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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
In the epigraph to one chapter you quote from former Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson about how easy it would be for terrorists to attack our food supply. Do you think that it will take a catastrophe on the scale of Sept. 11 for us to see some substantial changes?
I think the problem is that the industrial model is so established and people in power still mostly believe in it. Even the people who have taken this threat seriously are still not questioning the future of this model's existence and its efficiency. They're just trying to find a better way to circle the wagons. They're saying that we need to have surveillance; we need to have walls; we need to keep dogs and guns and barbed wire; we need to have laws saying you can't take pictures of farms.
As for the idea that the best way to deal with this is to decentralize the plants, the farms, the feedlots, the genetics, it may take some kind of crisis to get that through some people's heads. I mentioned in the book that after 9/11 there were some brokerage houses that decided it was not a really smart idea to have everything all in one place. The same logic applies with agriculture. Nature demands it, really. Row after row of exactly identical stalks of corn is not natural. And one of these days Mother Nature, even if no terrorist does it, will look dimly on that and send us some kind of locust or germ or bacteria and wipe them out.
Reading your book I was reminded of Thomas Frank's, "What's the Matter With Kansas?" What do you think of that book? Do you accept Frank's basic analysis that the people of the Midwest have essentially sacrificed their own economic interests in exchange for pandering over what he would call dead-end social causes?
I didn't read his book until I was nearly finished with mine, but I think he's right. People are voting to give more and more power to big business on a promise of, you know, protecting themselves from gay marriage. I think that's true. A friend of mine [Dan Glickman] was a congressman from Wichita and the only Democrat in the state delegation for quite a while. His crowning achievement was to get a law passed that made it less risky for the aircraft industry, which is big in Wichita, to start making single-engine planes again. They'd been worried about liability -- way down the road, after the plane had been sold and sold and sold again.
Then somebody came along and ran against him who worked for one of those aircraft companies. His main campaign was that a sitting congressman was too far left on guns and abortion. And he beat him. I remember a friend of mine, an editorial writer in Wichita, said, 'Well, that just proves those people who work at Boeing are more worried about losing their guns than losing their jobs.'"
I guess the bad guys in this scenario are the agribusiness corporations, Monsanto and ConAgra and such. I'm wondering how you explain their willingness to pursue policies that, if your analysis is right, are not good for anybody in the end.
Whether they're funnin' us or whether they truly believe it -- and I tend to think that they truly believe it -- they base their work on the idea that you need to produce more and more, that there are starving people in Africa and, by God, it's our duty to feed them. I think that they've said that often enough that they may believe it -- continually blinding themselves to the idea that those starving people in Africa will continue to starve until they have some money.
They continue to cling to this idea that one of these days we'll have just the right trade program, or just the right incentive, and all these people around the world will start buying our corn and our wheat. And they'll be fat and happy and we'll be fat and happy. But they don't have any money, and they're not likely to have any money unless they have their own healthy agricultural base.
So what is your prescription for farmers and for city dwellers and lawmakers? What are the most important things to be done immediately?
The macro solution is to move away from the subsidies and to start enforcing antitrust laws. If we enforce the antitrust laws, there would be more people competing to buy the farmers' grain and they might do a better job of surviving off the market instead of off the government. Some argue that it would cost the consumer more, but I don't think it would. If more suppliers had to compete to sell to farmers, and if you had more bidders on their fat cattle, fat hogs and harvested grain, farmers would turn a greater profit. Passing that increased cost along to the consumer depends to a large degree on how many processors there are and how many grocers there are. But even if that price does get passed along, it's already so small it wouldn't make much difference.
So the big answer is to enforce antitrust laws and to change or get rid of subsidies. What about individual citizens who have no connection to farming? What can they do?
Well, they can be more effective consumers. And more people are doing that. Buy organic. Buying local is even more important. If you've got organic that comes from a long way away or local that you're not too sure about, it's better to buy local and cut out the middle man. The cynical reason to do that is, if there's anything wrong with it, you know where it came from. So much of this stuff you got no idea where it comes from. The beef goes into this huge maw and it's ground and re-ground and distributed and packaged and repackaged. If you buy from the small processing plant or directly from the farmer and there is something wrong with it, then you just don't buy from him. And he'll notice.
