http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1888
by Gregory McNamee
These are bad times to be an http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4312, fruits, meats, cheeses—all are climbing. Even that most sacred of goods, beer, is skyrocketing in cost.
In part, the rise in food prices is a function of the cost of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=659. Food travels a long way—1,200 miles, on average—to reach American stomachs. It does so because American manufacturers, giddy at the bounty wrought by the Green Revolution and the advent of jets and container ships, long ago taught American consumers to abandon the idea of seasonality. We have come to expect bananas, oranges, tomatoes, corn, and the like to be available year-round, requiring the transportation of strawberries from Chile, citrus from South Africa, tomatoes from Ecuador, hothouse lettuces from France.Our farmers return the favor. Near my home in the Arizona desert stands a vast complex of greenhouses. Its name, EuroFresh, tells the story, for those greenhouses, 164 acres devoted to tomatoes alone, provide much of the produce consumed on the continent in wintertime.
Why European greenhouses do not grow food for Europe, and American greenhouses for America, is a complex matter of international trade, treaties, and government subsidies, too complex to do more than wonder at here. Suffice it to say that for many reasons it is good to be a farmer these days—not the small farmer of the kind celebrated in Jeffersonian ideals of democracy, but the farmer as agribusinessman, with millions of dollars of expensive machinery and miles-long rows of monoculture crops.
Those industrial farmers have long enjoyed federal largesse unavailable to their http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3226 counterparts in the form of massive subsidies, some in payment for not growing crops that are too abundant on the market, some simply handouts to the already wealthy. A landowner is allowed to earn up to $2.5 million per year in adjusted gross income and still be entitled to a broad portfolio of subsidies. In a rare fit of fiscal restraint, the White House recently proposed to trim this to $500,000—but not to close the many loopholes in the tax code that would make even this figure attainable to anyone with the slightest talent for creative bookkeeping.
Couple all that with other incentives, totaling $2.4 billion, that take such forms as optional self-employment tax, full write-offs for racehorses, and generous allowances to reduce personal income taxes with farm losses, and it seems curious that farming should not be the career choice of the best and brightest of our current crop of college graduates.
Nonetheless, many farmers are now shunning subsidies altogether and uncoupling themselves from federal price controls, for, as if to honor Marx’s dictum that capital has no country, there is gold to be made by growing crops that are too abundant here but in terrific demand elsewhere. Corn is one such crop, shipped as ethanol and syrup, the twin fuels of the modern world—for ethanol is an ever-more-important ingredient in gasoline blends, and corn syrup underlies the First World diet of processed food and soft drinks.
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