Kansas and the EU

When I was a child, the height of the Dust Bowl had been only a decade earlier, and references to it were common. A standard joke was about a farmer praying for rain – not for himself, he had seen it once before, but for his children, who had never seen any. That’s what people did back then, crack jokes about things too difficult to think about otherwise.  So the recent Ken Burns special on PBS about the Dust Bowl days of the 1930’s brought back sobering memories.  Now comes news just this week about how the Midwestern drought has intensified to the point that 100 percent of Kansas, 96 percent of Nebraska, 91 percent of Oklahoma and large portions of other states from South Dakota to Texas are declared to be under “at least” severe drought conditions; 63 percent of the area where winter wheat is grown is considered to be in danger of losing the crop because of drought conditions.  We are speaking here about one of the major breadbaskets of the world, whose crops feed hungry people around the globe. Climate change is beginning to hint at its full potential.  The news is being lost on the back pages of newspapers, and shouldn’t be.

We shouldn’t, this time around, face the devastation of Dust Bowl days.  A lot of the horrors of those days – children unable to go outside in Oklahoma because of the days long dust storms, wide spread pneumonia from dust inhalation, clouds of dust spreading to the east coast, desperate “Okie” migrations to California – were the result of poor farming practices which we’ve learned much better about since.  Some people in the 1930’s wanted the Midwest declared the new American Sahara and forgotten about (remember New Orleans after Katrina?).  FDR refused to accept that, and major federal agricultural research and assistance programs salvaged the Midwest for us and for the entire world.  The farm aid and research programs of today stem from that time.   The Midwest has changed a lot since then, though, with mega-farms and millionaires replacing desperate dirt farmers.  That causes simmering resentment in urban areas against farm subsidy programs, which are increasingly viewed as costly leeching by undeserving giant agricultural corporations.  Which brings me to the EU.

Word is beginning to spread in Washington these days about a possible free trade negotiation starting up between the U.S. and the EU, to create what David Ignatius of the Washington Post calls TAFTA,  a Trans Atlantic Free Trade Area.  According to Ignatius, a major barrier is the U.S. concern about the agricultural support programs of the EU, which provide levels of subsidy and protection to French and other EU farmers undreamt of in this country.  I suspect that any concessions gained by the U.S. on that front would have to be matched by American concessions on agricultural subsidies.  Given the urban resentment in this country, tying reductions in U.S. farm aid to the prospect of enhanced exports to Europe would certainly be an attraction. 

I, an urbanite, resent the raids on the Treasury by the giant agricultural corporations as much as anyone. But I also remember the haunted look in the eyes of small farm relatives in those post-Dust Bowl days.  Climate change is introducing us once again to what could become dangerous times on the farm – times that could pose major threats to our national, and global, food supply.  Multi-million dollar checks to Billion dollar corporations don’t make sense.  We need to trim silly subsidies like the subsidy that pays annual checks to suburban home owners on the gulf coast because the land their house is built on was, many years before, subjected to rice crop damage from hurricanes.  But we need also to be prepared for hard agricultural times – times when the role of the federal government in agriculture looms large. Anyone driving on a back country road can look out and see how technology-intensive farming has become, and it will be more complex as climate issues grow.  For example, increased agricultural irrigation needs to be traded off against depletion of water sources from urbanization and climate change.  We are just as much in danger of losing some of our cities to dwindling water supplies as we are our farms.  Agricultural research, innovative ways to grow and conserve crops, etc., will be just as important as they were in the days of FDR. 

This is one of those areas where, as I’ve mentioned, international policy and domestic policy increasingly unite.  We have to think through carefully how we trade off our domestic agricultural interests against the prospect of enhanced manufacturing exports.  We need to stop thinking that climate change, foreign relations, infrastructure development, green technology, agriculture policy, economic stimulus, etc., are all neat categories which can be analyzed and acted on separately, just as we need to think less of Rust Belts versus Farm Belts.  China watchers like to refer to the 21^st century task of China as a “great rebalancing”, where all the old arrangements need to be rethought and brought into new relationships.  That is our task also.