Obama's Secretary of Food I find interesting

[Guest guest]

Obama's `Secretary of Food'

December 12, 2008 by Daniel Redwood, DC

 

Nicholas Kristof's column points out the problems with the

Agriculture Department, which sends taxpayer dollars to all the wrong

places and harms Americans' health when it should be helping.

 

One measure of the absurdity of the system: Every year you, the

American taxpayer, send me a check for $588 in exchange for me not

growing crops on timberland I own in Oregon (I forward the money to a

charity). That's right. The Agriculture Department pays a New York

journalist not to grow crops in a forest in Oregon.

 

Modern confinement operations are less like farms than like meat

assembly lines. They are dazzlingly efficient in some ways, but they

use vast amounts of grain, as well as low-level antibiotics to reduce

infections — and the result is a public health threat from antibiotic-

resistant infections.

 

An industrial farm with 5,000 hogs produces as much waste as a town

with 20,000 people. But while the town is required to have a sewage

system, the industrial farm isn't.

 

" They look profitable because we're paying for their wastes, " notes

Robert P. Martin, executive director of the Pew Commission on

Industrial Farm Animal Production. " And then there's the cost of

antibiotic resistance to the economy as a whole. "