Farm Bill: A Wasted Chance

(Ben Burkett is the president of the National Family Farm Coalition, founded in 1986 as a national link for grassroots organizations working on family farm and rural community issues.)

The recently passed Farm Bill is an abysmal disappointment.

Despite the global food crisis and consumer demands for a healthier food system, Congress chose to stay with the failed status quo that favors industrial factory farms and corporate agribusiness profits over the interests of family farmers and consumers.

With commodity prices skyrocketing around the world and hunger on the rise here in the U.S., Congress chose to ignore the crisis by refusing to consider implementing Strategic Grain Reserves and reviving Farmer-Owned Reserves.

While China and India build up their buffer stocks and the European Union considers establishing reserves, the United States continues its policy to allow our food security to be at the mercy of speculative global markets.

Under the radical deregulation of the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act, government reserves were eliminated and control of grain stocks handed to corporate agribusiness giants. With nothing left in the cupboard, we are just one drought away from $10 corn or $20 wheat (per bushel) with no backup plan in place.

Meanwhile, agribusiness companies have seen their profits explode as they take advantage of market speculation. In April 2008, Cargill reported a $1 billion profit, up 86 percent from a year ago.

Grain reserves, by stabilizing prices, ensure that farmers do not have to rely on taxpayer subsidy payments by setting a floor on commodity prices so agribusiness can't underpay farmers. Reserves also help food processors and consumers crying out for relief.

During the years of cheap grain, factory farms escalated their expansion in rural America, wiping out family farmers and causing enormous environmental destruction.

Such corporate control has sucked the lifeblood out of many rural communities.

Recent food scares - from poisoned Chinese pet food to e.coli-tainted meat and spinach recalls - have caused consumers to take a heightened awareness about their food. While the Farm Bill includes significant increases in funding for organic crops, farmers markets, and innovative Community Food Projects, the bill represents a wasted opportunity to fundamentally alter our broken food system away from favoring the interests of corporate agribusiness towards sustainable family farmers.

It will not stop the continued hollowing out of rural America.