510 Modern Agricultural Reforms
In short, agriculture has largely become monologic. It speaks to us, not with us,
and that goes for farmers as much as eaters. And it speaks to us with one logic:
cheap food is all we should ask of agriculture. We don’t want to pay more than we
have to for our food, of course. This much is true. But the single-minded focus on
producing vast quantities of food in order to feed the world at low cost keeps us
from seeing the full connectedness of the agricultural conversation, the connected-
ness both between people and between people and the earth.
Among those connections are the implications of the cheap-food monologue for
farmers, in both rich countries and poor. In the US, our agricultural subsidies, as we
have seen, encourage ever-increasing production, which has the effect of driving
down the prices farmers receive, which in turn leads them to try to stay on the tread-
mill and solve the farmer’s problem by increasing their production even more. But
although this process is often praised for keeping food costs down, it no longer has
much impact on what eaters pay. Currently in the US, about 19 cents of every dollar
spent on food goes back to farmers – about $123 billion of the $661 billion Ameri-
can consumers spend on food each year.^18 Decreasing that percentage even further
would have little effect on food prices, as it is now such a minor fraction of the food
dollar.^19 But it would almost certainly result in fewer farmers on the treadmill.
In fact, we are currently awash in food in the US, and in most other industrial-
ized countries. The situation is so bad that, in order to prop up the prices farmers
get, so that they don’t all fold at once, we burn corn in our cars in the form of
ethanol and we have an aggressive food export policy. In addition to being the
world’s biggest food importer, the US is the world’s biggest food exporter. Which
is supposed to help feed the world. But as I have discussed, most American agricul-
tural products are too expensive for any but the relatively wealthy in other coun-
tries to purchase, the very people who are already eating pretty well. And in
circumstances where American food – grain, primarily – does get to poor regions
of the world, it tends to depress prices in those areas below what local farmers can
make a living on, putting them out of work and making them even poorer. ‘Feed-
ing the world’ with American grain is consequently often just a pretty slogan for
commodity dumping.
Despite being awash in cheap food at home, there is nonetheless widespread
hunger in the US. The US Department of Agriculture categorizes nearly 35 mil-
lion Americans, including 13 million children, as ‘food insecure’ – approximately
12.5 per cent of the nation in 2002. Approximately 9.4 million live in households
that the USDA classifies as ‘hungry’ – about 3 per cent of the nation.^20 This hun-
ger persists despite the fact that Americans spend less of their income on food –
about 11 per cent – than practically any other industrialized nation. But those are
average figures. Poor people need to eat as much as rich people do, and although
they cut costs and spend quite a bit less, they still spend a much higher propor-
tion of their income on food. People making between $5000 and $10,000 a year
spend about 33 per cent of their after-tax income on food.^21 Also, poor people in
the US typically face higher food costs, as supermarkets today typically are
located in suburban areas, away from where most poor people live.^22 The solution