Biden food/ag policy is mostly the same old

It's well past time to get going on big changes, but that doesn't look likely.

The federal government appears not to have learned from the experience. At the U.N. Food Systems Summit held on 23 September, U.S. Secretary for Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced a new “Coalition of Action on Sustainable Productivity Growth for Food Security and Resource Conservation.” The accompanying document succinctly presents the current global food security challenge as one of a growing population, a deteriorating natural resource base, an urgent need to reduce and cap climate emissions, and for farmers and food workers to earn more from agriculture to reduce global poverty. It’s a decent list of the challenges. From there, though, the document makes a leap to claim that “increasing agricultural productivity growth” is the only solution to all these problems. The proposed solution is to grow (a lot) more food using less water, soil and labour, with the help of genetic manipulation.

Secretary Vilsack’s call for a new coalition follows a long line of U.S. agriculture leaders who have boasted that U.S. agricultural productivity "feeds the world”. As ever, that boast does not spare a glance to the problems — including hunger — at home. The Biden administration has promised to tackle persistent systemic racism, including environmental racism, to end child poverty, and to make sharp, real cuts to climate emissions. Instead of confronting these problems, the secretary is pushing to globalize an agricultural system that has impoverished rural communities, polluted waterways, stripped soils, and created such surpluses that we don’t just feed most of our production to animals, but also to fuel tanks and methane-producing landfill. The share of U.S. productivity given over directly to food is shockingly small. - IATP