Why the Department of Agriculture Doesn't Need a Name Change - It Needs to Work More Closely With State

The department of Agriculture does not only deal with domestic policy, corn syrup, and American obesity. A NY Times op-ed from December 11, 2008 said this:

“We’re subsidizing the least healthy calories in the supermarket — high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soy oil, and we’re doing very little for farmers trying to grow real food,” notes Michael Pollan, author of such books as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food.”

The Agriculture Department — and the agriculture committees in Congress — have traditionally been handed over to industrial farming interests by Democrats and Republicans alike. The farm lobby uses that perch to inflict unhealthy food on American children in school-lunch programs, exacerbating our national crisis with diabetes and obesity.

I do not necessarily disagree with this critique of farm subsidies. I don't have qualms with any critique of US farm subsidies. I like them all. I still hide behind statements like, "The international food system exists in a tremendously complicated, ever fluctuating, probably feigned status quo that is such that we cannot possibly understand what would happen and to whom if US and European farm subsidies ended," though.

What I do disagree with is when the above cited Op-Ed small mindedly stated that the US should refer to the Department of Agriculture as the 'Department of Food'. The shift is supposed to elucidate that the US is a post-agrarian society, saying that only 2% of Americans can be classified as farmers. The change is supposed to reflect the position of the majority of US citizens that are consumers of food, not producers. I do not deny these numbers, but I feel there are some more general statistics that should be brought to bear in the decision.

Those 2% of Americans who are farmers produce enough wheat, grain, and soy to make us the single largest agricultural producer in the world. To extrapolate from this is to understand that, at least in part - a substantial part, the United States Department of Agriculture is an integral part in world hunger as well as well-fedness. The choices made by the Department of Agriculture determine international grain prices, influence huge swaths of international trade and agricultural market flows, they are intrinsically linked to US food-aid policies, world wide agricultural extension programs, and to some degree international agricultural development on the whole. The Department of Agriculture and the US farm lobby included determine market trends on micro and macro levels the world over. This is something that a name like 'Department of Food' does not encapsulate. The reasons that caused statesmen to call it the Department of Agriculture two hundred plus years ago may have changed, but reasons exist as to why the name is still applicable.

In the world of sustainable Sub Saharan African development they are game changers, they are policy makers. They should have closer normative ties to the State Department and US AID, not less.

This is especially true in light of recent news coming from East Africa. The Washington Post ran with an article today about a Kenyan wheat rust that is decimating crops in the Rift Valley. This stem rust doesn't reduce net profits - it kills all production and corresponding revenue. It, Ug99, has spread out of Kenya, jumped to Yemen, and then Iran this year. Norman Borlaug, among others, can only warn what would happen if this thing gets to India's 20 million hectares of wheat. See what would happen to world prices and hunger then.

USDA is among the bodies searching for a cure.

Yue Jin, a plant pathologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, gathered samples of Ug99 in Kenya and shipped them through biologically secure channels to the USDA's Cereal Disease Laboratory in St. Paul, Minn., and another lab in Winnipeg, Canada.

US Department of Food? Yeah right.