What's obesity got to do with the price of corn in Iowa?

A Michael Pollan opinion piece that appeared in yesterday's New York Times is reverberating in the ag community. Pollan contends that the United State's high spending on health care can be explained by the country's obesity crisis, and that fact will eventually pit health care interests against agribusiness.

". . . Our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry," Pollan wrote.

Here are some comments from Pollan about a brewing bout between health insurers and agribusiness:

• Reforming the food system is politically even more difficult than reforming the health care system
  
  
• Agribusiness dominates the agriculture committees of Congress, and has swatted away most efforts at reform
  
  
• In the same way much of the health insurance industry threw its weight behind the campaign against smoking, we can expect it to support, and perhaps even help pay for, (food-related) public education efforts
  
  
• The health care reform bill is only the first step in solving our health care crisis
  
  
• It's easy to imagine the (health care) industry throwing its weight behind a soda tax

Matt Bogard of AgWeb is indignant.

He points to a 2007 UC Davis research report that disputes the strong connection between obesity and farm policy.

"Given that consumers generally show limited responses to retail food price changes, eliminating the corn subsidy would reduce corn-based food consumption by at most 0.2 percent," Bogard quoted the report.

In closing, Bogard coined the phrase: "What's obesity got to do with the price of corn in Iowa?" Not much, he concludes.