David Wallinga, MD, MPA: Encouraging Healthy Food Production

“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,” Dr. Wallinga con­tin­ued. “What we at IATP 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 said. “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.

Turning It Around

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

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“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 IATP has 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 are also sustainable.”

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