Title: What Are Commodity Crops and Why Do They Matter? | Hampden Park Food Cooperative | Saint Paul, MN
Headings: What Are Commodity Crops and Why Do They Matter?
What Are Commodity Crops and Why Do They Matter?
— by Lois Braun
How price supports work
Industrial ag gets involved
Politics and the Farm Bill
What's wrong with the system
A better way?
Resources
International Year of Cooperatives

Content: Because payments are tied to volume, farmers overproduce, seeking top yields by over-application of fertilizer, pesticides, and tillage. 3) Overproduction keeps prices low for commodity traders and food processors, who are their real beneficiaries. For example, subsidies result in below-production-cost prices for feed grains, which gives confinement animal factories an advantage over more environmentally sound grass-based animal production systems. Subsidies also make products derived from corn, soybeans, and wheat exceedingly cheap, leading to their overuse in our food system, in things such as corn syrup and cooking oil, which may be a contributing factor to our obesity epidemic. Cheap commodity crops are also dumped on the world market as food aid. Although famine relief sounds altruistic, in reality, unless carefully administered, it undercuts farmers in the recipient countries, fostering continued dependency on food aid. 4) By practically guaranteeing a profit—or at least making agriculture less risky, subsidies make
agriculture attractive to investors, who drive up land prices, as well as the prices of agricultural inputs. Thus subsidies do not really help family farmers, who are still being squeezed between their suppliers and their buyers and who are still being driven out of business, to be replaced by industrial agriculture interests, which care little for the land or the people who work it. 5) The system is costly to taxpayers, who pay directly for the subsidies, and indirectly for cleaning up the harm done, both to the agricultural landscape, such as soil erosion and water contamination, and to our people’s health, such as in diabetes and heart disease. A better way?