During the 1990s there were numerous mergers between agricultural, pharmaceutical, and chemical firms tied to the global seed industry that aimed to take advantage of potential synergies and secure even greater corporate profit and strength. Because the mergers took place within the globalized market where most seed industry markets exist beyond one nation-state, however, these expected synergies were not realized and resulted in the spin off of numerous agricultural divisions: Monsanto, for example, merged with Pharmacia and Upjohn before a new Monsanto division, now focusing on agriculture, separated to form a new entity. Syngenta began with the merge between the agribusiness divisions of Novartis and Zeneca. However, AstraZeneca, which focuses on pharmaceuticals, remains a separate company. Bayer acquired the agribusiness operations of Aventis, yet Sonofi-Aventis remains a financially distinct pharmaceutical company. By 2009, six companies with pharmaceutical and chemical origins held control over 67% of the global seed industry. Collectively, in addition to the lobbying strength they exert and the private funding they funnel into public institutions, corporations have also been effective in translating their economic power into political power by way of the “revolving door” between corporations and the government. In 1999, for example, Monsanto was described as a “virtual retirement home for members of the Clinton administration.” The outcome of such tight relationships between corporations and governments is readily apparent in federal legislation that upholds agribusiness power.
The “Farmer Assurance Provision,” for example—a provision of a bill that was signed into law in March 2013 by President Obama, bud drying rack yet only remained in effect for six months—undermined the Department of Agriculture’s authority to ban genetically modified crops, even if the court ruled that such crops posed human and environmental health risks. Significantly, Republican Senator Roy Blunt worked directly with Monsanto employees to draft the initial provision. Although supporters stated that the provision was necessary to protect farmers from endless legal complaints by opponents of GMOs that hold up critical research, the Farmer Assurance Provision would have ensured a lack of corporate liability. THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION defines food security as having consistent access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life. At its core, however, food insecurity is a matter of income and poverty. As such, programs that aim to remedy food insecurity—most notably, the Farm Bill’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program —hold potential not only as key nutrition assistance programs, but also as part of the anti-poverty programs and safety net to support historically marginalized communities in the United States, including low-income communities and communities of color. This is especially the case during times of economic hardship. In this context, Part II first provides a brief snapshot of the state of poverty, food insecurity, and public nutrition assistance in the United States . It then addresses the origins of SNAP and its supposed concretization as an anti-poverty program in the 1970s, while tracing key periods of the erosion of the program tied to corporate influence and larger trends in public assistance reform.
It then addresses in greater detail ongoing corporate influence and gain, particularly in the context of neoliberal economic and political restructuring since the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the myths against public assistance that undergird such gain: anti-poor and racist “culture of poverty” stereotypes, and the stereotype that people on SNAP are “not in a hurry to get off.” Finally, Part II further challenges these and other myths against public assistance and investigates the relationship between SNAP and Unemployment Insurance , another major safety net program, by highlighting their role during the global recession that followed the 2007–2008 financial meltdown. The 2007 subprime mortgage crisis that triggered the “Great Recession” was caused in part by intense financialization: relaxed lending standards and problematic federal housing policies, massive household debt, and the infamous real-estate bubble, among other factors. By exploring the racialized impacts of this decline in economic activity as well as the support available to low-income communities and communities of color—most notably SNAP and UI—this part argues that safety net programs have become essential for such communities. These communities use most of their total expenditures on food and other basic necessities, and are the hardest hit during such economic downtowns. While it also argues that such safety net programs, particularly SNAP, are an important strategy in preventing and alleviating poverty in the United States, Part II ultimately argues that the strong ties between SNAP and corporate control undermine long term and structural work against poverty and structural racialization.The Food Stamps Program, which was later renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program , originated in the rural relief and commodity support policies of the New Deal era and, in the wake of the Great Depression, was just as much a farm price support program as an anti-poverty one. As part of the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation facilitated farmer and consumer support by allowing the federal government to distribute farm commodities, purchased at reduced prices, to state and local hunger relief agencies.
Spearheading President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” was the 1964 Food Stamp Act, which gained notoriety as a national anti-poverty program. Under the Food Stamp Act, food stamp benefits were financed by the government and administrative costs shared with states. Only with the 1977 Food and Agriculture Act enacted under President Jimmy Carter was SNAP directly incorporated as part of Farm Bill legislation. Before then, despite the work of the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, the Farm Bill had long been geared primarily toward commodity support programs. During a decade that saw Black unemployment rise from less than double that of whites to 2.5 times that of whites , this move by the Carter Administration was generally hailed as their principal anti-poverty achievement. Toward this end, in the 1970s alone, federal expenditure on food support grew by about 500%. In 1981, a series of corporate- and government-driven cuts to public assistance began, with SNAP undergoing severe budget cuts of about $1.8 billion, or 16% of its budget, along with cuts to other food and agriculture support programs under the Farm Bill. President Ronald Reagan, who ushered in the era of neoliberalism, made “welfare queens” an epithet, and turned SNAP into a symbol of the ills of big government, made severe cuts to SNAP and other domestic spending, which coincided with the deep recession of the early 1980s. Subsequently, food insecurity in the United States rose during the 1980s and poverty peaked with 15.2% of the population living under the poverty level, vertical grow rack system the highest since the end of the 1960s. These cuts also facilitated the rapid growth of food banks and grassroots hunger relief agencies—rather than federal public assistance programs—as an appropriate response to the rise in hunger: more than 80% of pantries and soup kitchens currently operating came into existence between 1980 and 2001. Significantly, these cuts mirrored the broader trends in the corporatization of the food system, as outlined in Part I, including scaling back of federal efforts to stabilize prices for farmers and cushion the impact of market volatility, corporate growth, consolidation, and influence in the food system more broadly. In order to combat the growing hunger crisis in the United States, funding was partially restored to SNAP in 1988 and 1990. Funding increases were accompanied by efforts to not only streamline administration of SNAP with an early form of the Electronic Benefit Transfer card, but also to expand eligibility for low-income communities. Yet SNAP’s growth in the early 1990s was countered in the mid-1990s with the conversion of funds into block grants to the states, and the enactment of more strict requirements on SNAP usage and eligibility. Although more aid was still provided to the public in terms of volume, in conjunction with the wave of cuts in federal spending in the mid-1990s, private sector aid became the fastest growing form of food assistance and had overtaken SNAP and other public aid. The 1996 Farm Bill represents the culmination of neoliberal-oriented public assistance reform that ramped up in the early 1980s, and marked the ongoing reallocation of tax dollars from public support programs to corporations themselves. SNAP in particular was cut by $26 billion over six years in the 1996 Farm Bill, a central part of Clinton’s campaign pledge to reform the public assistance system that consolidated Reagan’s neoliberal program of small government, tax cuts, deregulation, free trade agreements, and monetarist financial policies at the expense of low-income communities and communities of color. Although SNAP was reauthorized in the 1996 Farm Bill, major changes to the program were enacted in conjunction with the concurrent Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act of 1996 , framed as a supposed “reassertion of America’s work ethic.”
Most significantly, the 1996 Farm Bill and the PRWORA together eliminated SNAP eligibility for most legal permanent residents and placed a time limit on SNAP receipt for able-bodied adults without dependents who are not working at least 20 hours a week . Following the concurrent cuts to federal aid under the 1996 Farm Bill and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act, substantial changes were made to SNAP in the early 2000s. These cuts, in part, caused a dramatic rise in hunger, and loss of support for low-income communities and communities of color. The 2001 Farm Bill restored SNAP eligibility to an estimated 148,000 households, including LPRs. However, eligibility was restored to only about two-thirds as many families as would have been affected by a full restoration to pre-1996 support, which was extended to all legal immigrants, regardless of length of US residency or age. Over the course of the decade, SNAP spending grew from $21 billion in 2000 to $80 billion in 2012. The financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, and the recession it precipitated, was responsible for a significant part of this increase. The budget for SNAP was substantially bolstered in 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, with an additional $45.2 billion authorized over four years that allowed SNAP to temporarily maintain and increase monthly benefits for low-income communities and communities of color. Neoliberal political and economic restructuring from the late 1970s and early 1980s has promoted corporate profiteering from public assistance programs such as SNAP, albeit at the expense of low-income communities and communities of color. The Economic Policy Institute’s 2012 “The State of Working America” report maintains that low wages are caused by low minimum wage and weakened unions, as well as the effects of globalization, driven in large part by neoliberal economic policy. Thus, highlighting how corporations stand to benefit from keeping wages low, Jan Hatzius, chief US economist at Goldman Sachs stated, “The strength is directly related to the weakness in hourly wages.” Toward this end, according to a 2015 University of California, Berkeley Labor Center Study, “real hourly wages of the median American worker were just 5% higher in 2013 than they were in 1979, while the wages of the bottom decile of earners were 5% lower in 2013 than in 1979.” Significantly, according to the National Employment Law Project, the majority of low-wage workers are actually employed by large corporations, with 57.4% of workers employed by the food services industry—among the largest job sectors in the United States. In short, the federal government picks up the tab for corporations with programs such as SNAP. According to the same UC Berkeley Labor Center study, “when jobs don’t pay enough, workers turn to public assistance in order to meet their basic needs.” Overall, the study found that between 2009 and 2011 the federal government spent $127.8 billion per year on SNAP, Medicaid/CHIP, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families , and the Earned Income Tax Credit for working families, and that the states collectively spent $25 billion per year on Medicaid/CHIP and TANF for working families for a total of $152.8 billion per year. In all, $280.6 billion, or 56% of combined state and federal spending on public assistance goes to working families. The SNAP program in particular had 10.3 million working families receiving assistance, comprising 36% of the total program enrollment and $26.7 billion in costs, or 38% of total federal expenditures on this program. Significantly, SNAP and these other programs provide vital support to millions of working families whose employers pay less than a livable wage.