Protecting the US Food Supply Means Thinking Smaller
Decades of nurturing Big Ag have made our systems too vulnerable in a world of more frequent disruption. Congress can change that with the 2023 Farm Bill.
The growing cost of business as usual.
Photographer: Rory Doyle/Bloomberg
For better or worse, Americans are not just what we eat, we are the laws that govern what we eat. As agriculture leaders in Congress deliberate over the 2023 Farm Bill, they must confront the need for historic shifts in our food-policy diet — a momentous legislative cleanse, if you will.
Every five years, Congress revises this behemoth 1,000-page bill, reauthorizing some $800 billion in food and agriculture programs that oversee everything from farm subsidies and crop insurance to food-relief programs and organic standards. In the past half-century — since President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told farmers to “Get big or get out!” — those allocations have overwhelmingly benefitted the largest producers of meat, grains and fresh fruits and vegetables in the industry.