Ever heard of Michael Pollan? He’s probably best known for the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but I notice he has a couple of plant/gardening books on Amazon. Look’s like he right up my alley.
The other day I came across his article “Farmer in Chief,” directed to President-Elect Barack Obama. I’m going to write about it on Fridays for a while, not just because it was actually 12 pages long when I printed it out, but because there are so many points in it to explore that seem to express the ideas of Restoration Nation.
(The best way to find the article is to search for “Farmer in Chief.” The article was originally published in the New York Times, but at some point they’ll start charging for it.)
In my first Restoration Nation post, I asked this question: How do we move restoration into the private sector without “privatizing” it? That is, without turning it into an activity that enriches the few?
In a way, American agriculture has been “privatized” as I define it: there are fewer people farming now than at the turn of the twentieth century, and the number of farms has decreased as they have become larger. But according to Pollan, all that was a result of government subsidies for monocropping, for converting the munitions industry into a fertilizer/herbicides/pesticides industry after World War II, and for making agriculture dependent on fossil fuels.
I can understand why: the United States had just begun to recover from a Depression and had won a war, and the government wanted prosperity to continue, especially for the soldiers returning home. And food was cheap when it was produced on farms that emphasized one crop and supported it with fertilizer and other chemical products.
So it would be incorrect to say that the process of making agriculture in the United States “industrial” was a process that enriched the few. There are gigantic food corporations, yes, but the people as a whole benefited from cheap food—at least in their wallets.
One of Pollan’s first conclusions is that cheap food has made us sick.
“Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. . . . There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount—from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. . . . You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.”
I’ll stop there for today. I was planning to talk about “restoring” agriculture to be more regional, but I see now it’s going to take me a while to get there.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Your premise is a great illustration of an oxymoron, Beth, where you have included two contradictory terms together: ‘private sector’ and ‘no profit’. You doom the project to failure the moment it arrives in the private sector without a profit margin. I’m not sure I understand blocking ‘The Few’ from profiting if it means your restoration project is completed successfully. It would seem a better aim to demonstrate ways for different private sector ‘The Few’ groups to make a profit in restoration, and therefore make restoration projects an attractive enterprise.
Bernard,
I never said “no profit.” In this case, I’m talking about avoiding an agribusiness farming model, in which farms get bigger and bigger and small and medium-sized farmers get squeezed out.
I don’t want to get rid of agribusiness altogether, because I think we need some of that in this global economy, but I want to make it easier for smaller farms and ranches to succeed.
That’s what I mean by not enriching the few.