Within a year, Congress and the White House will begin negotiating the next Farm Bill, that monstrously complex piece of legislation that dominates our farm and food policy.

Both sides will do so amid a generalized zeal to slash budget deficits. The new Republican majority in the House swept into power in a wave of deficit hysteria (their own, that is; it turns out politicians and pundits are much more deficit-fixated than the broad public). As Tea Party stalwart Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-Minn.) put it on her blog last week, “Starting in January the majority can focus on reducing the debt, repealing Obamacare, and restoring limited government.”

The Obama administration, too, has displayed its “deficit hawk” feathers, declaring a three-year freeze on “non-defense discretionary spending” in January. In April, Obama created a bipartisan “deficit commission” charged to come up with policies to “balance the budget, excluding interest payments on the debt, by 2015.”

Before I get to what all of this means to food-system reform, let me state that I think it’s imbecilic to obsess about deficits now. The unemployment rate is stuck near 10 percent; another 7 percent of the population qualifies as “underemployed”; and 14.7 million Americans — including a million children — face “low food security” aka hunger pains. Economists such as James K. Galbraith and the Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman argue persuasively that fiscal austerity at a time of depressed employment just delivers more economic pain, not any impetus for a real recovery.

Indeed, the government can now borrow money at near-zero interest rates. What we should be doing now is investing in the infrastructure for a new green economy. Unlike other proposals for stimulating the economy — like launching yet another senseless war, as one centrist pundit recently suggested — a green-infrastructure program would both put people to work now and and create assets on the ground that will make the economy more efficient and less ecologically destructive in the future.