Would You Trust Your Farm Policy To…Tom Vilsack?

By Ezra Klein

Via CQ, we’re getting the first trial balloons for Obama’s agricultural secretary. And what we’re hearing is not encouraging:

Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack has emerged as the frontrunner for the post of Agriculture secretary in the Obama administration, according to people close to the presidential transition team.

Vilsack, a Democrat, has a powerful booster in fellow Iowan Tom Harkin , chairman of the Senate committee that will hold confirmation hearings for the next secretary. Harkin has been a political backer of the two-term former governor since his election in 1998 and supported Vilsack’s short-lived presidential campaign.

“Senator Harkin believes that Governor Vilsack would be a great secretary of Agriculture,” said Harkin spokeswoman Kate Cyrul.

Anyone who cares about food policy, or who was excited by Barack Obama’s offhand reference to Michael Pollan’s food policy manifesto, should be extremely skeptical of this pick. Iowa, of course, is a corn state. For the last 14 years, they’ve been the leading corn producer in the nation. In 2006, they grew almost 2.1 billion bushels of the stuff (most of it industrial grade — not the sweet, crisp ears you throw on the grill). But they don’t just grow corn. They also beg for subsidies. And they get them. Tens of billions of dollars of them.

Corn subsidies are far and away the worst of our food policy abominations — they make processed food cheaper, meat cheaper, sweeteners cheaper, and create a market for ethanol that would not naturally exist. They endure, in part, because of a quirk of our political system. The power of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucus is leveraged to force candidates into swearing fealty to ethanol and corn subsidies. This bit of civically disguised blackmail has become so routine that the West Wing did an episode on it. But it’s one thing to pander during the campaign. Putting a former governor of Iowa in charge of the Department of Agriculture, however, seems like a solemn oath that the subsidies will continue far into the future.

Worse, elevating Vilsack is a sign that the Obama administration will continue treating agricultural policy as if the relevant constituency is food producers rather than food consumers. Shortly after Pollan wrote his article on food, he popped into the comments section at The New York Times to say:

I have no illusions that these proposals would be easy to push through. Even in a Democratic administration with a Democratic Congress, you have agriculture committees that would thwart significant reform — as we just saw during the farm-bill debate. In the house, make Agriculture an “exclusive committee” — one of the major committees, like Financial Services or Energy and Commerce, that strive for geographical balance in their membership. This would require the Ag committee to have urban and suburban representation, and dilute the influence of the farm states. That way, eaters would be as well represented as farmers.

This is true on the Cabinet level, too. If the Department of Agriculture sees large farmers and farm producing states (like Iowa), rather than individual eaters, as their primary constituency, then we’ll have a farm policy geared towards those interests. But eaters have interests here too, as do taxpayers, and parents, and energy advocates, and the public health community. They, however, are not well represented in Iowa politics. The fact that Obama is already signaling that his chief agricultural appointment will hail from the land of corn, and whose agricultural experience will mainly have been keeping powerful corn interests happy with him, is not a good sign. Vilsack could surprise, of course. But the indication here is that Obama will not upend the ag subsidy apple cart.