The Triple Bottom Line Blog

Perhaps the most important business story in today's New York Times appears not in the business section but in the "Dining In/Dining Out" section, normally devoted to restaurant reviews and recipes. In an article titled "The Debate Over Subsidizing Snacks," food writer Marian Burros analyzes the battle surrounding various versions of the farm bill now making their way through Congress. The key grafs:

Increasingly, people are blaming the farm bill, and the longstanding agriculture policy it embodies, for some of the problems afflicting the country: the growth in obesity, the increase in food poisonings, and the disappearance of the family farm. Payments for farmers were started in the 1930s during the Depression to help save family farms; now the program costs billions and benefits about one-third of the nation’s farmers.

Changes in the farm bill are being supported by the Bush administration and an unusual alliance that includes the American Heart Association, Environmental Defense, Taxpayers for Common Sense and GMA/FPA, a food industry association. They agree that some subsidies should be cut and money spent instead to help fruit and vegetable growers, protect farmland, support small farmers and promote healthier eating.

For the first time, lobbyists for farm subsidies are facing off in the halls of Congress against hundreds of activists.

We see here a theme we've written about a lot: the growing public interconnectedness of all the links in an industry's value chain. In this case, the connections are being pushed by ever-more-informed, ever-more-sophisticated activists who are joining forces to create multiple pressure points at which to push for change in a system they view as having multiple flaws.

A decade or two ago, the chances for altering America's farm subsidies program (which was widely recognized as unbalanced and wasteful even then) were slim, mainly because the lobby that supported the program (the farmers themselves) was concentrated, united, and well organized, while the opposition was scattered, disunited, and disorganized. Today this is changing. And a big reason is that consumers have come to recognize the connections between the checks the government writes to support producers of a few favored commodities--soybeans, corn, rice, wheat, and cotton--and the nutrition habits developed by kids in their school cafeterias.

Armed with this new sophistication, they are creating alliances among disparate interest groups that, in combination, have far more clout than any single organization could muster--enough, perhaps, to overcome the powerful opposition of U.S. agribusiness.

If you're a business manager, you can no longer afford to take an atomized view of your industry or behave as if you're responsible just for the handful of activities you conduct on your own. You need to start taking a wide-angle view that includes everyone in your value chain and the human, economic, environmental, and social effects they all produce. Because sooner or later--and probably sooner--the outsiders who scrutinize business will start judging you through just such a wide-angle lens, and you'd better be prepared for what they will see.

Labels: Food and Agriculture, Role of Government