Articles by Tom Philpott

Why the late, lamented Doha round wasn’t really the answer for ag policy.

Harvesting a bit of vintage Reagan-era rhetoric, L.A. Times columnist Jonah Goldberg recently denounced what he called "welfare queens on tractors."

The right-winger's target was clear: The U.S. farm subsidy program, which doles out around $14.5 billion per year (depending on market fluctuations), mainly to large producers of corn, cotton, wheat, soybeans, and rice. As Congress opens debate on the 2007 Farm Bill -- the omnibus five-year legislation that governs agricultural support -- the subsidy program has drawn a chorus of critics.

Goldberg gets it about right when he lists the program's opponents: "Right-wing economists, left-wing environmentalists and almost anybody in-between who doesn't receive a check from the Department of Agriculture or depend on a political donation."

To be sure, the subsidy-haters have a point. A vast literature shows that the real beneficiaries of U.S. ag subsidies aren't farmers at all, but rather agribusiness giants. Direct government payments encourage farmers to produce as much as possible, which pushes down the prices of ag commodities.

For years now, ag subsidies have helped enable Archer Daniels Midland to buy the corn it transforms into high-fructose corn syrup at well below corn's production costs. Meat producers like Smithfield Foods use cheap corn as fodder to run their profitable -- and socially and environmentally ruinous -- feedlot operations.

Champion of ‘social ecology’ dies at 85

Murray Bookchin, who championed a democratic and anti-authoritarian vision of environmental politics, died last week in Vermont at 85.

Bookchin has for years been on my must-read list. I write and work from within a tradition he helped shape. As Brian Tokar recently put it in his obit on Counterpunch, Bookchin sought to "reclaim local political power, by means of direct popular democracy, against the consolidation and increasing centralization of the nation state."

As China’s exports boom, its farmland shrinks and food imports rise. Coincidence?

The philosopher Slavoj Zizek once remarked that the United States does still have a working class -- it's simply in China.

With the U.S. manufacturing base shriveling (Ford Explorer, anyone?) and imports from China booming (set to surpass a quarter trillion dollars this year), it's hard to contradict that trendy Slovenian academic.

China's manufacturing miracle means (among many other things) that even in a period of stagnant wage growth, U.S. consumers can march into Wal-Mart and fill their carts with lots and lots of stuff.

The most famous environmental impact of China's boom has to do with crude oil: As China's economy surges (it grew at an annualized 11 percent in the second quarter), it burns more and more crude, burdening the environment with greenhouse gases. While we ramble from strip mall to strip mall in SUVs stuffed with Chinese goods, Chinese factory smokestacks send plumes of black gunk into the air.

But here's another way to look at the situation: While China expands its industrial base to supply the world with everything from mops to electronics, it's cutting drastically into its farmland. Might some wag soon be moved to remark, "China does have farmers -- they're just in Brazil"?

The case for boycotting factory-farmed ‘organic’ milk

Of all the environmental gaffes the species homo sapien commits in the process of feeding itself, the practice of cramming megafauna into huge pens and plying them with corn may rank as the most imbecilic.

The excellent web site Eat Wild documents the environmental ills of confinement dairy and meat production; here are a few. Cows evolved to eat prairie grass, not grain, which makes them sick. Huge concentrations of large ravenous animals create huge concentrations of shit -- which is a critical resource for maintaining soil health in reasonable amounts, but a fetid nightmare when produced at mountainous levels. Industrial corn production requires titantic annual lashings of natural gas-based fertilizers, much of which leaks into groundwater and wreaks havoc clear down to the Gulf. And so on.

Appallingly -- though not surprisingly, given its habitual fealty to agribiz interests -- the USDA has not seen fit to demand that organic dairy production be pasture-based. The agency's organic code stipulates that cows be given "access to pasture," but its bureaucrats tend to give that rule a lackadaisical reading -- one fully exploited by Dean Foods and Aurora Organic, the dairy giants that together produce more than half of U.S. organic milk.

In response to such official laxity and corporate opportunism, the scrappy Organic Consumers Association has launched a boycott against companies that sell "organic" milk from factory-style farms.