In Oct. 2015, Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, Ricardo Salvador, and Olivier De Schutter, some of the finest food and agriculture writers and activists of our time, put forth a memo to our next president, recommending a National Food Policy. It is a phenomenal piece of writing and an enlightened set of policies, but it comes attached to one boggling concern.
“Were the next president to inaugurate such a policy, and by executive action establish the mechanisms for its implementation, the potential would dramatically increase to drive long-term change…”Executive action, however bold and in favor of the public good it may be, is a fundamentally unstable type of action. It is, in some fundamental ways, supremely undemocratic. Certainly, if we could find a president willing to champion our cause it would represent a meaningful leap towards a healthier America. But to enact durable, lasting policy requires engagement and participation. Isn’t disengagement from our food system what caused so many of our food woes in the first place? How meaningful is it, then, to champion a top-down solution?
Regardless of intention, it seems seriously unlikely that we will be electing a president willing to stake their legacy on reorganizing Lincoln’s own agency or fighting the farm lobby (while simultaneously shepherding the herd of cats that are the US environmental movement for support) anytime soon, particularly in 2016 when other issues are so pressing. Agriculture has notoriously been a third-rail issue, and in an election where nothing is going as anyone guessed, caution, not boldness, is to be expected.
So what now? What hope to do we have for achieving the goals of a National Food Policy if it is not championed? So much of what’s wrong with our system, as described by Bittman, Pollan, Salvador, and De Schutter, is policy based, from antiquated subsidies leading to overproduction to disincentives that discourage farmers from making positive environmental choices. If we can’t address the policy issues, is there anything that can be done about the system beyond shopping at the farmers market or tending our plot in the community garden?
Though some of these goals will only ever be achieved through political intervention, others can, and I think most definitely will, be accomplished by other means.
Let’s take the goal of re-solarizing the farm. Re-solarization is the ambition to reduce and eventually eliminate US Ag’s dependence on fossil fuels and other inorganic inputs used as fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides.
The need for this goal can inevitably be traced back a few key players in the agricultural industry- the likes of Monsanto, Dow Chemical (soon to be DowDupont), Syngenta, and BASF. These companies are the villains of a sustainable global food production system and will undoubtedly be among the staunchest enemies of our National Food Policy (as they have loudly been opposed to past reforms). These companies have captured US agriculture in more ways than one, but the most effective tool that they’ve perfected, by far, is friendship.
Growing up in rural farming community and now working in the industry, I can attest that the relationship between a farmer and their chemical, seed, and equipment dealers is sacred. This trusted advisor is one of the farmer’s strongest links to the industry, to other farmers, and even to their customers. More than that, a farmer’s dealer lives nearby, came to their kid’s graduation, and drove 20 miles out of town to bring him a spare tractor part at 4 am two summers ago. In a world where everyone wants to tell farmers how to do their job, their dealer shows up, shakes their hand, and looks them in the eye, not once or twice, but for big chunks of their lives. And these dealers tend to be employed by our villains (or by third-party companies that sell the products of our villains).
It’s these personal relationships all throughout rural America that give these companies a serious advantage when it comes to capturing the ears and hearts of farmers. Not to mention the millions they spend lobbying to destroy ideas like our NFP before they ever get beyond the comments section.
How, then, against this formidable enemy, will we reduce or dependence on fossil fuels in agriculture and move towards sustainability in production, in other words, re-solarize?
I think there are signs that the enemy within our enemies’ is already deteriorating, though maybe not in the way we’d expect (or hope). Signs like Monsanto’s 2013 purchase of Climate Corp or their acquisition of Beeologics, or Syngenta’s investment in Planet Labs and Edenspace among others. Though there have been theories that these acquisitions are of a sinister nature, it is also possible (and I think even likely) that these investment are evidence that our villains are aware of the sea change that is occurring in food and agriculture and are making investments in the new, high-tech, sustainable future.
If these companies, who for the last century championed an industrial, input-intensive, fossil fuel-dependent system, might be moving away from their health- and environment-damaging practices towards technologies that support a more sustainable future, there may be a good argument for getting out of their way. *
Yes, that is a hard pill to swallow. No, it’s not fair that the same companies that made billions bringing us to the brink of ruin should make billions more taking us back to where we started. Yes, that sucks. But are we willing to risk falling off the cliff for the sake of fairness? This is a question we’ll have to answer soon if we hope to avoid catastrophe.
I argue for taking a page from Dean Kamen’s book. Mr. Kamen’s recent invention, the Slingshot, is a cheap and effective water purification system that has the potential to eradicate the global water crisis. And Dean Kamen took his invention straight to Coca Cola. He didn’t take it to the liquid sugar hegemon for the payoff or for political reasons. He took it there simply because when you want a product to reach the most people and have maximum impact, Coca Cola is the best. Like the villains in our story, Coca Cola doesn’t succeed because of the inherent goodness of their products, but because they have the right incentives, the right skills, the right networks, and the power and effective organization to martial them.
That’s what agricultural input dealers are. They are a marketing web so imbedded in US Ag that they have become a part of the culture. And this group of people, probably more than any other, has the greatest chance of radically influencing the way food is grown in America. Rather than trying to kill our enemies and destroy what they’ve built, let’s kill the enemy in them, help them find the incentives to change the way they do business (hello AgTech!), and martial their resources in our favor. Were Monsanto, Syngenta, or BASF to become the champions of the NFP, we wouldn’t have to wait for November 3rd. It would already be done.
Reform in the agricultural production system will require, first and foremost, everyone to have a seat at the table. It may be time to put aside the question of who should speak for American farmers or American consumers, and start instead with who does speak for them, disrupting the way we look at the problem might just lead to a disruptive solution. We can say this for sure, the lasting change we’re looking for won’t come from the top, it will emerge from the bottom up, taking the conditions at every level into account and adjusting accordingly. Let’s keep an eye out for these solutions, and be a part of them whenever we can.
The agricultural system in the US is highly complex and dynamic, and in that way, a truly effective NFP seems extraordinarily unlikely. The quantity of variables that affects it makes it impossible to avoid the creation and/or elimination of feedback loops that can drastically change the outcomes. More simply put, the road to hell (read: obesity, environmental ruin, etc.) is paved with good intentions. So let’s take a different road, a road that isn’t commissioned by an executive but carved by the crowd of doers and makers that opted for something a little muddier and less conventional. This road, paved with good acts rather than good intentions, might just lead us to the wellness we seek.
*To be clear, I am absolutely not advocating for any de-regulation of agribusiness. On the contrary, I argue that these companies should be considerably more regulated than they are now. At this point, however, their political might makes the prospect of increased regulation supremely unlikely, to the point that arguing in favor of more regulation is probably meaningless. I mean to have a discussion about what can actually be done, rather than what should be done. If you are interested in what should be done, I would suggest A National Food Policy for the 21st Century.
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