Myth-busters: If Iowa feeds the world, why can't it feed us during COVID-19?
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Corporate agribusiness entities have created a false moral imperative about feeding the world. We see it perpetuated by people like former American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman who said: “Many farmers feel strongly that it’s the duty of the less than 1% of the U.S. population still directly involved in farming to help feed the masses.”
Here are three reasons why Iowa doesn't and shouldn't aim to feed the world:
1. Farmers aren't incentivized to grow food. People don't eat soybeans and corn; corporate-owned pigs at factory farms do. Agribusiness interests incentivize the overproduction of these commodity crops to create cheap feed for corporate controlled factory farms, all while degrading our natural resources and hurting farmers who are forced to farm fence-row to fence-row to try to scrape by. Farmers receive prices lower than the cost of production, while all the profits go straight to the top.
2. This false narrative is rooted in racism and the patriarchy. The corporate-conservative agenda that puts profits before everything is deeply tied to the oppression of people based on the color of their skin, where they come from, and their gender.
Our corporate-controlled agriculture system is no exception and is dependent on the division of everyday people based on perceived differences. At the root of this false narrative is the concept that white male farmers know best how to feed people all across the globe. And these seeds grow the kind of barriers that have kept Black farmers from landownership since Emancipation.
3. Our highly industrial agriculture system is far less resilient than the smaller, regional and diversified family farm operations it replaced. Because of the rampant consolidation over the last 40 years, if one piece of the system is removed the whole thing crumbles. There is no flexibility. As a result during the COVID-19 pandemic, we see cars line up for miles outside of food banks across the country while farmers are forced to kill livestock, dump milk and waste food. Instead of corporations monopolizing a global market and having CEOs dictate how food should be grown "for the world", we need to stop and re-evaluate how we do better. That starts with a moratorium on factory farms.
It's safe to say that the make up of our industrial agriculture system is not to feed the world but at the root is created by decades of bad policy driven by corporate greed.
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