Por Sylvia Regan
Paralegal de investigación
Donald Trump and RFK Jr. claim their administration will “Make America Healthy Again,” but their most recent report shows that MAHA can’t deliver the changes to our food system we need for a healthier future.
In May, the MAHA commission released “The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” a 72-page assessment of the conditions that the commission believes to be causing a chronic health crisis among American children.
A lot of pages in the report are spent on food, particularly ultra-processed foods, but there is noticeably little about the agricultural systems that are the source of the food we eat. In just one bullet point, the report discusses the consolidation of the food system under the control of a few huge corporations and that four companies control 80% of the U.S. meat market.
And yet, the report doesn’t go any further to explain why that consolidation is bad or how we could fix it. Instead, the next bullet point blames regulation for the challenges of small farmers and producers. Here lies the problem with the MAHA Report. It mentions the real problem — corporate control — but with a quick sleight-of-hand shifts the blame to regulation of corporate power, Trump and his corporate cronies’ real target.
This is the heart of the MAHA grift: pretending to care about real problems that many Americans face to garner popular buy-in, then twisting this support to justify policies that favor the powerful industry players that profit off our broken food system.
Read The MAHA Report’s Claims with Skepticism
First, some level-setting: Science matters. Facts matter. Combined with the experiences of the people most impacted by industrial animal agriculture, science grounds our work and is key to holding Big Ag accountable for the damage it wreaks on our planet and our bodies.
But MAHA and the Trump Administration are no friends to science — from peddling anti-vax conspiracy theories to purging climate science from government websites, this administration willfully ignores and twists science to suit its political whims.
The MAHA Report claims to be “a common scientific basis” for future work from the MAHA commission, but it has already been dinged by scientific professionals for “stretching the limits of science,” making misleading representations of studies, and even citing studies that do not exist (possibly because AI helped write it). The MAHA Report is not rigorously-reviewed science. It is a politically motivated report by a committee of political nominees, so don’t take its claims at face value.
The MAHA Report: Plenty of Handwaving, Little Substance
The report points a finger at a few key issues, including poor diet and exposure to chemical pollution, that impact human health. In the diet section, the report identifies a very real problem: the agriculture industry, and within it especially the meat industry, is highly concentrated in the hands of just a few corporations.
And yet, it doesn’t explain at all why this consolidation is harmful. The report is silent on the many ways Big Ag’s domination of our food system affects our health: it crowds out independent farmers growing food sustainably, pollutes our air, water and lands, increases the risk of new and stronger diseases incubated in factory farms (like bird flu), and particularly threatens the health of workers and residents of the rural communities where industrial agricultural facilities are located.
Rather than addressing these pressing dangers Big Ag creates in service of maximizing corporate profits or suggesting ways to build a food system for the people, the MAHA report implies that regulation is the biggest threat to independent food producers. But why would a report about how to make food healthier push for removing rules that help make sure our food is made safely and fairly?
Deregulation is bad news for the health of workers and consumers. Trump’s administration has thrown meat and food corporations huge bones, like moving to let slaughterhouses set even faster line speeds and withdrawing a rule to limit salmonella in poultry. These changes make workers and consumers less safe.
The biggest winners from deregulation are the huge corporations that lobby to remove rules that they find inconvenient to their profits.
Another place where the Trump Administration’s actions speak louder than the MAHA Report’s words? What foods our kids get at school. The report lifts up France as an exemplar for requiring schools to source much of their food from local farmers. Yet Trump’s USDA has cut billions in funding for programs that connected schools, food banks, and other organizations with fresh, healthy meat and produce from local producers. These cuts are bad for kids and disastrous for the independent farmers building a healthier food system. The only ones who benefit are the Big Ag giants who will tighten their grip like they did in the last administration.
The MAHA Report Perpetuates Big Ag’s Myths and Leaves Independent Farmers Behind
The MAHA Report can’t help us build a better food system, because it offers no analysis of the dominant system we need to transform. It only pays lip service to caring about farmers, saying “Farmers are the backbone of America – and the most innovative and productive in the world. We continue to feed the world as the largest food exporter. The greatest step the United States can take to reverse childhood chronic disease is to put whole foods produced by American farmers and ranchers at the center of healthcare.”
Sounds nice, right? We all want to support farmers feeding people. But this report parrots some of Big Ag’s favorite myths that it uses to deceive the public and escape scrutiny. The first is that every enterprise that grows food or produces animals for meat is a farmer. The reality is that less and less farmland is being stewarded by farmers in the way you probably picture when you hear the word “farmer” — people who own, live, and work on their land, and especially farmers who raise multiple crops and animals. Rather, huge corporations now control the market, buying up land, producing huge volumes of the same products, and crowding out smaller farmers.
But Big Ag doesn’t want you to draw the distinction between a farmer and a corporation that makes food — and apparently neither does MAHA.
The other myth Big Ag loves is that their methods of producing foods — extreme confinement of animals, reliance on chemical pesticides and fertilizers, exploiting workers — are necessary and justified because they are needed to produce enough food to feed the world. But the truth is, these corporations work the way they do to game the system and maximize their profits, not out of the goodness of their hearts. They aren’t worried about feeding the world, and they aren’t producing food in a way that meets the health needs of people at home or abroad.
If MAHA wants to offer Americans healthy, whole foods grown by American farmers, it should make policies that support independent, diversified farms and help farmers fetch fair prices for their products. These farmers want to grow food that nourishes their neighbors and communities, but the odds are stacked against them.
Instead, the MAHA Report actually hurts independent producers by propping up Big Ag’s facade that corporations are farmers, too, and making it easier for Big Ag companies to take advantage of programs meant to support farmers. And worse, the larger Trump Administration’s grant cancellations, tariffs, and firing of staff that help farmers are damaging the healthy, local food systems we really need.
Striving for a truly healthy food future
The MAHA Report only skims the surface of the issues that plague our health system. Instead of tackling the unfair power structure at play, the report merely gestures at the struggles of independent farmers while providing political cover for the Trump Administration’s destructive actions that jeopardize fair, healthier food systems and further entrench Big Ag’s dominance.
At FarmSTAND, we’re of the mind that MAHA — an idea inextricably tied to the anti-immigrant, anti-worker, anti-environment MAGA — is incompatible with our movement to build a fair food system that is healthy for everyone. The MAHA Report confirms this. It hides the systemic injustices in our food and economic systems and therefore can never lead us towards a truly just future.
FarmSTAND has been working to build for a healthier food system long before MAHA entered the scene, combining groundbreaking litigation with community organizing to deliver meaningful change.
We know that real change comes from communities, and we’re not holding out hope that Trump’s MAHA Commission will champion the needs of those most harmed by industrial agriculture.
Instead, we’re fighting for a future where agriculture supports healthy eating, living, and working conditions for everyone. That’s why we sued Trump’s USDA for illegally cancelling grants that support sustainable agriculture. It’s why we use laws like the Packers & Stockyards Act in court to fight for growers bankrupted by dishonest agribusinesses.
A truly healthy food system won’t make anyone sick — including farmworkers and meat processing workers. For us, fighting for a healthier future means winning COVID-19 protections for slaughterhouse workers, protecting the rights of seasonal farmworkers to see medical service providers without employer retaliation, and fighting for Michigan workers who are denied workers’ compensation just because they are undocumented.
A better food system is built by people, not a politician’s pet project. If you want to join the real fight, make sure you join us to get the latest updates.