Vilsack for agriculture?

CQ reports that former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack has "emerged as the frontrunner" for secretary of agriculture in the Obama administration. Ezra Klein is worried: Anyone who cares about food policy, or who was excited by Barack Obama’s offhand reference to Michael Pollan’s food policy manifesto, should be extremely skeptical of this pick. Iowa, of ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.

CQ reports that former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack has "emerged as the frontrunner" for secretary of agriculture in the Obama administration. Ezra Klein is worried:

CQ reports that former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack has "emerged as the frontrunner" for secretary of agriculture in the Obama administration. Ezra Klein is worried:

Anyone who cares about food policy, or who was excited by Barack Obama’s offhand reference to Michael Pollan’s food policy manifesto, should be extremely skeptical of this pick. Iowa, of course, is a corn state. For the last 14 years, they’ve been the leading corn producer in the nation. In 2006, they grew almost 2.1 billion bushels. But they don’t just grow corn. They also demand subsidies. And they get them. Tens of billions of dollars of them. And corn subsidies are far and away the worst of our food policy abominations — they make processed food cheaper, meat cheaper, sweeteners cheaper, and create a market for ethanol that would not naturally exist.

These subsidies also play a major role in boosting global food prices, earning them a place on our list of Obama’s 10 worst ideas.

As we move further into the transition phase, it will be interesting to see which of these ideas will actually turn into policies and which were just campaign-trail pandering. Appointing Vilsack would probably indicate that good times will continue to roll for King Corn, at the expense of the world’s poor and the environment. On the other hand, David Weigel thinks the Rahm Emanuel pick might indicate that renegotiating NAFTA falls into the pander category.

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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