Diabetes is the most expensive chronic condition in the country. Here’s how the government is making it worse.

Article by Ali Sabir

In 1972, as Soviet citizens queued for rationed bread, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Burtz demanded that American farmers: “plant fence row to fence row,” and “get big or get out.” Butz’s directive wasn’t just about profit—it was geopolitical warfare. By flooding global markets with subsidized corn and wheat, the U.S. aimed to undercut the USSR’s image, contrasting the Communist’s scarcity with capitalist abundance.

The strategy worked. Soviet grain shortages deepened, while U.S. agrobusiness boomed. Five decades later, however, the collateral damage of this pyrrhic victory is undeniable. The same policies that won the Cold War have not only outlived their purpose, but they’ve saddled America with a system that prioritizes cheap calories over human health, ecological resilience, or farmer’s livelihoods—a self-inflicted crisis that calls into question the value of prioritizing “abundance” over all else.

The modern subsidy system as we know it began as a New Deal lifeline during the devastating Dust Bowl, which saw American farmers over farm the Great Plains into a wasteland, displacing hundreds of thousands of families. President Roosevelt injected billions of dollars into the agriculture industry to limit production rather than to encourage it, spending to keep small farms and families afloat. FDR’s goal was soil conservation and price stability, paying farmers not to plant, in order to prevent another ecological and economic collapse. President Roosevelet, wasn’t just trying to fix the economy—he was reviving an ideal Thomas Jefferson once championed: the idea of the independent, self-sustaining farmer as the backbone of American society.

By the 1970s, this vision had been wholly upended. Under Richard Nixon, Butz overhauled farm policy to prioritize a new trinity: corn, soy, and wheat—crops not chosen for their nutritional value, but for their utility as export commodities, processed food inputs, and ethanol. The stability of the FDR-era subsidies were gone—instead of balancing supply with demand, the new objective was pure output in regards to maximum yield and minimum price. In America’s fight to one-up the Soviets it transformed its view of the farmer as the provider for America into nothing more than a cog in a global commodity machine.

President Gerald Ford, a Midwesterner himself, made a point of boasting about America’s grain dominance over the Soviets, even going as-so-far as to anger domestic farmers by cutting them off from the Soviet market, placing a grain embargo on the U.S.’ greatest enemy (and he wasn’t the only president from an agriculture state to do so). Behind American rhetoric of abundance was a deeper shift, however: the New Deal’s safety net had been morphed into a Cold Weapon, but a double sided one, sowing the seeds of a nutritional and environmental disaster.

By 1980, the U.S. produced 12% more calories per citizen than needed, a glut that reshaped diets at home and abroad. Cheap grain surpluses were dumped into school cafeterias, fast-food burgers, and Coca-Cola’s overseas expansion. The USDA even partnered with fast-food chains to promote beef/dairy consumption, with the average American eating 23 pounds of cheese per year today compared to eight pounds in 1970. 

Today, the CDC estimates that as many as one out of every three Americans will have diabetes in 2050. This problem is not just a health issue—it’s a fiscal one. According to the CDC, $1 out of every $4 in US healthcare costs is spent on caring for people with diabetes—how much more of this can we afford? Meanwhile, heart disease—also tied to poor diet—remains the leading cause of death in America, murdering Americans in cold blood every day in the face of inaction. Your grandparents aren’t the only ones being effectively charged by a jury of apathy with the death penalty, however—according to a joint survey done by the American Heart Association and American Diabetes Association, 7 in 10 respondents of all ages worry about poor health limiting their life experiences, but Gen Z is the generation most worried about their cardiovascular health.

And for good reason, too. The food environment they’ve inherited is rigged. A dollar in 2007 bought 1200 calories of chips, but just 250 calories of carrots. Corn syrup, soybean oil, and refined wheat have become the pillars of a diet directly linked to metabolic disease. Even produce has lost its nutritional value; studies show modern broccoli has 64% less calcium and 82% less Vitamin A than in 1950, a result of soil depletion from monocropping. Even a health-conscious consumer who picked the 250 calories of carrots of the 1200 of chips would be unpleasantly surprised—carrots have experienced a 63% decline in iron since 1950, and a 15% drop in calcium and a 17% drop in carbohydrates.

The ecological cost is just as dire. Since 1995, corn alone has received over $116 billion dollars. Grown on 90 million acres—an area greater than the size of Germany—corn depletes topsoil 10 times faster than Mother Nature can regenerate it, setting us up for a man-made climate disaster far worse than the Dust Bowl. According to The Guardian, “Without efforts to rebuild soil health, we could lose our ability to grow enough nutritious food to feed the planet’s population,” as “The world needs topsoil to grow 95% of its food – but it's rapidly disappearing.”

Adding to the problem, nitrogen fertilizers, required to sustain monocultures, poison waterways, creating a 6000-square-mile “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, roughly the size of Connecticut. When converted to ethanol, corn becomes a climate disaster: a 2022 PNAS study found that ethanol’s lifecycle emissions exceed those of even gasoline.

Farmers, paradoxically, gain very little from this system. Subsidies incentivize overproduction, crashing crop prices and trapping growers in a cycle of debt, all while rewarding massive agricultural corporations over small farmers—in Roosevelt’s time there were 6.8 million small farms; today there are less than 2 million—make no mistakes, even in Roosevelt’s time that number began to decrease, in part due to government policies pushing some Americans out of the farm, but that drastic a decrease is a testament to the growing number of mega farming corporations that have come to define the American agricultural industry.

Reforming this system faces the all-too-familiar hurdles that face reform in any industry—”Big Agro” spent $178 million in 2023 lobbying Congress to protect subsidies, the same year that the Farm Bill, which oversees the policies controlling farms and general agriculture, was up for reauthorization/extension. Additionally, the influential Iowa Caucuses draw intense political attention to the demands of Iowa, a state which relies heavily on the Agriculture industry. Politicians hoping to one day ascend to the presidency cannot afford to attack subsidies or the infamous “Ethanol Mandate”, with ethanol being a byproduct of corn. That’s not to say that Iowa’s role in the primary calendar is a problem; in many ways, it’s one of the few moments when rural issues are front and center in America. But when agriculture policy becomes untouchable, it’s no longer democratic—it’s dogma.

On that note, it’s important to recognize that the future of a sustainable agricultural industry relies upon focusing on the needs of American farmers instead of mistakenly blaming them for problems in the industry. There are various ways to do this—shifting subsidies toward sustainable crops like legumes, fruits, and vegetables; supporting diversified farms instead of monocultures; and enacting right-to-repair laws freeing farmers from equipment monopolies are just a few, each of which would also benefit consumers and the climate.

Simply put, a food system built on resilience, not overproduction, would be better for farmers, consumers, and the climate.

It’s disappointing then, to see Congress waste its time targeted nonexistent “fiscal abuse” instead of tackling this issue, even going as far as to gut $2 billion in USAID funding that purchased food for humanitarian relief from American farmers. If Congress is serious about fiscal responsibility, it shouldn’t start by cutting Medicare and Medicaid—it should start by fixing the system that makes people sick enough to lean on these cherished safety nets in the first palace. That means restoring the original spirit of American agriculture policy, not as a geopolitical tool, but as a means of supporting the proud patriots who grow our food and preserving the very land they—and we all—depend upon; such a spirit is arguably more American first than much of what the “America first” agenda has brought to the Beltway.

Many today argue that President Reagan won the Cold War by tripling military spending, pushing the USSR to attempt to do the same, and in the process push themselves to financial ruin. What we are slowly beginning to recognize today is that our desire to be bigger and better may have worked in the past, but that is no longer the case today. The true price of our competitive Cold War era tactics are being paid for—quite literally—in the modern era. America still seems to believe bigger is always better, in both defense and food, preparing a trillion dollar Pentagon spending package, while also keeping billions of dollars in harmful subsidies intact.

It’s time we applied the same urgency we once used to fight communism to fight the crises we face now—chronic illness, climate instability, and rural collapse. Supporting farmers is not a nostalgic return to the past; it’s an investment in a future where abundance refers to health, not just material surplus.