USDA's subsidies ignore its own dietary advice
By Andrew Martin, Chicago Tribune

The only reference to corn on the Department of Agriculture's new food pyramid is an image of a bright-yellow ear among a medley of other vegetables. Soybeans aren't mentioned at all.

But corn and soybeans receive a good chunk of the $15 billion in subsidies to farmers that the Agriculture Department is doling out this year. And while that might seem logical because the food pyramid advocates a plant-based diet, most of the corn and soybeans grown in the United States are used to fatten cows, pigs and chickens, while the pyramid recommends that consumers eat more fish and beans.

Corn and soybeans also are used to make artificial sweeteners and partially hydrogenated oils that the food pyramid urges Americans to avoid. Such oils also are derived from cotton, another heavily subsidized crop.

That disparity points outan awkward truth about the USDA: what it urges people to eat to remain healthy does not match what it pays farmers to grow.

In fact, fruit and vegetable farmers receive no subsidies from the government, though fruits and vegetables should make up the largest share of Americans' diets, according to the new pyramid.

"We're pleased that they continue to say that fruits and vegetables in general are important," said Robert Guenther, vice president of public policy for the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association, who would like federal help with marketing produce rather than subsidies for growing it. "But what we're saying to (the Agriculture Department) and others in Congress is you can't just issue these reports and his new pyramid and walk away. You need to get behind it."

Nutrition rarely, if ever, has entered the debate in Congress over the merits of farm subsidies, authorities say. Rather, inertia, farm-state politics and changing trends in foreign trade generally dictate how much is allocated to different commodities.

Calvin Dooley, a California Democrat who retired from Congress last year, said U.S. farm policy has been developed with little regard for the diets of Americans. Rather, he said, it's the result of a Depression-era program that was supposed to give temporary relief to farmers for low commodity prices.

"It's a classic case of once you provide a taxpayer benefit, you develop a constituency," said Dooley, who now is president of the Food Products Association, an industry trade group. "It is not just by chance that when you go to a hearing on farm policy the audience is made up primarily of lobbyists from the sugar industry and from other program crops."

But farm subsidies primarily benefit a handful of "program" crops, including corn, soybeans, cotton, rice, wheat and sugar, which does not receive subsidies but is protected from foreign competition by tariffs and quotas, he said. "It's only products that have wheat and corn in them in the supermarket that get any subsidies," said Dooley, a farm owner and longtime member of the House Agriculture Committee.

Former Rep. Charles Stenholm, D-Texas, a cotton farmer who helped write the 2002 Farm Bill, said there was "no relevance" between the subsidies and USDA nutrition programs.

He said the only justification for farm subsidies is to increase production of a crop or to level the playing field in the international marketplace. Stenholm pointed out that fruit and vegetable growers never asked for federal subsidies and only recently asked for some government help in marketing their products because of increasing foreign competition.

Ed Loyd, an Agriculture Department spokesman, disputed the notion that there is a conflict between the agency's role of subsidizing certain crops and providing dietary advice.

"I don't think there's a good basis there to make that correlation," Loyd said. "I think the question is being able to make informed decisions about how much food one eats. The issue isn't that there are bad foods."

For years, critics of the Agriculture Department have raised concerns about an alleged conflict between the agency's role in promoting both nutrition and agriculture. Two years ago, then-Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, R-Ill., said allowing the USDA to provide nutrition advice was "like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse," and he introduced legislation to move the nutrition program to the department of Health and Human Services.

But his legislation fizzled.

Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, said the Agriculture Department has struggled with a conflict of interest since its mission was expanded beyond farming to dietary advice and food assistance to the poor. The result, she said, is that lobbying from the food industry has historically influenced the agency's nutrition advice, including the composition of the new pyramid.

"The new pyramid brilliantly avoids giving any `eat less' messages," she said. "The dietary take-home messages from USDA are: Exercise is what really matters, and you can eat anything you want."

Farm subsidies are not the only USDA program that seems to contradict the advice of the food pyramid.

The Agriculture Department also sponsors a variety of marketing initiatives that encourage consumers to eat more of everything - from milk and mushrooms to pizza and bacon double-cheeseburgers.

Known collectively as "checkoff programs," they are supported by mandatory fees from farmers. The money has been used to create such well-known ad campaigns as "Got Milk?" and "Beef: It's What's for Dinner."

In defending the validity of the checkoff programs before the U.S. Supreme Court, federal attorneys argued that the beef checkoff program was "government speech" and therefore did not violate the First Amendment, as some beef ranchers had claimed.

But that argument raises questions about what government speech consumers should believe, said Parke Wilde, an agricultural economist at Tufts University and a former USDA employee. For example, the Agriculture-sanctioned beef checkoff program urges consumers to eat hearty, 1-pound steaks for dinner while another USDA program, the pyramid, recommends servings one-third that size.

"The instruction from Congress on commodity promotion (programs) is clear: to increase consumption of these commodities," Wilde said. "You have to ask overall, is it possible to have more beef consumption, more pork consumption and more dairy consumption and still be consistent with the dietary guidelines?"

The nutritional advice in the food pyramid is based on 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which were released in January.

Wilde said some specific checkoff campaigns are even more egregious, such as those that encourage consumers to eat more pizza and cheeseburgers.

Loyd, the USDA spokesman, said: "These are all good products and have their place. What's good about the food guide pyramid is it shows how to put these in the place (in a healthy diet)."

2005, Chicago Tribune.

EATING IS AN AGRICULTURAL ACT.

##