What happened to the Farm Bill? The State of the National Debate Around Food Justice – Leslie G. Woods

Read Christine Meléndez Ashley’s Essay, “The Anti-Hunger Bill”

Anyone who worked on the last Farm Bill, or the one before that, or the one before that, will tell you that today’s Farm Bill debate is like no other.

What is the Farm Bill, you ask? The Farm Bill is our nation’s comprehensive food and farm policy.  This bill comes up for “reauthorization” every five years or so, and contains the authorizing language for diverse programs, from SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly the Food Stamp Program), to subsidies for the major crop commodities, to conservation programs, energy research, rural development, and much more.  The bill’s provisions range from compassion to stewardship, from root causes of hunger to downright injustice.  Indeed, if we are interested at all in food justice, we must be concerned about the Farm Bill.

Congress used to go into a Farm Bill debate asking what we can do to improve programs that reduce hunger.  But this year, strangely, the debate has shifted drastically.  Now they are asking by how much they can get away with cutting SNAP.

Indeed, the meta-narrative around our nation’s food and farm policy has changed completely in one Farm Bill cycle.  Last time, in the debate around the 2007 Farm Bill, the PC(USA) joined with ecumenical partners to call for an end to trade-distorting subsidies and for investments in nutrition and conservation.  Today, in the 2012 Farm Bill debate (2012 because the current Farm Bill actually expired in 2012), we are still advocating for just food systems and investments in food aid, conservation, and rural development, but it is in the context of a Senate that voted to cut Food Stamps by $4 billion and House of Representatives that has introduced a bill to cut $40 billion from the same program.  What happened?

I would argue that several things have gone wrong in the five years since the last bill, and they don’t necessarily have to do with food policy.  In recent years we have seen unprecedented partisanship – gridlock – take control of Congress, to the point that very little business gets done, even very simple business.  We’ve seen an overwhelming increase in special interest money in politics, from both sides of the aisle, which tends to distract Members of Congress from their true constituents.  And we’ve seen a marked increase in constant, unforgiving media cycles, from TV to social media, that mean that a tiny story can go viral and major, important stories can go unreported if the outlet thinks the topic “uninteresting” to a general public.  Public figures are constantly seeking that slight media edge, that catchy story, that video that will go viral.  In all, the transformation that these and many other changes has wrought in Congress amounts to priorities in the wrong place and a willful refusal to govern.

In a recent letter to Congress, the Rev. Gradye Parsons, Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly, wrote, “It is no accident that the Farm Bill connects food production with hungry people and stewardship of our fields and rivers.  Long-term food security for our nation demands that the three be interconnected and considered together.  Indeed, it would be more fitting to call this bill our Food Security Bill, because its implications are much broader than farm policy.”

Our Farm Bill touches policy as diverse as anti-hunger, to energy research, to aid for international disaster areas.  Most prominent among these policies are those that connect hungry people to food, and those that connect food producers to the people they feed.  Anti-hunger and farm support programs have historically been married together, not only because it makes good sense to connect food producers to food eaters, but also because these different interests – rural farm groups and urban anti-poverty groups – protect each other – usually.

The Farm Bill used to be an overwhelmingly bipartisan bill whose real policy debates broke down along regional, rather than party lines: rural vs. urban, commodities vs. specialty crops, Big Ag vs. small, family farms.  But this traditional breakdown does not describe today’s debate.  Today’s debate has been a delicate dance between deficit reduction and commitment to shared priorities; between efforts to reduce the size of cuts and outright contempt for poor people.

So the answer to the gridlock over the Farm Bill does have to do with anti-hunger advocacy, but it also has to do with changing our system – all systems.  From the system that traps generations in poverty to the political system that rewards politicians with the best social media consultants.  Work against hunger.  But also, work for campaign finance reform and election reform.  Work to change the way our culture consumes information.  Because even after the 2012 Farm Bill is put to bed, good or bad, these staggering challenges will remain… until we change them.

For more information on the PC(USA)’s witness on the Farm Bill, visit our farm bill blog posts.

This article is expanded from a piece that was published by the Presbyterian Hunger Program in its Fall 2013 PHP Post.