Do you have a waste? Let’s remove billions on the company’s farm subsidies.

Brock Rollins, our new Minister of Agriculture, is to reform the administration and create “effective and effective nutrition programs.” On its first day, “I pledged to bring greater efficiency to the US Department of Agriculture” and “stop shedding.”

If it is serious about eliminating waste, it will take a closer look at wasted delegations and billions of US tax dollars that go directly to agricultural companies every year.

What do we get this huge investment for public funds? Often an industry benefits from a few large companies and perpetuates a course of excessive production and waste. In fact, waste and spending delegations add additional costs to Americans at the top of our tax dollars, including billions in increasing food, fuel, medical costs and environmental harm.

Rollins has a great opportunity to change.

Despite spending $ 20 billion annually from our tax dollars on agriculture, Americans never see most of the American agricultural products. We only eat about 37 percent of the main producing crops. The rest feeds on the pockets of large agricultural companies – which have been converted into industrial processes that lead to increased fuel production, nourishing or exporting them outside the country and are involved in the tariff battles.

Take the biofuel industry: Congress supports biofuels through a renewable fuel standard, which requires all fuel refineries to include billions of gallons of corn-based biofuels and soybeans in gasoline and diesel-much more than the market requires.

Biological fuel did not rise to their promise. We do not need it to be independent of energy, and did not help reduce carbon emissions.

What biofuel support has done is an increase in consumer costs. In a recent report, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the renewed fuel standard increases the costs of food and fuel by more than $ 8 billion annually.

If the new Minister of Agriculture supports efficiency, she will press to help the move of corn farmers and soybeans to better land uses, produce more than we really need and rely less on subsidies.

Rollins can also treat another form of inefficiency – food waste. We waste about 40 percent of foods in our homes, restaurants, groceries and other places in the production chain. We read where dairy farms, for example, threw thousands of gallons of milk -backed milk.

The big food waste problem has been understood more than a decade ago, but almost no progress has been made. Political makers wander in food waste, but continue to vote for the benefits that stimulate excessive production, which benefits from the major companies that perpetuate the waste system.

When it comes to 37 percent of the crops we eat, the benefits that extinguish the production of foods that make us patient. The atom, which is highly supported, often ends with highly fructose drink in processed foods such as grains and sugary drinks. Through direct subsidies and import restrictions, we also support sugar cane production and beet production. Excessive consumption of these unhealthy foods contributes to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other diseases associated with diets that cost our health system more than $ 1 trillion per year.

If Rollins is really interested in making America healthy again, it must stop forcing the taxpayers to pay the food bill that makes us sick. Consumers can still buy what they want without lining up the pockets of companies that benefit from excessive production of unnecessary and unhealthy foods.

Agricultural subsidies have swollen largely due to the legend of the Bocolic family farm. Nobody wants to hurt the small farms that work hard and multiple generations that are just trying to win a sincere life.

But this is not the truth of American agriculture today. We have a small number of industrial companies that benefit from the vast majority of subsidies.

Between 2017-2022, the American agriculture industry lost more than 100,000 small and medium farms to unify. Currently, only 6 percent of farms produce 90 percent of all dairy, dairy and poultry products.

Rural societies suffer under this system. Since more profits are unified with fewer companies, the smaller farms cannot compete and the functions available in low -wage industrial facilities and unsafe in the factory conditions. Rural societies are caught with profits at the top.

Rollins says she wants to “update” the US Department of Agriculture. To do this, policies must recognize the reality of the unified companies industry today. They are family farms and rural societies – all of this to produce many unnecessary and unhealthy products supported by our tax dollars.

To be clear – not all agricultural support is a waste and ineffective. The bill of bill supports farm and lowering farmers to adopt proactive systems that reduce the need for disaster and crop insurance, including smart conservation practices that maintain air and water cleanliness, change the slow climate, and build flexibility in the harsh weather. Rollins can encourage Congress to direct all benefits to practices such as directly benefiting farmers, societies and taxpayers.

The farm bill for renewal will be this fall. Rollins will have an important sound. It will have a real opportunity to reduce waste, create efficiency and improve our health. We will know that it is serious in fulfilling its promises if it begins to focus on eliminating the benefits, mandates and unnecessary authorities.

Peter Lynar directs the sustainable food and agriculture program for Earthjustice.