[Marxism] Cuban sanctions linked to obesity in americans

[Lajany Otum]

Pat Costello quotes Michael Pollan:
 
> So why did we ever abandon this comparatively sane sort of farm policy?
> Politics, in a word. The shift from an agricultural-support system designed to
> discourage overproduction to one that encourages it dates to the early 1970's--to
> the last time food prices in America climbed high enough to generate significant
> political heat. 


Michael Pollan sometimes has interesting things to say, but this is cobblers. The 
US has had a surplus grain problem, and has been dumping it on the world
under such guises as PL480 and the Mutual Security Act since the 1950's 
(See Darrel Moen, "The postwar Japanese agricultural debacle." available at
http://www.dgmoen.net/essays_index.html).
Essentially overproduction has been built into US agriculture since the 1950's,
by the form of price supports adopted under the New Deal, and compounded
by the technological treadmill ever since. 


Below is an extract from Harriet Friedmann, New Left Review Jan-Feb 1993,
kindly forwarded to me a while back by Louis Proyect:

The need for trade controls stemmed from an odd feature of domestic farm 
programmes, where, instead of direct income support, New Deal price 
supports tried to raise farm incomes indirectly by setting a minimum 
price for commodities named in the legislation, and maintaining this 
price through state purchases. Government purchases to support prices 
encouraged farmers to produce as much as possible. Legislation to limit 
production by restricting acreage was never effective. In fact, insofar 
as they encouraged farmers to remove their worst land from production, 
acreage controls tended to increase productivity.

Surpluses mounted more persistently with the technological developments 
involved in the industrialization of agriculture. Industrialization 
subordinated farms to emerging agro-food corporations, both as buyers of 
machines, chemicals, and animal feeds, and as sellers of raw materials 
to food manufacturing industries or livestock operations. Profits in the 
agro-food sector depended on the larger restructuring of the postwar 
economy towards mass production and mass consumption, [8] especially 
increased consumption of animal products and high value-added 
manufactured foods, or what might be called ‘durable foods’. [9]



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