Did Agricultural Reform Die Yesterday?

Our farming policies in this country are as dysfunctional as our health care system. Say "farm subsidies" and everyone — Democrat, Republican, independent — will shake his or her head in disgust.

Look a bit lower — at the waistline — and you'll get the same story.

How did our policies come to be so laughably bad? It's a complicated question, to be sure, but here's one clear factor: Rural states are over-represented in the Senate, where Minnesota has as many votes as California. And agribusinesses give heavily to their Senators and other elected officials.

That problem just got worse — a lot worse — with yesterday's Supreme Court ruling lifting a longstanding ban on corporate political spending. At the ruling's heart is the disturbing assumption that money equals speech, and agribusinesses have a lot of money.

President Obama called the ruling "a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans."

For "other powerful interests," insert agribusinesses.

The real problem with corporate influence comes when lobbyists secure legislation that helps their industry but actively hurts the average citizen. So it clearly is with our farm and food policies, that subsidize the least healthy of ingredients and monocultural crops, while squeezing out small and sustainable farmers and people across the country who'd like to eat well but can't afford it.

Add to that that we're teaching our children in school how to gobble up the subsidized junk the USDA pays agribusinesses to churn out, and you have a felony case of hurting people to help corporations.

But a movement has been bubbling up across the land to shift the focus from quantity to quality and from corporate farmers to consumers. Can that movement survive the Supreme Court's ruling?

Even before yesterday, food policy expert Marion Nestle had been calling campaign finance a major obstacle to the kind of reforms that most Americans want.

Today, she writes, simply, "If we want our congressional representatives to make decisions in the public interest, their election campaigns must be publicly funded. When corporations fund campaigns, representatives make decisions in the corporate interest. It's that simple."

Photo credit: davidsilver