Childhood Obesity and American Agriculture

Obese chil­dren and ado­les­cents are more likely than non-obese chil­dren to have risk fac­tors asso­ci­ated with car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease (high blood pres­sure, high cho­les­terol and type 2 dia­betes); and accord­ing to the American Diabetes Association, 23.6 mil­lion American chil­dren have dia­betes.Health Affairs jour­nal recently pub­lished a very inter­est­ing arti­cle enti­tled The Role of Agriculture Policy in Reducing Childhood Obesity by Dr. David Wallinga, Director of the Food and Health Program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Dr. Wallinga sat down with Organic Connections to dis­cuss the very real role that today’s agri­cul­tural poli­cies play in the cur­rent child­hood obe­sity epidemic.

“Farm pol­icy for a long time has been focused not on health con­cerns but rather on just over­pro­duc­ing cer­tain crops,” Dr. Wallinga said. “Especially in the last 35 years or so, what we’ve focused on as a coun­try is pro­duc­ing great amounts of just a few crops that gen­er­ate a lot of calories—namely corn and soy­beans and a few other com­mod­ity crops. What we argue, and can find quite a bit of evi­dence for, is that this super­abun­dance of calo­ries is help­ing to cre­ate an obe­segenic [obesity-causing] food envi­ron­ment for kids; in other words, a food envi­ron­ment that encour­ages an over­con­sump­tion of calo­ries par­tic­u­larly from food ingre­di­ents that we know to be unhealthy and which hap­pen to be derived from these same com­mod­ity crops that farm pol­icy most encourages.”

How did this harm­ful sce­nario come about? “I think the stated orig­i­nal ratio­nale was that by over­pro­duc­ing these par­tic­u­lar crops, American farm­ers would seize the global mar­kets by being the low-cost pro­duc­ers of those crops,” Dr. Wallinga explained. “The sad fact is that none of this panned out. Instead, the flood­ing of the global mar­ket with these crops drove prices down for US farm­ers, and then in the ’80s and ’90s those farm­ers started going out of busi­ness. They were really quite des­per­ate, so by the time the 1996 farm bill rolled around, farm­ers were clam­or­ing to stay in busi­ness and ask­ing for help from the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to do so. There were then some tem­po­rary pay­ments to these same corn and soy­bean farmers—but by 2002 the pay­ments had become per­ma­nent. That is how we ended up with these sub­sidy pay­ments today; they came 15 or 20 years after the poli­cies began to pro­mote over­pro­duc­tion of these few crops.”

Dr. Wallinga went on to explain that the gov­ern­ment also did away with poli­cies that were effec­tive in lim­it­ing over­pro­duc­tion of these crops and thereby ensured that prices were fair to the farmer and kept mar­ket costs sta­ble for the con­sumer. These poli­cies were replaced by new ones that didn’t work well for the farmer or con­sumer but were highly ben­e­fi­cial to meat-producing com­pa­nies uti­liz­ing corn and soy­beans as feed. They also worked well for com­pa­nies such as soft-drink man­u­fac­tur­ers that used low-cost corn sweeteners.

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Turning It Around

Dr. Wallinga sees sev­eral needed mea­sures. The first of these would be the inclu­sion of health pro­fes­sion­als at a leg­isla­tive level.

“We think that we can’t afford any longer to exclude health pro­fes­sion­als from the mak­ing of food pol­icy,” said Dr. Wallinga, “which is basi­cally what’s hap­pened in the past. At the least it’s been very lim­ited; there has been some input in terms of the nutri­tion pro­grams in the farm bill, but there haven’t been any health experts, obe­sity experts, pub­lic health experts or researchers talk­ing about com­mod­ity crop poli­cies. We can’t afford to do that any­more. We’re sim­ply at too big of a cri­sis point, where the poli­cies we have aren’t ben­e­fit­ing Americans but are actu­ally hurt­ing health­care by help­ing to drive this huge epi­demic of obe­sity and all the expen­sive dis­eases that come from it.

“The other thing is that farm­ers need to be actively engaged as part of this con­ver­sa­tion about how to pro­duce healthy food, in a way that keeps farm­ers on the land, because right now they’re dis­ap­pear­ing. And the farm­ers that are dis­ap­pear­ing are exactly the ones that would be best suited for increas­ing things like fruits and veg­eta­bles; they’re small- or medium-scale farm­ers who still have con­trol over their own oper­a­tions. They’re farm­ers who are open to new ideas and grow­ing new things.”

In the end, what has to change is that healthy foods need pro­duc­tion encour­age­ment, from the top down. “We could have poli­cies that sup­port farm­ers in pro­duc­ing healthy foods, but we’ve done just the oppo­site,” Dr. Wallinga pointed out. “We’ve got poli­cies that dis­cour­age farm­ers from pro­duc­ing healthy foods.

“The work that we’ve been doing, and the con­fer­ences we’ve been co-hosting, is all about find­ing a win-win where we cre­ate an agri­cul­ture that pro­duces not only food that peo­ple need to eat but food grown in ways that nour­ish long-term health both of the pop­u­la­tion and of the envi­ron­ment and is also sustainable.”

To find out more about Dr. Wallinga and the work of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, visit www.iatp.org.