Rural America is Trump country. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is the federal department that does the most to help rural Americans. A writer in Vanity Fair magazine reported on how the Trump administration is gutting the USDA, and will probably get away with it, because most Americans don’t know what the USDA does.
When I think of the USDA, I think of the Agricultural Extension Service and the Soil Conservation Service, which help and encourage to adopt best practices, and its crop subsidy programs, which, unfortunately, mainly benefit big agri-business corporations.
The fact is, as the Vanity Fair writer pointed out, that 70 percent of the USDA budget goes to programs to relieve hunger—food stamps, subsidies for school lunches, a program to assure proper nutrition to new mothers and infants and a dozen or so smaller programs.
The USDA conducts scientific research into food security, nutrition, food safety and plant-based fuel. All these require taking global warming into account, which is unacceptable to the Trump appointees.
Other examples of the USDA’s many functions are inspection of meat animals and fighting forest fires.
The program of most benefit to ordinary people in rural communities are grants and loans for rural development, helping start-up businesses and local government projects that otherwise wouldn’t get started.
The political problem is the contradiction between rural America’s culture of self-reliance and fact of dependence on government. This contradiction is resolved by hiding the source of funding. Most people who benefit from USDA grants and loans are told that the help is coming from the local government or bank. So when the grants and loans dry up, they won’t know why.
LINK
Inside Trump’s Cruel Campaign Against the U.S.D.A.’s Scientists by Michael Lewis for Vanity Fair.
Tags: Department of Agriculture, Rural America, Trump Administration
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