As Revisha Martinez pondered the cost of peaches and watermelon at her local King Soopers recently, she became the last stop in a complicated food-production system that critics believe has turned healthy eating into expensive eating.
If Martinez wants each member of her household to have one peach, it’ll cost her about $3.
If she chooses Kraft macaroni and cheese, she can get 18 servings — with 400 calories and 580 milligrams of sodium in each — for the same price.
The reasons fresh fruits and vegetables are so pricey compared with processed food in a carton are a complicated stew of government subsidies, politics and the whims of Mother Nature.
But their combined might, say critics pushing for a change in the way money is doled out, moves us away from fruits and vegetables and toward meat, dairy products and the sugar- and sodium-loaded processed foods for which crops like corn and wheat serve as the raw ingredients.
“We’ve made the unhealthy choice the rational choice,” said Merrick Weaver, who, as executive director of Partnership for Healthy Communities, works to improve nutrition among lower-income families in Commerce City.
Weaver was echoing Michael Pollan, whose “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” has become a manifesto for those trying to shift discussion about the country’s obesity epidemic to include the food-production infrastructure.
In short, “You can buy more calories for your dollar if you buy bad foods,” Weaver said.
A chorus of critics say that is no accident but rather the result of long-standing government policies.
Between 1995 and 2009, the U.S. Department of Agriculture handed out $245 billion in subsidies to farmers — including $4.4 billion in Colorado.
The payments come through a variety of programs that insure against catastrophic weather, set price floors and offer incentives for growing certain crops — and not growing others.
In Colorado, like the rest of the country, the money is not distributed evenly to every farmer.
The Environmental Working Group, which opposes farm subsidies but maintains one of the only accessible databases of information about those subsidies, found that during the past 15 years, 70 percent, or $170 billion, of farm subsidies supported the production of five crops: corn, wheat, cotton, rice and soybeans.
Corn growers alone got $73.8 billion between 1995 and 2009. But only a tiny fraction of the 13.4 billion bushels of corn that the USDA forecasts will be harvested this year will end up as yellow kernels on our plates. The biggest share will become livestock feed, with ethanol production getting the second-biggest chunk, and production of starch, corn oil and corn sweeteners not far behind.
And the fruit and vegetable growers?
“They don’t get direct subsidies,” said David DeGennaro, legislative and policy analyst for the Environmental Working Group.
“It’s always been that way, ever since the subsidies structure took shape in the ’30s and ’40s,” DeGennaro said.
A tangle of factors
The answer to why farm subsidies tilt toward crops such as corn and wheat depends a bit on whom you ask. But it’s widely agreed that they started out as a way to keep farmers in business during the Depression. Since then, fruit- and vegetable-growers — who are eligible for some, but not all, USDA programs — haven’t so much missed out as they haven’t asked to participate.
Fruit and vegetable producers aren’t unified the way corn growers are, and some even view other produce growers as competition, DeGennaro said.
Some impact of those policies was on display at the King Soopers near Martinez’s neighborhood.
Locally grown and long-awaited Western Slope peaches were on sale for 99 cents a pound. With each peach weighing roughly half a pound, it would cost about $3 for each Martinez family member to have one.
Not far from the produce section, Kraft macaroni and cheese mixes were bundled into six packs offering 18 servings of “enriched macaroni product” and cheese sauce mix, and selling for a mere $2.99.
Three years ago, Susan Levin of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine — a group that, among other things, promotes a vegetarian diet — became something of a celebrity in food-system reform circles when she distributed a pair of charts under the title “Why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac?”
Three years and some policy changes in the 2008 Farm Bill later, Levin believes her subsidy pyramid — with its fat bottom of meat and dairy supports and its wide midsection of grain dollars — is still largely accurate.
“I think this explains greatly why food and the food we eat most of in this country is so cheap,” she said.
Darrin Ihnen, president of the National Corn Growers Association, would tend to agree.
“Our food is cheaper in this country than any place in the world, and (farm bill programs) keep the cost of food lower than it otherwise would be,” Ihnen said.
But not everyone believes subsidies alone explain the cost of food in the produce aisle.
“Commodity supports for soy and corn and wheat, etc., are not necessarily the reason why those commodities are priced lower in the market,” said Ray Gilmer, vice president of communications for the United Fresh Produce Association, a trade organization that represents fruit- and vegetable-growers.”You have to look at the cost of production,” he said.
Unlike corn and wheat, spinach and tomatoes can’t sit in silos indefinitely, he said. Fruits and vegetables destined to be sold as fresh produce often have to be hand-picked.
Harvests are subject to weather, he pointed out. “And a 25-pound carton of tomatoes could be $6 or it could be $20,” he said.
His group has focused on gaining support for research that could help lower the costs of growing produce or fighting pests, and for programs to help growers market their product, Gilmer said.
That approach is just fine with Glenn Hirakata.
The Hirakata family has farmed in the Rocky Ford area of southeastern Colorado for four generations. This year, they are growing cantaloupes, watermelons, pumpkins and some corn.
For growing corn, they can get subsidies and crop insurance through the USDA.
Melons are a different story.
Hirakata estimates that a hailstorm early in the year wiped out 40 percent of his cantaloupes. Insurance is available, but for cantaloupe it works differently than it does for corn.
With melons, “It’s more catastrophic insurance. You’ve got to lose 50 percent of your crop, and even then they only pay you 50 percent of the price you would have gotten.”
Still, Hirakata isn’t sure he wants more of the government’s strings-attached assistance. “That’s a double-edged sword. The government can help you, but the government has got its hands in too much.”
What he would be interested in, Hirakata said, is some way to keep, say, California melons out of Colorado grocery stores during those months when his locally grown fruit is ripe and juicy and waiting to be eaten.
In Colorado, growing corn can run about $650 an acre (the state’s famous sweet corn is more, about $725 an acre), while wheat costs about $275 an acre to raise, said Dawn Thilmany, professor and agribusiness extension economist at Colorado State University.
Tomatoes, watermelon and cantaloupe, however, can run up tabs of between $1,400 and $1,700 an acre, she said.
They also, of course, fetch higher prices, but those prices are needed for farmers to break even, she said.
Boosting fruits, veggies
CSU is Colorado’s main conduit for a relatively new USDA block-grant program designed to help states boost production of fruits and vegetables, known in USDA-speak as specialty crops.
In the past six years, CSU has awarded research grants to 68 farmers who have studied everything from ways to improve irrigation efficiency to new fruit production methods, said Frank Stonaker, coordinator of the specialty crops program.
The program was launched with a $1.5 million grant.
“More recently, the 2008 farm bill really increased funding available to specialty crops,” Stonaker said, so he’s hopeful that money will keep flowing to produce growers.
DeGennaro, of the Environmental Working Group, said that may be because of increased attention to health and nutrition.
“The people who write the farm bill are on the agricultural committee, and for the longest time, the rest of the House hasn’t given much thought to the farm bill.”
The people who write the farm bill also tend to be from farm states, such as Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska.
The 10 states that get the greatest share of USDA farm subsidies are Texas, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, North Dakota, Arkansas, California and South Dakota. That illustrates why sweeping change won’t come easily, Gilmer said.
“If you are in a state like Kansas or Nebraska and you go home and say, ‘We’re going to change the current market supports in the farm bill’ — that’s difficult to do.”
And so fruit and vegetable crops will, for the foreseeable future, be allotted a fraction of the money available to commodity crops, for everything from planting to marketing, said Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina.
“Five-a-day spends as much in a year on media as is spent in one day on those other commodities,” said Popkin, who is author of “The World Is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies, and Products That Are Fattening the Human Race.”
He was referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s media campaign to encourage consumption of five servings of fruits and vegetables daily.
But in fact, if all 309 million Americans suddenly decided to live by that advice, we’d quickly run out of fruits and vegetables.
An article in the March issue of the journal “Health Affairs” cited USDA data to conclude that “the U.S. food system supplies 24 percent fewer servings per person than the five daily vegetable servings recommended for a standard 2,000 calorie diet.”
Take out starchy vegetables like potatoes, and the shortfall starts to get serious.
“Only half the recommended servings of dark green vegetables are available,” the article continued.
Not to worry, said Gilmer of the produce association. If Americans suddenly started gobbling twice as many fruits and vegetables, “growers wouldn’t ignore that. They’d plow up what they have and plant more tomatoes, and spinach, etc.”
At the moment, though, if growers of wheat or corn who get subsidies suddenly switched to zucchini or lettuce, they would face financial penalty, under current subsidy rules.
No matter what happens in Washington, lawmakers probably can’t change the nation’s food system alone.
To really change the food infrastructure, Americans might have to weather a little financial pain, Popkin said.
“We’ve created such a distorted diet that we do have to give up something and increase those prices.”
Spending more for groceries isn’t an option for people like Revisha Martinez, who feeds four kids on their father’s salary as an RTD bus driver.
“I have to stretch every dollar,” Martinez said. That means no meat that costs more than $2 a pound. It means stocking up on anything on sale. It also means fresh fruits and veggies are precious.
“There is no doubt we would buy more if they were cheaper. My kids really do love fruits and vegetables. When we get them, it’s a big treat.”
Karen Auge: 303-954-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com
The federal government provides a safety net to agricultural producers that is intended to help sustain them through the vagaries of market fluctuations and uncontrollable forces, including weather.
The so-called commodity crops eligible to receive subsidies include corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, peanuts, sorghum and mohair.
There are numerous programs through which the government, via the U.S. Department of Agriculture, makes assistance available. Some of the major categories, most of which have smaller programs within them, include:
Direct payments: Created in the 1996 Farm Bill, direct payments are based on a formula involving the historic production on a given plot of land in 1986.
Counter-cyclical payments: Payments that compensate producers when prices fall below certain thresholds.
Marketing loans: Assistance allows farmers to hold onto their crop and sell when it is most needed on the market. Otherwise farmers would likely all have to sell crops immediately, causing a temporary market glut and resulting in lower prices.
Disaster payments: Payments made to producers to offset potential losses from weather.
Crop insurance: Producers can choose a policy that compensates them for a loss in crop yields or for a decline in revenue. The policies are sold through 16 private companies. The USDA decides which crops in which regions are eligible for crop insurance. Policies are available for more than 100 crops.
Source: Environmental Working Group
