American Rescue Plan Funds Will Lead to Less Food
By Jen Hill
Last week Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced massive new spending totaling $2.1 billion for the agriculture sector. Much of the language around this latest funding is centered on the concept of American food security with lofty expressed goals of reinforcing US food infrastructure and ensuring food shortages are not in our future. Following pandemic shortages, wild inflation and a supply chain that has been wonky at best for more than two years it’s easy to see why politicians and bureaucrats would want to pull on our emotional triggers by presenting us with fear and then promising to solve it, with tax money of course. But when you dig into the actual landing places for much of the funding it’s easy to see that their actions, unsurprisingly, have little to do with food security and instead continue to push fad based agriculture.
The funds are coming from the American Rescue Plan Act and other relief legislation, furthering the illusion that these programs are designed to prevent a relapse of the empty shelf panic from 2020. In late March President Joe Biden went so far as to warn the American public that global food shortages are headed our way, saying they are, “going to be real.” Whether his comments were made in an attempt to bolster support for American intervention in Ukraine or support for further government spending is questionable. It’s possible Biden himself is unaware of what or why he said it, but either way it laid the framework for the latest spending announcement.
So who is getting a piece of this new money pie? $375 million is designated for organic and urban agriculture projects with another $370 million to boost public access to healthy food. In a time of looming food shortage threats, dumping money into organic and urban agriculture is downright moronic. While organic agriculture has seen a swell of popularity in the last 20 years one thing it is not known for is high levels of production. Because of its very nature of avoiding additives that would increase production rates organic farm yields are far lower. In fact numerous studies indicate organic crops yield as much as 20- 40% less than their conventionally grown counterparts. I don’t point out this data to disparage organic farmers. They found a market for their product and demand a premium for it. That’s laudable. But what isn’t praiseworthy is to promote a system of food production with inherently lower production yields while simultaneously telling the nation they should prepare for food shortages. The choice is so head scratching it begs the question, are the warned food shortages unreal, are they planned or is our government really just that dumb and susceptible to lobbying efforts? Reality is the answer could be any mix of the three.
The USDA has been given $400 million to establish regional food business centers that will provide technical assistance to small and midsize food and farm businesses. It’s unclear what exactly that means but one can assume that at least part of the goal is to flood government offices with additional workers designated to help farmers and ranchers find more ways to tap into government subsidies and paychecks, keeping them ever more reliant on that government teat. They could instead put those bureaucrats to work enforcing the Packers and Stockyards Act, or better yet, save all the money and just massively reduce federal regulations limiting farmers and ranchers ability to bring their product direct to consumers, but nah, that might make too much sense.
The funding also includes $900 million for food processing workforce training and supply-chain infrastructure, and $550 million for small food businesses and reducing food waste. I’m not sure how the government thinks they can tackle food waste. Perhaps they’ll send a USDA employee to my house to make sure my kids finish their broccoli. Or maybe the plan is just to make sure there’s less food available, thereby decreasing food waste. Given the fad agriculture focus of much of these funds I wouldn’t be surprised if their thinking community composting, which I’m sure will work about as well as the community recycling centers currently closing all around the country. Either way, that’s a lot of money thrown at a very ambiguous problem.
At the end of the day the newly directed $2.1 billion in yet another example of the government breaking your leg and then handing you organic, uneven crutches and declaring themselves helpful.