The Outsourcing of Food

Ronny Sloan is a farmer to his roots. Sloan's father was a farmer, and so was his grandfather, and his great grandfather, and everyone that family history can remember since the Sloans moved from Kentucky to Illinois in the early 19th century. Today Sloan and his four sons farm near the tiny town of Pana, Illinois, where they grow corn, soybeans and oats.

The Sloans are successful farmers, their 6,000-acre operation large by local standards. In recent years, however, they have had to grapple with a problem never encountered before -- foreign competition.

"Things are tough, the farm economy is tough," says Sloan, his voice a rural twang that sounds closer to Mississippi than Missouri. "We used to be the big player and had 75 percent of the soy market. That's not the case. We're now second place, behind Brazil. That's definitely hurting us."

The Sloans are not alone. From the apple orchards of western Washington to the tomato fields of Florida to the potato heartland of Idaho, American farmers are battling a new kind of pest -- imports from international rivals who can produce essential foodstuffs cheaper than they can be grown here.

After decades of being the world's top food producer, the U.S. is poised to become a net importer of agriculture products, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture. By the end of the decade, Brazil is expected to eclipse the U.S. as the number one food grower.

Call it the outsourcing of food. Following in the footsteps of blue-collar workers and, more recently, white-collar employees, the U.S.'s two million farmers face the prospect of being offshored as well.

The shift to foreign food production is clearly bad news for farmers, who have struggled for years to get their sale prices to match the costs of production. The outsourcing of food is also troubling for the U.S.'s ever-growing debt burden, since agricultural products were among the few bright spots in the country's deficit-burdened trade balance. For now, consumers benefit by getting lower food prices. But, say some food policy analysts, the U.S. could, in the long run, face a food security threat if present trends continue.

The U.S. has always been an importer of commodities that can't be cultivated here -- coffee and cocoa, bananas and mangos. But now U.S. markets are being flooded with products that Americans are accustomed to growing themselves. An increasing percentage of the produce you buy at the grocery store comes from fields and orchards thousands of miles away. If you've had any apple juice lately, it's more than likely that the concentrate used to make it was produced in China. Those raspberries you love may have been grown in Chile, the tomatoes in Mexico, and the avocados in Central America.

Even those most American of foods -- good old meat and potatoes -- often are imported. Scandinavia, for example, exports baby back ribs to the U.S., while a portion of our spuds come from abroad. Potato processing giant J.R. Simplot recently laid off 625 workers at one of its French fry factories in Oregon and plans to have the work done overseas.

Reggie Brown, vice president of the Florida Tomato Exchange, a trade group that represents the state's $500 million tomato industry and which has suffered serious loses in the last decade, puts the issue succinctly: "The fundamental question is, 'Is it America's long term interest to produce these crops here, or to have them produced elsewhere and shipped in?' We feel it's in Americans' best interest to be a producer of our own food supply. But there doesn't seem to be a national agenda to do that. The opposite seems to be the national agenda."

Trading Away the Farm

Many farmers and academics say that a decade of free trade agreements is responsible for the plight facing U.S. agriculture. During the heated debates over the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Washington political establishment told U.S. growers that the new trade deals would be a net benefit for farmers. In hindsight, it appears that the politicians promised too much.