Should USDA be Renamed?
Posted: March 9, 2010
During a press conference at Commodity Classic, the question was posed to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack whether the Department of Agriculture should be re-named the Department of Food – which I guess would make him the Secretary of Food.
Vilsack said you could look at the department in a number of different ways. “When the department was founded in 1862, the substantial percentage of the population was in the farming business, so it made all the sense in the world to call it the department of agriculture. Today, the mission of the department of agriculture is fairly diverse and not very well understood by a lot of people in the country. Seventy percent of our budget is in the form of food assistance – the SNAP program, the WIC program, the school lunch and school breakfast programs. Now, one could say that makes the argument for the Department of Food, but I would say a lot of those programs are benefited from commodity purchases which help stabilize markets and that’s beneficial to the farmers, so maybe it’s okay to say Department of Agriculture.”
“We do a lot of rural development activities, trying to build strong communities and regions and trying to promote business and industry, and so you might think we should call it the Department of Rural Development. Except that the vast majority of farm families get a substantial percentage of their income off the farm, so the capacity to create jobs in rural communities basically helps people keep the farm, so maybe it’s okay to call it the Department of Agriculture.”
Ditto for the department of global food aid, or forestry, or food safety. “The point is this is a department that has multiple missions but at the end of the day, every single mission comes back to the beginning of this department, which is that it’s beneficial in some form or fashion, directly or indirectly, to farmers,” Vilsack concluded.
Listen to Vilsack’s entire answer here:
Download the sound bite with this link: Vilsack on Department of Food