Food Fight — Abstract

• Total USDA appropriations have roughly averaged $87 billion per year for the past six years. Farm Bill programs largely determine spending priorities.
• Just five crops — corn, cotton, wheat, rice, and soybeans — receive 84 percent of all commodity supports.
• According to the Environmental Working Group, the richest 10 percent of farm operations receive more than 70 percent of all subsidy payments.
• Though the Farm Bill is often promoted as supporting small family farmers, three out of five farmers receive no subsidy payments at all.
• Over half of all USDA appropriations are devoted to much-needed Food Stamp, school lunch and breakfast, and other nutrition assistance programs.

Health and Nutrition

• Only 2 percent of 2- to 19-year-olds meet all five federal requirements for a healthy diet.
• In 2000, five “vegetables” — lettuce, frozen potatoes, fresh potatoes, potato chips, and canned tomatoes — made up almost half of the total vegetable servings in the United States.
• The food industry spends $15 billion a year marketing to children. The Federal School Lunch Program spends only $7 billion per year to feed our children in the public schools.
• The average American consumes more than 50 gallons of carbonated soft drinks every year.¹
• Nearly 12 percent of Americans are “food insecure,” or experience “relatively low food security, ” USDA shorthand meaning that they are often not certain where their next meal will come from.²
• Due to a rise in obesity and type-2 diabetes, this generation may be the first in American history to die at a younger age than their parents.

Energy

• 20 percent of current U.S. fossil fuel consumption is used to grow, process, and distribute food.³
• On average, 10 calories of petroleum are needed to yield just one calorie of industrial food (not including transportation).⁴
• Harvesting a single bushel of corn requires two-thirds of a gallon of gasoline.
• The average 1200-pound steer consumes 35 gallons of oil — nearly a barrel — over its short lifetime from cow-calf operation to feedlot.⁵
• Nitrogen fertilizers, synthesized from natural gas, are the backbone of high-yield industrial agriculture, consuming nearly one-third of the energy used in U.S. agriculture.

Conservation

• Seventy percent of the U.S. land base is privately owned.
• Nearly two-thirds of the 1.9 billion acres in the continental U.S. is comprised of crop, pasture, range, and forest land — about one-half of which is privately owned.
• Only one-tenth of the Lower 48 States fall under some form of state or federal habitat protection, and these areas have become increasingly fragmented and isolated.
• Public lands are being exploited for resource extraction, grazing, timbering, off-road recreation, and other harmful activities.
• Every year, 1.2 million acres of agricultural and forest lands are lost to development.⁶
• As of 1995, 84 percent of all endangered or threatened plants and animal species were listed in part due to agricultural activities.⁷
• Between 2006 and 2010, nearly 28 million acres under Conservation Reserve Program contracts will expire; their future is uncertain.
• Conservation programs are among the Green Box payments that are acceptable under World Trade Organization rules.

Notes
1. “U.S. Farm Policy Contributes to Obesity: New Report Finds Policies Drive Production of Unhealthy Food,” Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, 2006.
2. Food Insecurity means that a household had limited or uncertain availability of food, or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways (i.e., without resorting to emergency food supplies, scavenging, stealing, or other unusual coping strategies).
3. Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
4. Richard Manning, “The Oil We Eat,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2005.
5. Pollan, Ibid., p. 84.
6. Jerry Goodbody, “Green Acres,” Audubon Magazine, November 2005.
7. Defenders of Wildlife’s “Comments for the Development of USDA Recommendations for the 2007 Farm Bill” (70 Federal Register 35221 June 17, 2005).

Excerpted from Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill by Daniel Imhoff, © 2007 Watershed Media, distributed by University of California Press.

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