Brooke Rollins, our new secretary of Agriculture, is promising to reform the department and create “effective and efficient nutrition programs.” On her first day she “pledged to bring greater efficiency to USDA” and “stop wasteful spending.”
If she’s serious about eliminating waste, she’ll take a hard look at the wasteful mandates and billions of U.S. tax dollars that go directly to agricultural corporations every year.
What do we get for this huge investment of public funds? Mostly an industry that benefits a few large corporations and perpetuates a cycle of overproduction and waste. Wasteful mandates and spending actually add additional costs to Americans on top of our tax dollars, including billions in increased food, fuel, and medical costs, and environmental harm.
Rollins has a big opportunity for change.
Despite spending $20 billion a year of our tax dollars on farm subsidies, Americans never see most U.S. agriculture products. We only eat about 37 percent of major crops produced. The remainder are feeding the pockets of large agriculture corporations — diverted to industrial processes that overproduce fuel and feed or exported out of the country and entangled in tariff battles.
Take the biofuel industry: Congress subsidizes biofuels through the Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires all fuel refiners to include billions of gallons of corn and soy-based biofuels in gasoline and diesel — far more than what the market demands.
Biofuels have not lived up to their promise. We don’t need them in order to be energy independent, and they haven’t helped reduce carbon emissions.
What biofuel subsidies have done is increase consumer costs. In a recent report, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the Renewable Fuel Standard increases our food and fuel costs by over $8 billion per year.
If the new Agriculture secretary supports efficiency, she will press to help transition corn and soy farmers to better land uses, producing more of what we really need and relying less on subsidies.
Rollins can also tackle another form of inefficiency — food waste. We waste about 40 percent of food in our homes, restaurants, grocery stores and elsewhere in the production chain. We read where dairy farms, for example, have thrown thousands of gallons of subsidized milk down the drain.
The problem of significant food waste has been understood for well over a decade, but almost no progress has been made. Policymakers bemoan food waste but continue to vote for subsidies that incentivize overproduction, benefitting large corporations that are perpetuating a wasteful system.
When it comes to the 37 percent of crops we do eat, subsidies over-incentivize production of foods that are making us sick. Heavily subsidized corn often ends up as high-fructose corn syrup in heavily processed foods like sugary cereals and beverages. Through direct subsidies and import restrictions, we also prop up sugar cane and sugar beet production. The overconsumption of these unhealthy foods contributes to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other diet-related illnesses that cost our health system more than $1 trillion a year.
If Rollins really cares about making America healthy again, she should stop forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for foods that are making us ill. Consumers can still buy whatever they want without lining the pockets of corporations benefiting from over-producing unnecessary, unhealthy foods.
Agricultural subsidies have ballooned out of control largely because of the myth of the bucolic family farm. No one wants to hurt the hard-working, multi-generational small farmer who is just trying to earn an honest living.
But this isn’t the reality of American agriculture today. Our agriculture industry is dominated by a small number of industrial-scale corporations that benefit from the vast majority of subsidies.
Between 2017-2022, the U.S. agricultural industry lost more than 100,000 small and medium farms to consolidation. Currently, only 6 percent of farms produce 90 percent of all meat, dairy and poultry products.
Rural communities are suffering under this system. As more profits are consolidated with fewer corporations, smaller farms can’t compete and the jobs available at industrial facilities are low-paid and unsafe in factory conditions. Rural communities are hollowed out as profits consolidate at the top.
Rollins says she wants to “modernize” the USDA. To do that, policies must acknowledge the reality of today’s consolidated, corporate industry. It’s gutting family farms and rural communities — all to produce many unnecessary and unhealthy products propped up by our tax dollars.
To be clear — not all agriculture subsidies are wasteful and inefficient. The farm bill and Inflation Reduction Act support farmers to proactively adopt systems that reduce the need for disaster and crop insurance payouts, including smart conservation practices that keep air and water clean, slow climate change, and build resilience to extreme weather. Rollins can encourage Congress to direct all subsidies to practices like these that directly benefit farmers, communities and taxpayers.
The farm bill will be up for renewal this fall. Rollins will have an important voice. She will have a real opportunity to reduce waste, create efficiency and improve our health. We’ll know she’s serious about delivering on her promises if she starts with a focus on eliminating unnecessary subsidies, mandates and authorities.
Peter Lehner directs Earthjustice’s Sustainable Food & Farming Program.
