This is my response to a section of the policy brief section of a report, The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition and Climate Change: The Lancet Commission report, originally here,https://www.thelancet.com/commissions/global-syndemic . The parent link for that section was originally here:https://marlin-prod.literatumonline.com/pb-assets/Lancet/stories/commissions/obesity-2019/GlobalSyndemicCommission_policybrief.pdf. Find the report now here: https://www.academia.edu/86907593/The_Global_Syndemic_of_Obesity_Undernutrition_and_Climate_Change_The_Lancet_Commission_report

Unfortunately I find problems in their understanding of farm policy, and how it impacts sustainability, climate and public health. Since that is not evidence based, it then taints The Lancet’s approach over all, (and this also applies to Walter Willett generally, I’ve found in the past). According to the policy brief:

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6 Eliminate subsidies for products that contribute to The Global Syndemic and redirect funding to actions that mitigate it. 

•Increase awareness of the impact of subsidies on the true costs of food and car use to build support for sustainable agriculture and sustainable modes of transportation. 

•Redirect existing government subsidies for beef, dairy, sugar, corn, rice, and wheat (about $US0·5 trillion a year) to sustainable farming for healthful foods.

•Redirect subsidies for fossil fuels (about $US5 trillion a year) to renewable energy and sustainable transportation systems.

This is the rooted in a key farm subsidy myth, and I’m convinced that it’s a major factor behind a wide range of anti-farmer public attitudes and academic biases. Economically, they don’t understand that (the data clearly shows that,) the main economic issue is ‘free’ market failure, (the failure of actual agricultural markets for major crops,) which is much bigger in impact than, (and opposite in impact to,) the subsidy compensations, (i.e. U.S. “deficiency payments,”) that everyone knows about. It’s the over all penalization of farmers, (market reductions + subsidies = net or total impacts,) that has been so important in causing these problems, not the myth that farmers have been over-rewarded, (since they’ve received farm subsidies). This is a case where more people need to start showing the evidence, because otherwise the conclusions seem counterintuitive, and just about anyone might go with their intuitions over the evidence.

Basically, (like almost everyone else,) The Lancet supports continuing the maximum of subsidization (from farmers) to CAFOs, (cheap market prices, “implicit subsidies,”) which has led most farms to lose livestock, as the CAFOs can usually purchase feed cheaper than diversified farms can grow it. It then drastically reduces permanent pastures on fragile lands and sustainable crop rotations with green sod crops. It massively damages the whole on-farm, local, regional, national and global infrastructure for diversity (sustainability,) that today’s organic farmers also need. 

That all makes us much more dependent upon fossil fuels, both in the manufacturing of farm inputs and products, but also in the farming itself. In a diversified system livestock can harvest their own feed and spread their own fertilizer over permanent green sod crops for large periods of time, all without much of any fossil fuel impacts. In the other system we produce all sorts of machines and inputs, to be transported to farms, (with much fossil fuel use,) to then prepare, plant, maintain and harvest feeds to be transported to livestock, and with the manure then being stored and transported back to the lands. These enormous differences seem to be invisible to those focusing on, for example, cows belching methane, or as some have put it, ignoring “the how,” to focus only on “the cow.” Either they know nothing about this massive difference in farming systems, or they simply throw the baby out with the bathwater, arguing that since some livestock systems are bad for climate and etc., all livestock systems should be eliminated, (even if they greatly help climate and etc.).

Politically they’re supporting the dividing and conquering of our efforts, farm vs urban, farmer vs farmer,) and continued conservative domination of the rural vote. None of that occurs with a true farm justice solution, which is much more sustainable because it addresses the actual causes of the problems, (not the imagined cause behind these statements,) with much less government spending, and with farmers, farm states, the United States and farming countries being paid much more fairly, (such as being paid above the cost of production on export sales). They basically claim that farmers have been over-rewarded! There isn’t any valid evidence to support that. They’re clearly relying only on invalid evidence, (that subsidies exist and are paid to farmers in certain amounts). 

Consider the logic behind EAT Lancet’s claims. Hungry people in inner cities get the bulk of food subsidies. That doesn’t prove that they’re big economic winners with the same strategic interests as “big food,” the dominant lobby, etc. Their subsidies are a kind of correlation evidence. They correlate with all kinds of social problems. That isn’t evidence that the food subsidies cause those problems, or that eliminating food subsidies would end poverty in inner cities and such. But that’s the principle of logic that The Lancet is using, applied to farm subsidies.

EXPANDED THOUGHTS

Also implied in The Lancet’s farm policy proposal is that they don’t know about the problems of oversupply that cause such cheap market prices that then contribute so strongly to global rural poverty and hunger. Nearly 80% of the global “undernourished” are rural, as is nearly 70% of the population of Least Developed Countries. (The percentages have been dropping as people flock from rural poverty areas to urban ghettos.) The Lancet, in ignoring this problem while trying to subsidize a shift to greater food production, would make global rural poverty worse, not better, because such a shift would lower global farm prices for the various crops. 

A key question for these people is, are they adequately addressing over population? All kinds of proposed solutions will fail eventually, if nothing is done about population, (which is also tied to poverty). If the solution is a switch to manufactured food, that places it into the hands of authoritarian agribusiness megamachines. That’s even more likely to make global rural poverty worse.

In general, I think that The Lancet doesn’t know the difference between the fossil fuel subsidies and farm subsidies. Farm subsidies are like food subsidies, (SNAP, food stamps). They’re paid to people being greatly underpaid by the larger economy, leading to all kinds of problems. But you can’t fix the problems of inner cities by cutting food subsidies and other welfare payments to the victims, (on the argument that the problems are caused by over-rewarding them). You need to fix the larger problem of economic exploitation which is unrelated to food subsidies and welfare. Unfortunately, this is the principle behind The Lancet’s (unsubstantiated) theory or opinion on farm subsidies.

One missing piece is that the farmer subsidies to agribusiness buyers, (cheap, below cost farm prices,) are paid even though agribusiness, unlike farmers, has never shown any need to be subsidized. So agribusiness get the subsidies (from farmers,) without any prior deficiency.

EAT Lancet’s middle point, in bold, is based upon a spending paradigm, that treats the larger economy as an acceptable given, to be ignored, with “follow the money” only applying to government spending. (Again, applied to SNAP, that would show the hungry as the dominant winners, since they get so much money). What’s missing is the (economic) chronic market failure of US and global agriculture, (on both supply and demand sides, http://agpolicy.org/weekcol/248.html, http://agpolicy.org/weekcol/325.html) and the (political) reduction and elimination of the government market management policies that previously fixed these market failures. Grain, soybean and cotton farmers, then, are the biggest victims, paid less, even with added subsidies, than 45 fruits and vegetables (measured by % of parity, https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/subsidized-crops-vs-vegetables-pt-i/239258118,https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/subsidized-crops-vs-fruits-pt-2/239258054) even as all crops were reduced over 7 decades. Subsidies provide a small and fairly ineffective amount of justice to remedy that, and The Lancet wants to remove even that. 

So market failure, combined with farm bill market management reduction (1953-1995) and elimination (1996-2023) caused the problems in various ways*. What’s overwhelmingly needed for sustainability, the evidence clearly shows, (https://familyfarmjustice.me/2022/07/31/you-cant-fix-sustainability-without-justice/) is restoration of adequate US and global market management, (esp. price floors and supply reductions). Proposals are available from the National Family Farm Coalition, the National Farmers Union, The Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment, and the Texas Farmers Union, plus various proposals for dairy. No subsidies are needed.

*What’s happened is that Congress has become colonized by multinational corporations, so that they ignore chronic farm market failure, and allow prices to drop to the lowest possible levels, such that we lose money on major farm exports and sales out of farming states and communities for decades at a time, setting extremely low global market prices, causing massive poverty and hunger across the rural half of the world. The Lancet proposal offers nothing to address this, but instead fosters the maximization of US and global farmer exploitation by agribusiness buyers. They apparently aren’t able to conceptualize this larger paradigm. Again, the cheap prices have led to the loss of livestock from most farms, which has greatly reduced the permanent green cover of pastures and as part of sustainable crop rotations, (and increased corn and soybean production). Again, this has been a major assault on grazing systems, as they must compete with the (massively farmer-subsidized) CAFO systems. Again, it’s caused by the penalization of corn and soybeans and the sustainable crops they have replaced, the evidence clearly shows. The alleged over-rewarding that is claimed has not existed. So unknowingly, the Lancet is calling for maintaining the current destructive system with the enormous pot of money, (paid by farmers,) that comes from chronic free market failures, while also reducing the compensations to the biggest victims. And then attempts are made to use subsidies in ways that can easily foster overproduction of other crops, and make sustainable farming less profitable. 

Here we should note Tom Philpott’s proposal to take 10% of the corn and soybean land in 10 midwestern U.S. states to plant to fruits and vegetables. If done, that would increase the supply of fruits and vegetables by 160%, (to 260%,) thus crashing markets.

(To spell it out more clearly,) The Lancet supports the continuation of the maximum of the massive subsidies paid by corn and soybean farmers to CAFOs and export dumpers, while relying on government payments to fix things after the fact. Again, in the real world, these subsidies back to farmers have always been much smaller than the market reductions they started out with. They’ve also been shrinking in each farm bill, (2008, 2014, 2018), and there were no regular farm commodity subsidies paid to most farmers growing corn, soybeans and other crops in 2018, (i.e. to the 90%+ farmers in ARC). 

These findings point toward a conclusion that this seems to be just another group of high status scientists who don’t know how to be evidenced based on issues that are too far afield from their major fields of study, and who therefore rely on the opinions of others, such as mainstream media and the Food Movement leaders like Michael Pollan, (https://znetwork.org/zblogs/michael-pollan-rebuttal-four-proofs-against-pollans-corn-subsidy-argument-by-brad-wilson/, cf. https://zcomm.org/zblogs/philpott-bittman-imhoff-lappe-are-wrong-about-tim-wise/) (neither of which have ever offered any valid, practically significant evidence in support of the alleged subsidy problems or subsidy reform theory).

Here’s some further reading. 

On the dozens of farm subsidy myths and corollary myths. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ZIOiwv1Nr6jn9SsnE62z1P_hitZKTBaD

Diana Rogers, “20 Ways EAT Lancet’s Global Diet is Wrongfully Vilifying Meat,” Sustainable Dish, 1/17/19, https://sustainabledish.com/20-ways-eat-lancets-global-diet-is-wrongfully-vilifying-meat/

Nina Teicholz, “EAT-Lancet Report is One-sided, Not Backed by Rigorous Science,” Nutrition Coalition, January 29, 2019, https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/news/eatlancet-report-one-sided.