Paula Crossfield: The Obama Administration and Food, Year One

By Paula Crossfield, Huffington Post

A year after America voted for the change-agent they saw in Barack Obama, advocates hoping for deep improvements in our food system can point to only a few successes, while other policies that could lead to food insecurity are brewing in back rooms.

Nearly two years ago, candidate Obama said the following in a speech at the Iowa Farmer's Union:

We'll tell ConAgra that it's not the Department of Agribusiness. It's the Department of Agriculture. We're going to put the people's interests ahead of the special interests.

Then, less than two weeks before the election, Obama told Joe Klein at TIME:

I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen [sic] about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart...

Click here to read the entire article...