As the US presidential election inches closer, a recent survey found that the is the top issue for voters, and many are also concerned about healthcare, foreign policy and inequality. Amid all the noise about these key issues however, food has received only marginal coverage in the campaigning despite the country’s high .
Author
- Shonil Bhagwat
Professor of Environment and Development, The Open University
, a 900-page policy document produced by conservative thinktank the , has become a major talking point in the election campaign. Although Republican candidate Donald Trump has denied any links between his campaign and Project 2025, the people who have authored this document are to the former president, with more than half of the 307 contributors having served in the Trump administration or on his campaign or transition teams.
Trump’s Democratic rival in the race to the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris, has been very vocal about the to the American people if the Project 2025 proposals were to be implemented. Instead, her campaign has promised an to support the American middle class, which will seek to cut prices and taxes, lower household costs, and offer various tax reliefs.
Analyses of Harris’ versus Trump’s suggest that the Trump has proposed will cause a rise in prices of imported goods – including food. On the other hand, Trump’s policies could lower energy costs because more domestic fossil fuel production could make US-produced foodstuffs cheaper.
But Project 2025 proposes deregulation of and US , including Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), Women, Infants and Children Program (WIC), and the ³Ô¹ÏÍøÕ¾ School Lunch Program. that this will “drastically reduce” the access that families have to fresh American-grown food, threatening the health of the most vulnerable.
Democrats have also that Project 2025 policies would reduce support to small-scale farmers, favouring large agribusinesses while the flow of ultra-processed food manufactured and distributed by influential corporations. Some estimates suggest that is already made up of ultra-processed foods, and they have been found to provide consumed by the average US adult.
The between ultra-processed food and negative health outcomes are increasingly being drawn. As such, food policy under Project 2025 would be very likely to have a negative impact on wider public health in the US.
But at the same time, Project 2025 would probably make and more restrictive for millions of citizens. It promises to reinstate the ability of the pharmaceutical industry to , raising the cost of drugs for American people.
It would also for health coverage for low-income Americans, threatening the survival of hospitals, health centres or doctors who serve those people.
These healthcare policies, combined with deregulation of the food industry and dietary guidelines, as well as the defunding of food assistance programmes, could spell a triple whammy for the health and wellbeing of some of the most vulnerable people in America.
How do Harris’s plans compare?
Harris’s plans, on the other hand, aim to make healthcare less expensive and more accessible, particularly for those from vulnerable groups such as or those on .
But while these proposals might remove barriers to healthcare, they won’t directly improve food provision for Americans. Some of the proposals in Harris’s “opportunity economy”, however, could directly address the issue.
focus on strengthening and diversifying supply chains for food production, processing and distribution. She has been outspoken about investigating price-fixing of food products by large corporations – and prosecuting firms anywhere in the supply chain where this is found to have happened.
Harris’s plans would also support small producers, processors, distributors, family farms and food and farm workers with more funding to compete with large conglomerates. This could result in more decentralised supply chains, which are known to make it easier to provide to more people by encouraging crop diversity and lowering the cost of fresh local products.
And she is promising to crack down on mergers and acquisitions of , which are known to compromise the sustainable provision of healthy food by curbing farmers’ bargaining power and leaving communities with little say over how their land is used.
Food is integral to the public sector economy, alongside things such as providing healthcare, protecting the environment and reducing inequalities. The organisation of the entire food system – from production to processing, trade to transport, and consumption to nutrition – needs to consider ways in which feeding a country can strenghten its public sector economy, and meet its obligation to the . The US has already made a to these goals through global food security programmes like .
These issues are especially pertinent to the US, as its food system is highly centralised. In fact, grow 60% of food. Meanwhile family farms – which represent 88% of the total – contribute only 19%. Harris’s proposals could go some way to correcting this imbalance. But the rhetoric coming from her rivals on the other hand could ultimately end up making the US worse off in terms of food provision and health.
