Abstract
ON ONE LEVEL, we could make this a very short read by simply stating that although the Farm Bill does matter to the average US citizen, it is a fully rigged game run by the immensely powerful farm lobbies and monopolies that profit mightily from how our food is grown, processed, marketed, and distributed. Concerned citizens who do want to change an unfair and unhealthy system for the better are going to fall short of reform. Sadly, that may be all too true. The next Farm Bill will probably continue to prop up the industrial agriculture complex with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars annually, as it has done for decades. But our nation’s food and farming system is far too important to us all to forgo serious debate and the hard work needed to achieve urgent reforms.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Notes
- 1.
Alisha Coleman-Jensen et al., “Household Food Security in the United States in 2014,” Report No. 194 (Washington, DC: USDA Economic Research Service, September 2015).
- 2.
Essayist and farmer Wendell Berry has written: “The global ‘free market’ is free to the corporations precisely because it dissolves the boundaries of the old national colonialisms, and replaces them with a new colonialism without restraints or boundaries. It is pretty much as if all the rabbits have now been forbidden to have holes, thereby ’freeing’ the hounds.” “The Total Economy,” in Citizenship Papers (Washington, DC: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2003), 66.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Daniel Imhoff
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Imhoff, D., Badaracco, C. (2019). Why Does the Farm Bill Matter?. In: The Farm Bill. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-975-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-975-3_2
Publisher Name: Island Press, Washington, DC
Print ISBN: 978-1-64283-030-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-61091-975-3
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)