2007 US Farm Bill

The importance of the Farm Bill due to come before congress this summer is difficult to overstate. Michael Pollan provides a good overview in this NY Times Magazine article.

The health of the American soil, the purity of its water, the biodiversity and the very look of its landscape owe in no small part to impenetrable titles, programs and formulae buried deep in the farm bill.

I was talking with my friend Ray the economist the other day - he was marveling at the apparent inability of our political system to remove such obviously distorting economic incentives. Pollan has a theory to explain this:

...most of us assume that, true to its name, the farm bill is about “farming,” an increasingly quaint activity that involves no one we know and in which few of us think we have a stake. This leaves our own representatives free to ignore the farm bill, to treat it as a parochial piece of legislation affecting a handful of their Midwestern colleagues. Since we aren’t paying attention, they pay no political price for trading, or even selling, their farm-bill votes.