Fixing the Farm Bill

This is from the conclusion to Healthy Food, Farms & Families

First, we must work to free agriculture from a sterile and meaningless attachment to conventional notions of industrial efficiency, and place the consumer and the environment in which we live at the center of food policy. We can no longer tolerate food policies that are derivatives of bad farm policies—that reduce the role of the public to surplus consumers of last resort, while putting farmers on a production treadmill that makes it impossible for them to adequately consider quality and safety and condemning the world's hungry people to a hungry future.

Second, we must replace the myth of the family farm with the reality of farm businesses that are good for families. The large farms that produce most of our food should not be afforded special treatment through nostalgia for a "way of life," but rather should be expected to perform efficiently and reliably with far less government intervention than today. The interventions that government does undertake must be aimed at supporting farmers to run businesses that respond to market signals, stay in tune with the safety and health concerns of their customers, reduce damage to the environment, and produce a product people want to buy.

Third, we should fight the farm subsidy structure. No compromise. No buying off. We should work with members of Congress who are not beholden to the special interests of big agriculture. We should reach out to state officials, particularly governors, who can be persuaded that rural development block grants would be better overall for their states—and for their political future—than just supporting the status quo. Organizing at the state level will be critical. The Structure Project was correct: agriculture varies dramatically from place to place, and from crop to crop. The Washington lobby for commodity interests is far more single-minded in its defense of subsidies than are most farmers.

Fourth, we need to educate the broader public about the increasingly destructive role played by current farm policy and convince people that the commodity interests can be defeated. Surveys of public opinion—including the German Marshall Fund's annual Perspectives on Trade and Poverty Reduction2—show strong support for farmers. So we need to expose the emptiness of arguments that current farm programs function as a rural safety net, or help poor farmers, or preserve the family farm.

Fifth, consumers, the food industry, and advocates for the global poor have a strong common interest in shaping a food policy that responds to the needs of the 99 percent of Americans who are not farmers, and to the millions of people around the world who would eat more—or more nutritiously—if they were given a chance. The food industry must do its part, both as a group of powerful advocates for better public policy and as consumer-driven businesses, to help put good nutrition at the center of our farm policy and food system.

Finally, while too many people still cannot afford to buy healthy food, a lot of the people reading this article can. Until more consumers insist on environmentally-sound production methods, healthier and lower-fat products, and more ways to get locally-grown fruits and vegetables when in season, they will remain too expensive to be shared by all.

I'm a little skeptical of the demand for supposedly "environmentally-sound production methods" and "ways to get locally-grown fruits and vegetables", but at least they call for a consumer-driven change, instead of something imposed by the state.

And Greg Mankiw cites a CBO report:

If all policies worldwide that distort agricultural trade were phased out in this decade, the likely total annual economic benefit to the world by 2015 would be roughly $50 billion to $185 billion, which is about 3 percent to 13 percent of the value added by world agriculture.