A while back, I began a series of posts examining the infamous "farm lobby," that oft-mentioned force supposedly responsible for our food system’s many ills.  I noticed that mainstream media coverage of the Farm Bill tends to demonize farmers to the exclusion of other, more powerful figures whose fingerprints are all over our grocery carts (and whose advertising budgets flow straight into the veins of those same media outlets.) It’s hard for me to get my head around how the driving force behind the industrial livestock complex could be an Iowa hog farmer who signs a contract to manage a CAFO so he can keep his family on the land, while Smithfield, busy busting unions and avoiding manure spill clean-up costs, just happens to reap the benefits of the farm lobby’s hard work.

With this perspective on the brain, I couldn’t help but chuckle, in that I’m-chuckling-because-I-want-to-scream kind of way, when I scanned a recent editorial from the LA Times this afternoon. (Yes, it’s three days old; house guests ate my RSS feed.) While the title is more blunt than most ("The Farm Bill Feeds Greed"), the position it lays out is nothing we haven’t heard before: food prices are rising, Congress is hard at work finding ways to give the farm lobby more subsidies, and the poor are suffering. To wit, the editorial’s last line: "For Congress to take food out of their [the very poor’s] mouths in order to shovel more money at farmers — who are enjoying huge profits thanks to the same high food prices that are hurting the poor — would be a disgrace."

That’s an easy position to support. Who would choose millionaire farmers over starving kids? (Well, Alex Avery might… but I digress.) But for a moment, let’s step back and look at some of the assumptions at work in the LAT editorial room.

The LAT claims that farmers are reaping huge profits from high commodity prices. It’s true that commodity prices are higher now than ever before — but so are the prices of inputs like fertilizer and fuel, which Purdue University estimates [PDF] have risen 16% for corn and soybeans since the 2007 season and 21% for wheat. (These are about the same amounts by which the prices of staple foods have risen, notes Tom Philpott over at Grist.) Bigger input bills offset much of the gain farmers receive from higher commodity prices. Meanwhile, prices are high enough that farmers aren’t receiving most subsidies, since the majority of payments kick in only when prices are low.

Purdue’s input cost estimates are, yes, only estimates, but they suggest that the "huge profits" the LAT claims farmers are getting may not be that huge. In urban terms: You might be getting a dollar more for that pizza you’re delivering, but it won’t seem so great when you head to the pump to fill up the delivery car with some $3.65/gallon gas.

The LAT also fails to mention other factors that drive food prices up, choosing instead to vaguely blame high grocery bills on the farm lobby. In our highly-processed, transport-and-refrigeration-dependent food system, there are many other factors — chief among them the rising cost of fuel — that affect costs between the farm gate and the grocery store. And yet the sole culprit behind rising food prices, we’re told, is greedy farmers. Not the fact that our food is being flown, shipped, and trucked in from thousands of miles away.

The LAT’s line of reasoning drives public attention toward farmers and away from the real problem: The industrial food system is highly mechanized, fertilizer-and-pesticide intensive, and fuel-dependent. And there are a lot of agribusiness interests that would like to see it stay that way, even if it means higher costs for poor consumers.

If we were to focus on that line of reasoning instead of the one offered by the LA Times, we might come to the logical conclusion that federal dollars would be best spent supporting efforts to wean our food system off the petroleum teat. You know, things like money for research into organic agriculture, investment in infrastructure for local and regional food production, credit for small and mid-sized family farms, greater funding for conservation programs, incentives for farms to generate wind and solar energy… the options are endless.

Hopefully, despite media pressure to the contrary, the public’s focus on "greedy farmers" won’t be.

Photo courtesy of the Cornucopia Institute.