May, 2020
Lincoln – Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is looking for big ideas, according to reporting from the New York Times. Good. Now is the time if there ever was one.
But the long article by Alexander Burns did not contain a single use of the following words: rural, food, nutrition, soil, or farm.
This, despite the fact that the fabric of rural America is in tatters and shredding further. This was the sorry condition even before the coronavirus pandemic. Now it is heartbreaking to see farmers destroy hogs and chickens even as the food-chain collapses and people go hungry.
Rural America was already disproportionately beset by so-called deaths of despair. With the coronavirus, the diseases resulting from poor nutrition – diabetes, obesity, addictions – have created underlying conditions that only worsen the pandemic.
Make no mistake about how we got to this sorry state. Decades ago, short-sighted agricultural economists led by Earl Butz, who became Secretary of Agriculture, advocated a "get-big-or-get-out" policy, de-populating rural America. Corporate farming moved in; fertilizer, seed, and pesticide behemoths dictated farming practices; crop monocultures damaged precious topsoils; pollinators disappeared; unhealthy processed foods ravaged the American diet; foreign-owned enterprises took over the food-chain.
It was all propped up by massive federal taxpayer spending on Farm Bills that never worked as promised. Now it has all collapsed, and we may not have seen the half of it.
Big ideas for Joe Biden:
• Re-populate rural America. Put current federal spending levels on agriculture to use in re-populating rural America with small farms and small towns, built around local and regional markets for healthy food, which will create jobs. Totally re-write much of the Farm Bill. Give towns back their local hospitals and food-processing plants. Restore the nation's former food-chain.
• Save America's topsoil. Treat soil health as a national infrastructure priority through aggressive conservation, including a carbon-capture soil program to combat climate change. Call for this to be an essential part of any new infrastructure bill, for national food security.
• Make America healthy through better nutrition. Better nutrition must become the first-line defense against pandemics. Take away federal support of junk food in every federal program.
Not only is this what America needs, it's what Joe Biden needs to win the presidential election, which may well be decided once again, as in 2016, in rural America. Democratic candidates up and down the ticket need leadership on rural policy from their presidential candidate. House and particularly Senate candidates must get into rural America to see conditions and have proposals at the ready.*
Rural voters will like these big ideas, if offered. They want a president who cares about them and has a vision of what American can look like in the 21st century to fight pandemics and climate change.
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* DSCC strategy in 2018 was intentionally not to have any coordinated rural policy offerings on which Senate candidates could run. It was foolish: Democrats managed to lose a seat in a blue-wave year. Pete Buttigieg beat Joe Biden badly in the 2020 Iowa primary because he focused on small towns and rural areas.
