Based on recent news accounts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems intent on transforming the House cafeteria.
Gone are the Jell-O, the processed cheese, the meatloaf and the substandard buns. Replacing those are more healthy foods, including pears with Stilton cheese, pan-roasted fish, baguettes and organic yogurt.
If only Chez Pelosi could now put the same energy and imagination into transforming the 2007 farm bill.
This $286 billion pork fest, versions of which have passed the House and Senate, would perpetuate the wasteful subsidies of past. Billions of dollars would flow to wealthy farmers and commodity firms that handle corn, sugar, wheat, rice and cotton.
Such subsidies generate a national glut of high-sugar, high-fat processed foods – the kind that Pelosi is trying to banish from the House. They hurt our trade relations with allies, and they feed a type of monoculture farming that damages the environment.
By now, Pelosi knows she was hoodwinked last year in helping to pass a farm bill written by Collin Peterson, a Minnesota Democrat who chairs the House Agriculture Committee. Peterson touted his measure as a "reform" bill. Only later we learn how it was laden with gimmicks and continued subsidies.
The House and Senate versions of the farm bill have now moved to a conference committee, and so Peterson is floating a new version that is slightly better than the last one. Yet it would still allow subsidies to flow to millionaires. And it may not go far enough to avoid a veto from President Bush, who opposes a tax hike contained in earlier versions.
The clock is ticking. If Congress doesn't approve a new five-year farm bill before the current 2002 law expires, farm policy could revert to a 1940s statute. Such an outcome could hurt conservation programs and farmers in California and elsewhere.
Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will be the keys in determining whether this game of chicken produces an edible dish, or something worthy of the congressional dumpster.
