote the quality of our food (and farming) over and above its quantity.”

(via Marginal Revolution)

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