I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
OK, this is two days old, but I missed it and maybe you did, too. President-elect Barack Obama should redefine the Department of Agriculture as the Department of Food, says Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times Op-Ed columnist. As Kristof writes:
A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat. Renaming the department would signal that Mr. Obama seeks to move away from a bankrupt structure of factory farming that squanders energy, exacerbates climate change and makes Americans unhealthy — all while costing taxpayers billions of dollars.
Kristof criticizes the way the Department of Agriculture has been run by industrial farming interests, the same group that rakes in huge subsidies from the Farm Bill. A reform secretary would restructure the department so that support goes to small farmers growing things like fruits and vegetables, rather than subsidizing the products that are responsible for national health epidemics (namely high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soybean oil).
New Mexico produces relatively little of the major subsidy crops and the vast majority of the state’s farms are small, so a restructuring of this nature could be of significant help to farmers here.
But there’s more:
Modern confinement operations are less like farms than like meat assembly lines. They are dazzlingly efficient in some ways, but they use vast amounts of grain, as well as low-level antibiotics to reduce infections — and the result is a public health threat from antibiotic-resistant infections.
An industrial farm with 5,000 hogs produces as much waste as a town with 20,000 people. But while the town is required to have a sewage system, the industrial farm isn’t.
“They look profitable because we’re paying for their wastes,” notes Robert P. Martin, executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. “And then there’s the cost of antibiotic resistance to the economy as a whole.”
One study suggests that these large operations receive, in effect, a $24 subsidy for each hog raised. We face an obesity crisis and a budget crisis, and we subsidize bacon?
Yes, yes, good. What? People, there’s nothing wrong with a little bacon now and then.
Kristof also has an excellent quote from author Michael Pollan (an omnivore, by the way), who says, “Even if you don’t think agriculture is a high priority, given all the other problems we face, we’re not going to make progress on the issues Obama campaigned on — health care, climate change and energy independence — unless we reform agriculture.”
Good point, Mr. Pollan!
An online petition here asks Obama to appoint a Secretary of Agriculture who will reform the department.
