The Insanity of Our Food Policy

By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

[Please ignore the weird appearance here. Something's really off.]

Opening Paragraph: “American food policy has long been rife with head-scratching illogic. We spend billions every year on farm subsidies, many of which help wealthy commercial operations to plant more crops than we need. The glut depresses world crop prices, harming farmers in developing countries. Meanwhile, millions of Americans live tenuously close to hunger, which is barely kept at bay by a food stamp program that gives most beneficiaries just a little more than $4 a day.”

Major Players: This paragraph clearly establishes the writer as critical of what we might call the agricultural industrial complex and the government and in support of the poor/food insecure/those on SNAP. The social class divide the piece highlights is already clear, and this makes sense, as this opinion piece is an entry in TNYT’s “Great Divide” series.

(The Great Divide is a series on inequality — the haves, the have-nots and everyone in between — in the United States and around the world, and its implications for economics, politics, society and culture. The series moderator is Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, a Columbia professor and a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist for the World Bank.)

The problem/conflict: “For the putative purpose of balancing the country’s books, the measures that the House Republican caucus is pushing for in negotiations with the Senate, as Congress attempts to pass a long-stalled extension of the farm bill, would cut back the meager aid to our country’s most vulnerable and use the proceeds to continue fattening up a small number of wealthy American farmers.”

Side note: Look at how the language used bolster’s the writer’s argument: “meager” aid to the “most vulnerable” as compared to “fattening up” and “wealthy” for the other group. Diction clearly aids in making this assertion.

Illustration of problem: “ Small, powerful interests — in this case, wealthy commercial farmers — help create market-skewing public policies that benefit only themselves, appropriating a larger slice of the nation’s economic pie. Their larger slice means everyone else gets a smaller one — the pie doesn’t get any bigger — though the rent-seekers are usually adept at taking little enough from individual Americans that they are hardly aware of the loss.” The “pie” metaphor is an easy-to-understand, visual illustration of the problem.

Concession, which illustrates anticipated objection: “While the money that they’ve picked from each individual American’s pocket is small, the aggregate is huge for the rent-seeker. And this in turn deepens inequality.

This concession/conceding of a point to the opposition – the amount each American will lose is small – is offered to acknowledge the likely objection that the proposed changes don’t affect individuals all that much so therefore their benefits are far greater.

The rebuttal comes quickly; after all, it’s in the same sentence: “the aggregate is huge for the rent-seeker. And this in turn deepens inequality.”

Essentially, this means that these small, individual losses mean giant games for a small, powerful minority . . . and this is a problem because it will deepen the divide between the rich and poor. (The piece’s intro foreshadows this rebuttal by noting that “ . . . wealthy commercial operations to plant more crops than we need . . . [while] while, millions of Americans live tenuously close to hunger.”

The rebuttal is offered again, this time in different, perhaps more powerful terms, here: “It takes real money, money that is necessary for bare survival, from the poorest Americans, and gives it to a small group of the undeserving rich, in return for their campaign contributions and political support.”

Concession #2: “FARM subsidies were much more sensible when they began eight decades ago, in 1933, at a time when more than 40 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Farm incomes had fallen by about a half in the first three years of the Great Depression. In that context, the subsidies were an anti-poverty program.” By acknowledging that farm subsidies used to be morally and economically justified (the two kinds of justification the author says the current proposals are not), he appeals to those in favor of subsidies by acknowledging their usefulness . . . at one point.

Restatement of the significance of his argument:

Remember, the author’s thesis is this: “[these proposals] would cut back the meager aid to our country’s most vulnerable and use the proceeds to continue fattening up a small number of wealthy American farmers.” He restates the significance of this argument in his final paragraph/sentence: “For these proposals to become law would be a moral and economic failure for the country”.