America’s obesity epidemic is about to get worse (click to inflate)

Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa is set to introduce a bill that he says will promote agriculture in the US, but which will instead promote obesity:

Like the House bill passed in July, the Senate product is very much a farm bill in the traditional let-them-eat-high-fructose-corn-syrup mold.

For starters, the Old Guard on both agriculture committees has managed to preserve the entire hoary contraption of direct payments, countercyclical payments and loan deficiency payments that subsidize the five big commodity crops — corn, wheat, rice, soybeans and cotton — to the tune of $42 billion over five years.

The Old Guard has also managed to add a $5 billion “permanent disaster” program (excuse me, but isn’t a permanent disaster a contradiction in terms?) to help farmers in the High Plains struggling to grow crops in a drought-prone region that, as the chronic need for disaster aid suggests, might not be the best place to grow crops.

When you consider that farm income is at record levels (thanks to the ethanol boom, itself fueled by another set of federal subsidies); that the World Trade Organization has ruled that several of these subsidies are illegal; that the federal government is broke and the president is threatening a veto, bringing forth a $288 billion farm bill that guarantees billions in payments to commodity farmers seems impressively defiant.

So we’re going to continue to pay people to get fat. We’re going to continue to subsidize the foods that are helping to cause increased levels hypertension, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes in Americans, even as our politicians tell us that there’s not enough money to ensure that everyone has access to health care. A quick look at the subsidies shows that we’re paying the most to subsidize the foods we should eat the least:

(click to inflate)

Of course, food subsidies aren’t the only way that we support obesity. We also invest more in roads than in public transit, encouraging people to drive instead of walking to a bus stop. In rural communities, we subsidize television broadcasters, and we give fast food restaurants and junk food makers a tax break when they advertise their products. But the biggest impact is a system of food subsidies that makes processed food cheaper than fresh food, and which makes meat, candy, and corn chips cheaper than fruit and vegetables.

Some will argue that the rate of obesity is driven primarily by genetics and prosperity, but take another look at that first chart. It shows a steep increase in obesity rates in every state in the nation, during a time when Americans’ disposable incomes rose only slightly. Only two factors can account for the sharp increase, and both are aggravated by current federal policy. We are becoming more sedentary, and we are eating the wrong things. Getting people to exercise more will require not just changes in funding priorities, but also changes in the way we design our communities. But as we’ve seen over the past decade, changing the way we eat is as simple as making the right foods cheaper than the wrong foods.

Unfortunately, Senator Harkin’s Obesity Promotion Bill will push prices in precisely the wrong direction.

(cross posted at appletree)

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This entry by gordo was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.