Fixing the Food System

This WaPo article describes the difficulty of tackling a problem that reaches into many areas:

The problem for the food folks is the message itself.

"They don't have a central, core message," James Thurber, an expert on lobbying and the director of American University's Center on Congressional and Presidential Studies, told me. That, or they're not getting it out. "Is this about reducing obesity in schools?" he asks. "Is it about pesticides on the farms? It's a wonderful thing to try to change policy, but what policy are they trying to change?"

Well, they're trying to change them all. And why not, they say. After all, there's no one policy for improving food in America. To bring real change, policymakers need to look at the system more holistically -- because everything, as foodies see it, is connected. Federal subsidies of grain and corn make it cheap to produce meat. Industrial meat production, which takes advantage of cheap feed, is responsible for about one-fifth of the world's greenhouse gases. Eating too much meat and too many processed foods made with corn products such as high fructose corn syrup has contributed to the sharp spike in obesity over the past 30 years.

Water is interconnected in the same way.

My suggestion is to:

1. Announce a phased-in program to stop subsidies over 2-8 years.
2. Implement the program.
3. Lower trade barriers for food over the same period.
4. Maintain good data on what's happening to prices, people and outcomes.
5. Target compensation to those who suffer. It's likely that nobody will -- except lobbyists.

These steps will work for food, and they would also work with implementing markets where water is allocated by bureaucracy and/or in an unregulated free-for-all (and destroyed-for-all).

Bottom Line: First, stop doing stupid things, then think of clever things to do.

hattip to CC