| The highlight of King Corn has gotta be when these two guys growing their own acre of corn in Iowa visited the late Earl Butz's nursing home and respectfully asked him about his farm policies. I don't have the quote handy but Butz, Richard Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, attacked New Deal farm policies, also known as paying people not to grow stuff, as really, really stupid. To him, his farm policies, telling farmers to grow crops from hedgerow to hedgerow, brought cheap food to America and cheap food is the root of modern American prosperity. [Granted, we're almost all hurting now, but when Butz said this it was 2005. All the pain we're in now wasn't clear then.]
If you know your history, then you know that the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Act paid farmers to reduce the amount of land they were planting in order to create shortages designed to increase prices. The reason for this was that during the Depression, it cost farmers more to grow most crops than they could ever expect to get selling their harvest. It took some guts to do this during the Depression, a time of widespread hunger in America, but the program did raise crop prices. [It also led to thousands of tenant farmers getting kicked off their land, but that's another story.]
As Butz explains it, he stopped this insanity, but that's only half the story What he didn't say, but it's obvious from the film, is that he and Nixon didn't stop the crop subsidies. Since Nixon, we've been paying farmers to flood the market and make up for the fact that the law of supply and demand then sent their prices through the floor. Explain to me what's sane about that. Butz's policies helped farmers in the short term because they still got aide even when they didn't need it. But where exactly are we now?
King Corn tells this story well. We have mountains of corns being grown by ever fewer people and every small farmer has to take government subsidies to turn a measly profit or perhaps go broke anyways. If the government really cared about the plight of the family farm, they'd start paying them NOT to grow corn again. And if this drives up the cost of soda pop, so much the better! The savings in Medicare and Medicaid will more than likely offset the cost of the farm subsidies in the long run. |
