Healthy Farm Bill

Whether or not it was the inten­tion of its authors, the Farm Bill has been sub­si­diz­ing a food sys­tem that is fac­tu­ally mak­ing Americans unhealthy—both from the foods pro­duced and from the meth­ods of crop and meat pro­duc­tion. Now a group of con­cerned pro­fes­sion­als and activists have put together a Charter for a Healthy Farm Bill—a pro­posal that is ask­ing leg­is­la­tors to make changes to the Farm Bill that pro­vide for a sus­tain­able, healthy food system.

“The char­ter is based on a broad set of prin­ci­ples for the food sys­tem that con­cern how to make the food sys­tem health­ier and more sus­tain­able,” David Wallinga, MD, of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, told Organic Connections. “Those prin­ci­ples were released by four major mem­ber­ship groups: the American Public Health Association, the American Dietetic Association, the American Planning Association and the American Nurses Association. The char­ter basi­cally picks those health-based prin­ci­ples and says that if we’re going to spend roughly $60 bil­lion a year over the next five years on a new Farm Bill, then it should be pro­mot­ing that kind of a food system.”

These prin­ci­ples include health impacts across the entire life cycle of food pro­duc­tion; sus­tain­able grow­ing prac­tices; resilience of crops to pests and short­ages; fair­ness to farm­ers and labor­ers; diver­sity of crops, pro­duc­tion prac­tices and scales (small to large farms); eco­nomic bal­ance; and trans­parency of pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion methods.

“There are a lot of good things about the Farm Bill, and then there are some things we feel could be improved on,” Wallinga said. “The major issue with the Farm Bill is that it was never designed nec­es­sar­ily to pro­mote the health of Americans. It started off being a piece of leg­is­la­tion that was mostly about income sup­port for farm­ers, to help them stay on the farm regard­less of what they grow. That piece has mor­phed into a pro­gram largely to sup­port pro­duc­tion of just a few crops, many of which don’t even end up in human food. But by far the biggest piece of the Farm Bill now is really a poverty alle­vi­a­tion program—a food-stamp program—the pri­mary pur­pose of which is really income sup­port for poor peo­ple, not nec­es­sar­ily focus­ing on the health of the food that goes to those people.

“What we’d like to see is a Farm Bill that should still do some of those things, but also has as its pri­mary goal pro­mot­ing diets for Americans that are health­ier, and pro­mot­ing farm­ers to grow those foods and grow them in a way that is healthy for the envi­ron­ment in the long term as well.”

There are other ways in which the Farm Bill could be more ben­e­fi­cial. “One part of the last Farm Bill involves research,” Wallinga con­tin­ued. “The goal of research is to kind of point us in the direc­tion we want to go; so if the direc­tion we want to go in is a coun­try where we grow more healthy food and we grow it in health­ier ways, then the research ought to get us there. But it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily do that right now; a lot of the research has been and con­tin­ues to be about how to grow more corn and soy and other com­mod­ity crops, not food crops, in a very indus­trial way that uses a lot of fos­sil fuels and a lot of water.”

The char­ter already has the sup­port of many health author­i­ties, includ­ing noted physi­cian and author Dr. Andrew Weil, and Marion Nestle, PhD, of New York University and author of Food Politics.

Dr. Wallinga con­cluded with how we can all help get the char­ter to Washington. “Every inter­ac­tion that con­sumers have with pol­i­cy­mak­ers could empha­size that this is the kind of food sys­tem they want, too. They could ask their health pro­fes­sion­als to sign on to the char­ter. Really any­one can sign on to the charter—you could be a health-concerned cit­i­zen or con­sumer and sign it; but we think that health pro­fes­sion­als have a par­tic­u­lar role in terms of endors­ing it.

“Additionally, your retail super­mar­kets, the com­pa­nies that run your hos­pi­tal cafe­te­ria or the cafe­te­ria in your office build­ing, are all extremely sen­si­tive to what their clients demand. Many of them are start­ing to look harder at the health­ful­ness of the food they offer, how sus­tain­ably it’s grown and, indi­rectly, at the gov­ern­ment poli­cies that sup­port that as well, includ­ing the Farm Bill.”

To view and sign the Charter for a Healthy Farm Bill, visit www.HealthyFoodAction.org.