In the housing boom that lasted from 2001 to 2007, highly motivated investment bankers capitalized on historically low interest rates, abundant liquidity, government- sponsored housing finance, political encouragement to make housing accessible to all, and mortgage-interest tax policies to create a securitization party of unrivaled scale and scope.
The hangover from this toxic cocktail continues to plague the global economy: The world still struggles with too much debt, the threat of deflation and the painful prospect of more deleveraging.
Similar dynamics are at work in the global food system: Forces are combining to create another dangerous bubble. This food bubble, like the housing one, has grown from a system that is focused on generating efficiencies through high volumes, which generate lower prices and increased consumption. The commoditization of loans and crops, supported by government policies to keep prices low, has led to overconsumption of credit and food — resulting in a highly leveraged society, and a national obesity epidemic.
Just as bankers created loans for standardized mortgage pools, most farmers now produce predominantly for commodity markets. And just as bankers stopped caring about their customers’ financial health, or even their ability to repay loans, farmers, under the heavy influence of government programs, have increasingly stopped growing food for the benefit of the people who eat it. In fact, industrial farming is generally not even producing “food,” but rather inputs for what author Michael Pollan calls “edible food-like substances” — processed foods.
U.S. government policies have promoted the production of high-volume commodity foods. These policies date to the early 1970s, when poor harvests in the Soviet Union and bad weather in the American farm belt caused crop prices to skyrocket. U.S. News & World Report and Time magazines dedicated cover stories to food inflation and its social impact.
To prevent grocery prices from soaring 20 percent or more, Earl Butz, the secretary of agriculture in the Nixon and Ford administrations, made a series of policy changes designed to lower food prices. He did away with some loans to farmers, government grain purchases and incentives for leaving land idle during times of low crop prices. And he replaced them with direct payments to farmers to make up any difference between the market price and an artificial price floor.
Rather than discourage farmers from growing more crops when market prices were low, the new policy motivated them to produce more, regardless of price. The floor, which has been regularly adjusted, set a price at which farmers could effectively sell an infinite supply. Ballooning crop volumes drove prices lower, which, in turn, increased consumption.
Similarly, in 2001, when the Federal Reserve lowered short- term interest rates the price of money was driven lower, and that increased the use of debt.
In a time of strained budgets and rising medical costs, we must think more broadly about the health effects of our food system. To ignore the connection between agricultural policy and public health would be as wrong as to ignore the link between housing policy and financial regulation. Let us begin by redesigning agricultural policy to minimize incentives for overproduction and encourage the production of healthy calories.
