Fields of Rotting Food Are Stark Example of Trump’s Incompetence
By Heidi Heitkamp and Sister Simone Campbell
As the economic fallout of COVID-19 becomes increasingly severe, Americans across the country are starting to ask: how will I feed my family? Before the pandemic, 29.8 million American children relied on free or reduced-price lunch offered through their schools. Now, with schools closed and tens of millions unemployed, families are being forced into a precarious position. To whom should they look for answers? Certainly not the Trump administration, whose callous political appointees have hollowed out the very agencies Americans should be able to rely on when confronted by the most severe economic contraction in 100 years.
We need federal leadership that understands the magnitude of the problems facing families, and the moral responsibility of our federal government to respond to this global crisis. Nowhere is the administration’s leadership deficit so apparent as our national food supply chain. Feeding the hungry is an anchor tenet of our Catholic faith, and our nation’s leaders must protect the vulnerable. With millions of hungry schoolchildren suddenly losing access to school lunch programs, a competent administration would spring into action. But not the Trump administration. Instead, as schools and restaurants closed, unemployment numbers skyrocketed, and food pantries cried out for help — the Trump administration repeated the pattern of behavior that had come to define its response to the pandemic: it waited.
For six long weeks, the economic situation for working families deteriorated because of a deadly virus that swept the nation. And as paychecks were cut off and savings dried up — and children went days without lunch — the Trump administration twiddled its thumbs. One might say, “That’s unfair. The president can’t be everywhere, doing everything, all at once.” They would be right — but he has the full force of the U.S. government to assist him. It is the moral duty of a leader to ensure that their people are kept safe, and that means using every resource to stop families from going hungry. Trump has abdicated this duty.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in agricultural communities across the country, farmers grew increasingly alarmed. Schools and restaurants amount for most of the meat and dairy consumption nationwide. With shutdowns closing cafeterias and dining rooms across the country, there was a glut of agricultural goods — eggs, milk, and produce — that had nowhere to go. This is shocking in and of itself, but even more so because Trump’s reelection likely hinges on the continued political support of rural communities, many of them powered by agricultural economies. If for no other reason, perhaps Trump’s sense of self-preservation would make moving surplus resources from Point A to the hungry mouths at Point B a priority. After all, Trump has long claimed to be a friend to the farmer.
In Trump’s America, however, the U.S. Department of Agriculture needed six weeks to announce it would buy surplus agricultural goods and help coordinate getting the fruit of farm labor to the food banks and nonprofits serving America’s most vulnerable to food insecurity. In those six weeks, millions had filed for unemployment — with nearly 4 million losing their jobs the week the USDA plan was announced. And millions of pounds of food lay rotting in fields across the country.
In Idaho, 1 million pounds of onions were destroyed. Entire fields of squash and tomatoes were plowed over — better buried in the ground than left to fester and become a magnet for pests. Dairy Farmers of America, an industry group, estimated over 3 million gallons of milk were being dumped each day. Millions of unhatched chicken eggs were smashed each week. All the while, families in America were wondering where they would get their next meal, and farmers struggled to find outlets with the capacity to absorb the volume of available product. Many farms declared bankruptcy altogether.
Our federal policies have failed rural communities for decades, leading to increased poverty, lack of jobs and access to health care, and no meaningful investment in broadband and other infrastructure. Many of these issues are detailed in a report NETWORK published in February of 2020, and now the COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated the problems in rural communities. Rural families were already hurting, now they’re starving.
When people need food, but farmers are dumping their livelihoods down the drain, there’s a failure of leadership. There is not a failure of the farmer or failure of the distribution system — it’s a failure of connecting those two. Unsurprisingly, Trump has signaled he is not interested in that sort of work. Sitting maskless in a PPE manufacturing facility, the president told ABC’s David Muir in May, “I want to be a cheerleader for our country.” The problem is our nation’s children and farmers do not need someone to offer encouragement from the sidelines. They need someone to lead. Who we elect matters, and our country needs a new leader.
Heidi Heitkamp served as the first female senator elected from North Dakota from 2013–2019 and is co-founder of the One Country Project. Sister Simone Campbell, SSS is the executive director of NETWORK, the nation’s leading lobby for Catholic social justice.
