Mennonite
Central
Committee

Collards, Corn and the U.S. Congress: Advocacy and the farm bill

Bethany Spicher Schonberg
June 22, 2006

It's late spring in Washington, D.C. At the Mount Pleasant farmers' market, everyone's celebrating the underappreciated season between spinach and tomatoes. The vendors' stands are laden with fresh locally grown strawberries, tender turnips and bushel baskets of collard greens.

At home, we're eating greens in quiche, on pasta and with peanut sauce, making up for a winter's lack of vitamin A. At the local supermarket chain store, however, the same California-grown collards have been on sale all winter long. Though they're 50 cents cheaper per pound, hidden costs like pollution from transportation fuel don't figure into the price tag.

A few miles away, on Capitol Hill, talks are underway for the 2007 farm bill. Though I buy my collards locally, I can't wash my hands as Congress crafts legislation that will govern farm payments, nutrition programs, environmental conservation and rural development policy for the next five years.

When I buy a bunch of greens from Zachariah and Georgia at my neighborhood market, I know my money is going home with them to Waterford, Va. But when I choose, say, a box of cornflakes at the grocery store, my purchase ties me into the world's far-flung food and agriculture system.

It's not likely that many of my cereal dollars will end up in a farmer's pocket. The lion's share will go to a handful of agribusiness corporations, grain traders, food processors and livestock operations. Farm subsidies allow these giants to buy grain for less than it costs farmers to grow it.

For example, this fall, farmers across the Corn Belt were selling corn for $1.35 per bushel, far below the cost of production. In contrast, when I was born in 1978, U.S. corn growers were getting, on average, $2.25 per bushel. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $6.75 today.

U.S. taxpayers have kicked in billions of dollars to keep the largest growers afloat. At an MCC Washington Office farm bill seminar this spring, however, both grain farmers and backyard gardeners agreed that, on the whole, agricultural subsidies have failed to sustain small-scale farms and rural communities.

Low prices don't hurt only U.S. family farmers, they also allow corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland to ship grain overseas and sell it cheap, undermining local markets. And developing countries don't have the resources to subsidize their farmers against unfair prices.

As the farm bill debates begin, agribusiness corporations are already lobbying to maintain low prices and high subsidies. Farmers, environmentalists and anti-hunger advocates, on the other hand, are asking that subsidy dollars instead fund programs that sustain land and people.

The money I spend at the grocery store makes me a player in the global food and agriculture system. But more importantly, Christ's command to love my neighbors C from food-stamp recipients to developing-country farmers C gives me a stake in the legislative processes that govern what I eat.

MCC Washington Office encourages lawmakers to:

• Eliminate subsidies that encourage commodity overproduction, dumping on overseas markets and agribusiness consolidation.
• Cap the payments that one individual can receive to a level that supports a family farm.
• Use subsidy savings to fund conservation, nutrition and rural development programs that support family farmers and hungry communities.

For more information, see the MCC Washington Office Guide to Food and Farming (PDF)

 

Bethany Spicher Schonberg is serving as a legislative associate for the MCC Washington Office through June 2006.