The food we produce and the way we produce it has profound effects—good or bad—on our health, quality of life and the environment. On these pages you will learn what EWG is doing to protect your health and environment while ensuring a sustainable future for America’s working farms and ranches.
Farmers can do more than producing food and fiber. They can also produce clean air, clean water, and abundant habitat for wildlife. But farm policies are doing too little to reward good stewardship and too much to underwrite unsustainable crop and animal production by the largest and most successful farm businesses.
EWG’s renowned farm subsidy database reveals that taxpayer support goes mostly to large, profitable operations, not to sustainable family farms that truly need the help. We’re working to change a badly broken system.
Food should be good for you. But some foods aren’t. Pesticides are sprayed on millions of acres every year and some of them end up on your food. Our broken farm subsidy system encourages over production of the wrong food. EWG is pushing for better policy and more sustainable ways of farming that produce healthy food in a healthy environment.
Nothing is more important to your health and quality of life than safe drinking water and clean streams and lakes. Across the country, pollution from farms is one of the primary reasons water is no longer clean or safe. Agriculture is the leading source of pollution of rivers and streams surveyed by U.S. government experts, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Thankfully, if we make simple changes in the way we farm, we can take a big step toward clean water.
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Rural voters played an important role in the last election. As the Senate considers a new Secretary of Agriculture and Congress begins work on a new Farm Bill, it’s important to consider the effect that food and farm policy has on rural communities, especially those that are impoverished.
Last fall, an EWG investigation debunked the agriculture industry’s claims that American farms “feed the world.” In fact, fewer than 1 percent of U.S. exports go toward feeding the hungriest nations.
In recent years, important bipartisan progress has been made to food policy, including new food safety laws, new rules and incentives for healthier packaged foods, increased access to healthier foods, new rules to require healthier food in schools, and efforts to make food labels more transparent.
Can we reform farm policies to support healthier diets? The Washington Post’s food writer Tamar Haspel discounts the role that subsidies can play in the choices farmers make, noting that subsidies flow to some barley and lentil farmers, as well as corn and soybean farmers.
