If you're not into agriculture policy this may be boring, but bear with me:
Lots of countries subsidize agriculture, but in the US we do it in a particularly perverse way. In Europe and Canada, the governments give farmers some direct subsidies, let them grow what they want, and in emergencies will buy up crops to keep prices from collapsing too far.
In the US we don't subsidize farmers, we subsidize crops: essentially, if you grow corn, wheat, soy, or rapeseed (they call it "canola oil" because nobody would buy "rapeseed oil"), you get a check. If you grow something else, you're on your own. (Yes, it's more complicated than that, but bear with me.) Forget the farm subsidy stories you've heard about people being paid to not grow anything: that happens occasionally, and happens for a good reason, and isn't part of the problem.
Now, this has led to a race over the past few decades to plant as much corn, soy, etc. as possible. This has led to overuse of pesticides and fertilizer to get as much yield as possible, and use of GM crops to make applying the pesticides easier. This annoys me but isn't my point in this post so I'll leave that be for now. What it has also done is pressure markets.
It should be pretty obvious that if farmers are growing as much as possible of a few crops, there will eventually be a price collapse as too much of those crops get harvested. Enter NAFTA.
There have been two big winners from NAFTA (and "free trade" in general): manufacturers in poor countries, and American agriculture. We pay farmers to grow staple crops, and since there's not enough market for them here we dump them on poor countries. And since they are subsidized by our taxes, they can sell them at artificially low prices. And when I say "we pay farmers", in a lot of cases we're paying Monsanto, ADM, and ConAgra. There are independent American farmers still, but probably not for too much longer (excepting the "go local" movement farmers, who seem to be doing ok). And the individual farmers who have survived now have holdings so huge that only the industrial ag model works. So, yes, if you're a farmer who managed to make it through the past 20 years, you're riding high: but most of your neighbors have sold their farms to you and moved to town.
Anyways, we dump these farmers crops on markets south of us. This puts Mexican, Guatemalan, Haitian, etc. farmers out of work. Some go to work in the factories that left the Rust Belt or the textile mills that left the South. But a lot of them end up coming to the US.
Just think about that for a second: our tax dollars are being used to drive farmers off their farms and turn them into illegal immigrants. It's like Lou Dobbs's wet dream.
Back to Haiti. Port au Prince is sort of the Lagos of the Caribbean. It's a huge shantytown that stretches for miles in every direction. Former farmers from inland lost their farms when subsidized US crops got dumped in to the Haitian market; some were snapped up by the factories and mills, some made it by hook or crook into the US, and a lot just live in shantytowns, in hideous poverty, without clean water or reliable food sources. And so, when an earthquake strikes, instead of a population spread more thinly across the island, we have a population crowded into and around the urban areas without enough money to build actual buildings. So they end up buried in rubble.
To summarize the pattern: we subsidize staple crops and dump them on poor countries' markets. This makes the poor countries' farmers go out of business. They find work in factories making cheap crap for us to buy. Those factories left America a while ago because they knew they could get lower wages in poor countries. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Now, Social Security has been called the third rail of American politics. It's not: GW Bush wasn't fried when he tried to touch it (that's a nice image, though). He failed, but there was pretty spirited debate on both sides. The third rail is the farm bill. People don't know much about how their food is made, for the most part. They see pictures on packaging of small farmhouses that have been in the family for generations, growing arugula, milking cows, or whatever, and they take that at face value. Why shouldn't we want to subsidize that? And if you speak out against it or (God forbid) vote against it, you're branded as trying to kill family farms and the rural way of life.
But the fact is, rather than helping small farms, our taxes go to huge agri firms who plant genetically modified monocultures over huge tracts with devastating environmental consequences. And don't even get me started about how animals are raised! The cruelty and environmental issues aside, the jackasses at Perdue, Jimmy Dean, etc. have managed to
re-implement sharecropping and you never hear a word about it (except for rants on DU). Obama campaigned on implementing a packer ban (I won't get in to the details of what that is, but it undoes the sharecropping I was talking about), but nothing has happened yet.
It's not going to come from Congress, at least not unless we get term limits and campaign finance reform. All we can do is stop buying industrialized food. It's not much but it has to start somewhere. You can find a CSA (sort of a farmer/consumer co-op)
here or, oddly enough, through the
USDA (obviously not everybody in there is on the wrong side, just the Republicans). We need to start checking out of the food production and distribution system that impoverishes us, impoverishes others, and degrades the environment.
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