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Gabriel N. Rosenberg , Jan Dutkiewicz /December 27, 2021Abolish the Department of AgricultureThe USDA has become an inefficient monster that often promotes products that are bad for consumers and the environment. Let’s replace it with a Department of Food.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
What Now? 4Get Ready for the Most Pivotal Year in the History of the Supreme Court—Again 5Abolish the Department of Agriculture 6It’s Put Up or Shut Up Time in the Fight Against Global Corruption View All
In late April of 2020, many
Americans were shocked by the Trump administration’s executive order to keep
the nation’s meatpacking plants humming: Covid-19 was tearing through the
plants where workers labored, crammed shoulder to shoulder, sickening them and
helping to spread the virus in their communities. The companies
who owned the plants publicly insisted that shuttering plants would spark a meat
shortage and imperil the country’s food supply. Behind the scenes, they used
their access with U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to shape the executive orderand USDA policy ,
keeping a steady supply of meat flowing to both American supermarkets and
lucrative foreign markets. Over the next year, meatpacking plants would lead to 334,000Covid-19 infections . The
mere presence of a beef or pork plant in a community, according to one study,
doubled the community’s infection rate.
The USDA, at this point, isso thoroughly captured by big agribusiness that it barely matters which partypicks the secretary.It’s easy to dismiss this sadsaga as another example of malfeasance and mismanagement by the Trumpadministration. But the truth is that Big Meat has just as much pull with JoeBiden’s USDA. Current Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack previously served asthe head of the USDA during both of Obama’s terms. Then, after enthusiastically handing the baton to Perdue, he sauntered
through the revolving door into the CEO position at the U.S. Dairy Export
Council before promptly trotting back to his old cabinet seat with the
Democratic victory. At the recent COP26 climate summit, despite the fact that
animal agriculture contributes 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions,
he told reporters , “I do not think we have to reduce the amount of meat or
livestock produced in the U.S.” This is just one example of the department’s
support for a dysfunctional status quo. Since the start of Joe Biden’s term, the USDA has supported increasing already back-breaking line speeds atslaughterhouses ,
failed to address racial disparity in loans and grants, and, instead of
working to actually reduce American agriculture’s climate footprint, backed
bandaid-technofixes like methane bio digesters on factory farms and agricultural carbon offsets .
The USDA, at this point, is
so thoroughly captured by big agribusiness that it barely matters which party
picks the secretary; whoever serves will ultimately serve mega-corporations and
rich farmers. That’s partly because our political system over-represents rural
voters and monied interests. But it’s also the product of more banal
dysfunctions: poor institutional design, inertia, and mission-drift at an
agency built for a different country and a different time.
The USDA was designed for a
United States in which a majority of people made their livelihoods, directly or
indirectly, from agriculture. That country is long gone. It is replaced by one
where very few people—and very few, very large corporations—control food
production and distribution to the detriment of American consumers, taxpayers,
and workers. If we are to have any hope of fixing what ails the American food
system, we need a drastic approach: We need to abolish the USDA. In its place,
we need an institution that will prioritize the public interest, including the
interests of laborers and eaters, as well as public health and the environment.
We need a Department of Food.
To understand why the USDA is
so ill-suited for the present moment, you have to understand its current
structure. With a budget of $146 billion and about 100,000
employees, the USDA is a mammoth agency.
It runs three different forms of direct assistance to farmers: commodity
support programs, crop insurance, and “conservation” funding, which pays farmers
to keep fields fallow or to implement emissions-mitigation programs on their
farms. Off the farm, the USDA administers forests through the Forest Service,
food safety regulation and oversight through the Food Safety and Inspection
Service, rural development initiatives like high-speed broadband through
the Rural Utilities Service, agribusiness research and development both
directly and through grants, and the promotion and sale of U.S. agricultural
commodities in foreign markets. It also administers the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program (formerly the Food Stamp Program, now known as “SNAP”) and other nutrition
programs, which together make up just under 80 percent of the agency’s budget.
All of this is funded through the sprawling Farm Bills
that substantively define U.S. agricultural policy and the USDA’s operations
every five years.
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There are two big problems
here. On the one hand, the USDA is charged with the oxymoronic double mandate
of both promoting and regulating all
of American agriculture—two disparate tasks that, when combined, effectively
put the fox in charge of the henhouse. On the other hand, the department
remains focused on the needs of agricultural producers despite the broad
social, environmental, and economic impacts of agriculture. In practice, this
means that the USDA’s budget and policies must satisfy large farming
interests, who demand and often get something in exchange for agreeing to the
USDA’s other policies.
There is no reason why food aid to the poorest Americans shouldbe tied to support for the production of cash crops.These policies also show up in the administration and funding of SNAP, the nation’s biggest—if imperfect—policy solution to food insecurity.
Through the Farm Bill, funding for SNAP has been fused to the USDA’s subsidy
programs since its creation in the 1960s. As a result, the food security of the
nation’s poorest households is continually held ransom to agricultural
subsidies; any efforts by progressives to pare those subsidies will be met with
cuts or roadblocks to food assistance by farm state politicians. And attempts
to improve SNAP similarly run into partisan politics .
Meanwhile, all those
subsidies flow to farm households that hold a total net wealth nine times greater than the national median and,
even among that already wealthy demographic, overwhelmingly to the
very wealthiest farmers. Worse still, subsidies can increase the cost of food by incentivizing the production of
nonfood commodities such as corn for ethanol and distorting agricultural
markets. The marriage of SNAP and commodity support programs isn’t just bad; it’s perverse. There is no reason why food aid to the poorest Americans should
be tied to support for the production of cash crops.
SNAP is the most flagrant
example, but it’s hardly alone. Because the USDA administers important parts of
trade, energy, labor, and sometimes even military policy , these all appear in the Farm
Bill. That means that farm-state politicians (who write the legislation) and big
agricultural interests (whom they serve) use their outsized leverage to shape
important policies otherwise unrelated to agriculture. This results in the sorts of massive subsidies and bailouts that prop up mass-scale commodity production. In 2019, for instance, when the Trump administration sought to compensate corn farmers for losses caused by its trade disputes, it overpaid $3 billion in aid to corn farmers , including offering farmers in different regions different prices for corn, with premiums going to those in the South and Midwest. The USDA also regularly provides price supports and bailouts for industries like dairy, with one study suggesting that dairy farms receive upwards of 75 percent of their revenue from different government supports.
This horsetrading
ultimately distorts and undermines any laudable project progressive forces
might try to run through the department. For example, subsidies for corn
ethanol ensure the crop is a reliable moneymaker for Midwestern farmers, but
its contribution to a sustainable energy policy, its stated raison d’etre, is at best neutral .
The law forbids you from treating animals in acruel fashion. . . unless you’re a farmer. The law forbids you from dumping debrisinto open waterways. . . unless you’re a farmer.The throughline of allthis dysfunction is simply that the USDA puts the interests of agriculturalproduction for its own sake over everything else. As a result, the countlesssystemic problems of modern American agriculture go unaddressed. Agriculturalworkers are among the worst-paid in the United States, their wages
completely incommensurate with the difficult and dangerous work they perform. A
conservative estimate is that agriculture makes up 10 percent of all U.S.
greenhouse gas emissions. It is also one of the biggest polluters of waterways in the U.S. Small, alternative,
and minority-owned farming gets scant support. Meanwhile, over 100 million Americans are obese or suffer from diet-related diseases like
diabetes and hypertension, in part as a result of agricultural policies and
in part due to the failure of public health policies.
Under the USDA’s watch,
American farming has become the consummate exception to countless regulatory
reforms of the past century. The law forbids you from treating animals in a
cruel fashion. . . unless you’re a farmer . The law forbids you from dumping debris
into open waterways. . . unless you’re a farmer . The law forbids you from firing an
employee for joining a union. . . unless you’re a farmer . And the law also forbids you from
employing a child under the age of 14. . . unless you’re a farmer . This last exception was so outrageous
that Obama’s Department of Labor attempted to close the loophole in 2012 by
extending the protection of existing child labor laws to agriculture. The
changes were met with criticism from predictable corners such as major
agribusiness interests and farm state politicians, including Democrats Jon
Tester and Al Franken. Joining the critics was none other than Tom Vilsack. The
changes were scrapped . Upwards of 500,000 children still labor in American agriculture.
The USDA was established
under Abraham Lincoln in 1862 as part of a suite of policies pushed by the small Northern farmers who
made up the base of Lincoln’s Republican Party. In addition to the Homestead
Act and the transcontinental railroad, these policies subsidized and
accelerated the conversion of Western grasslands into settled agriculture and
gave federal backing to the Jeffersonian ideal of small, independent, yeoman
farmers—all, of course, on the plundered
lands of Indigenous peoples, and doing little for the recently emancipated enslaved people who were excluded from many of the benefits.
This basic logic of serving
landowners and producers hasn’t changed substantially even as the country and its agriculture have. In the 1860s, Lincoln had good reason to call the USDA “The
People’s Department” since 50 percent of the population lived or worked on
farms, and in a country of 31 million there were 1.5 million farms. By the
1930s, this idea still held as the population grew to almost 130 million with
6.8 million farms. Today, however, in a country of 330 million, there are only
around 2 million farms, and of those the 5 percent largest operationsmake up almost 60 percent of all production . Farm workers and operators, meanwhile,
make up about only 1.7 percent of the U.S. labor force, even as agricultural
output is higher than ever.
Agriculture is now a
high-volume and highly capitalized industry where a tiny fraction of farms
produce the vast bulk of commodities. USDA policies are a big reason why. By
trying, as MIT Professor Deborah Fitzgerald puts it , to turn “every farm into a factory,” the
USDA pushed mechanical implements, artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and
debt-financed, capital- and input-intensive agriculture. Given these
incentives, most farmers, whether to grow rich or merely survive, have turned
to business models predicated on high-yield monocropping, economies of scale,
and farm consolidation. That means fewer, substantially larger farms produce
just a handful of commodities or factory-farmed animals. Today, corn, soy, and
wheat make up half of all crop sales, and upward of 99 percent of meat,
including over 9 billion chickens, comes from factory farms where animals are
fattened up on those crops.
This isn’t a pattern either
major political party knows how to break: It’s built into the department’s
structure and backed by a powerful lobbying apparatus. Farmers and agribusiness
furnish the USDA with political capital and the USDA guarantees stable prices
for commodity monocrops with minimal regulation. “Conventional farmers,” writes
the agricultural critic Daniel Imhoff, “stay afloat by farming the system
rather than growing what might best serve their particular tract of land for
the long term or provide for more well-rounded, healthy diets.” The system
serves up the safe bet, but it has also selected, generation after generation,
for farmers (and policymakers) who only make safe bets.
While the USDA’s rotten
policies work far better for large farmers than small ones, the primary
victims are not people who own farms, but the 99 percent of the population who
do not. Now more than ever, workers and consumers desperately need a safe,
equitable, and sustainable food system, and to build one we need an agency up
to the task.
A Department of Food would
start with a mandate to maintain a just, healthy, and sustainable food system.
Agricultural policy would be only one element, alongside food and nutritional
access and industrial, energy, labor, land use, environmental, climate, and
animal-welfare policies. It would leave the economic promotion of agriculture
to the Department of Commerce and the production of energy to the Department of
Energy, shedding its conflicts of interests and focusing its institutional
energies exclusively on making sure that all Americans have access to safe,
healthy, fairly produced, and affordable food. These goals would be its
benchmarks of success—not the economic profitability of American agriculture
as it is defined by rich farmers and agribusinesses executives.
With a clearer mission, theDepartment of Food would be leaner and more focused, armed with renewed energy and abroader public interest.With a clearer mission, theDepartment of Food would be leaner and more focused, armed with renewed energy and abroader public interest. It could stop subsidizing the production of cornethanol. It could, instead, shape agricultural subsidies to incentivize theproduction of healthy foods that have low greenhouse gas and environmentalfootprints. It could start taxing the production of foods that do not.
The Department of Food couldend agriculture’s regulatory exceptionalism by forcing farms to adhere to thesame basic environmental, animal welfare, and labor standards that otherbusinesses must already obey. It could ensure that all workers, on farms and infood services, are fairly paid, work under safe conditions, have robust laborrights, and have healthy and affordable food to eat. Itcould also leave all food-safety policymaking and oversight to the Food andDrug Administration, again eliminating a conflict of interest. (Currently, theUSDA receives pressure from special interests, like meatpackers, whose products it promotes. As a result, the department winds up rubber-stamping misleading claims about the humane treatment of animals, for example.) The Department of Food could support major improvements in animal
welfare laws, making the sort of treatment that is standard on factory
farms illegal and industrialized animal agriculture functionally impossible,
and with it the wasteful monocrop corn and soy animal feed supply chain.
The Department of Food could
administer food assistance according to the nutritional needs of the
population, not to manage agricultural surpluses, and it would work with other
agencies to address the income inequality that drives food insecurity.
The Department of Food could
make robust public investments in solutions to food systems problems outside
the USDA’s obsessive focus on corn, soy, and meat. It could, for example,
create a National Laboratory for Food Technology to conduct open-access,
public-interest-based research on alternative proteins and improved
processing, storage, and upcycling techniques. For farmers genuinely interested
in sustainably producing fresh and healthy food for their communities, it could
purchase acreage retired from commodity soy and corn or ranching production
and found a national land bank. That bank could sell and finance at favorable terms
to support tribal land-back schemes, reparations for communities historically
excluded from farming, agro-ecological farming projects, rewilding and
conservation initiatives, worker-owned farms, and community-supported
agriculture.
All of this might seem
radical, but it has solid precedents. Both Democratic and Republican
politicians have from time to time suggested scrapping the USDA in favor of a
more sustainable system. Richard Nixon proposed abolishing it in 1971. Jimmy
Carter supported assigning most of its functions to other agencies in 1977.
Orville Freeman, the Secretary of Agriculture in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, hoped to signal a new approach when he called for renaming it
the Department of Food and Agriculture or Department of Food and Rural
Services. None of these efforts succeeded. But a major reorganization of the
agency’s purpose already succeeded once when, during World War II, the
Department of Agriculture was reorganized to meet the nation’s wartime needs.
To ensure that the nation’s
agricultural and food policy supported the war effort, rather than suborned it,
President Roosevelt created a new agency by executive order, called the War
Food Administration, in 1943. It coordinated both the production and consumption
of food, a task that required that it absorb most of the USDA’s functions and
assume broad regulatory and pricing powers at every stage of the food system.
Its charge was to meet production quotas based on the caloric needs of
America’s fighting and laboring population, food supplies for its allies, and
the raw materials for the war effort. Farmers did very well during World War
II, but their interests were subordinated to the larger war effort as one of
the many groups relevant to food policy.
We don’t need to treat the
reorganization of the American food system as a war effort or use the
all-too-American language of war to recognize the wisdom in Roosevelt’s
approach. Roosevelt’s war powers allowed him to reorganize the USDA through an
executive order. Change today would require
an Act of Congress. That’s a tall order, and one certain to be opposed by
anyone with a stake in the agricultural or political status quo. But consumers
and workers—in both cities and the country, in both red and blue states—would benefit, as would
small farmers, animals, and the environment—and the reality is that our food system
demands it. An agency laser-focused on the interests of agribusinesses is as out
of place in today’s world as it was in the midst of World War II.
Gabriel N. Rosenberg @gnrosenberg Gabriel N. Rosenberg teaches at Duke University and is the Duke Endowment Fellow of the National Humanities Center.
Jan Dutkiewicz @jan_dutkiewicz Jan Dutkiewicz is a policy fellow at the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law Policy Program at Harvard Law School.
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