Sowing Disaster: Why We Need a New Farm Bill - CommonDreams.org

Sowing Disaster: Why We Need a New Farm Bill - CommonDreams.org Friday, April 18, 2008 | by Christopher D. Cook

Congress passes its share of boondoggles, but there’s a real doozy on the docket April 18. If the nearly $300 billion Farm Bill passes in its current form, the American public will pay billions of dollars to large-scale farmers and food corporations for the following end results: an oversupply of unhealthful junk food that worsens our national obesity epidemic; severe depletion of soil and air through overuse of pesticides and destructive farming practices; and the hastened removal of small farms from the land, eroding the spirit and finances of rural communities across the U.S.
...
Consider just a few numbers. Seventy-five percent of subsidies go to a handful of commodities (mostly wheat, corn, and oilseeds) used as food additives, making highly processed junk food cheap — while fruits and vegetables and whole foods get no payments at all. Nearly 70 percent of farm payments go to the top ten percent of the country’s biggest growers — while America loses one farm every half an hour, 15,000 per year. This form of corporate welfare encourages the ongoing consolidation of farming and food production into fewer hands while removing small and mid-sized farmers who can no longer compete in this unlevel playing field. Meanwhile, by skewing payments toward large-scale farming, these subsidies promote ecologically damaging intensive pesticide use and severe depletion of precious topsoils — while organic foods, often exorbitantly expensive, get no supports at all. As a nation we dump nearly half a million tons of toxic pesticides on the land, polluting the air, often sickening nearby residents, and tainting rivers and streams, to say nothing of our food supply which is covered in pesticide residue. ///