Brownfield Agriculture Network reporter Peter Shinn posted a story on their site yesterday with the intriguing headline:

Negative press coverage influences farm bill debate

The story Shinn writes is in reaction to this story in the Omaha World Herald that spoke about the latest Disaster Aid package approved by Congress. The Omaha World Herald asks some tough questions about the constant stream of disaster aid directed at farmers. House Ag Chairman Peterson had this comment to make in the story about the coming proposal for permanent disaster relief:

It would be somewhat of a new subsidy, Peterson said.

Shinn makes an effort to discredit the Omaha World Herald piece and brings in Nebraska Farm Bureau President Keith Olsen to bolster his argument.

Oh, no, no, Olsen said. It wasn't talking about where does that money go, and in most cases the farmers don't keep it. It goes to pay bills - it goes to pay off debt - because they haven't raised any crops.

Go here for a comment from our President in regards to that last quote.

For the record, the EWG supported the most recent disaster relief package. Mr. Shinn, working for a news organization, would have found that out had he called our office. To me, the rub in Shinn's piece comes from University of Nebraska at Lincoln ag policy specialist Dr. Brad Lubben:

I believe every major daily across the country has, at some point, run an article, an editorial, about these payments and where they're going, and that has changed the tenor of the debate in Washington and across the country.

Why would every major daily in the country have run a piece critical of current farm subsidy policy? Could it be because the system is broken? No, can't be.

According to Lubben, the database of farm program payments first compiled by the Environmental Working Group more than five years ago has driven most of the negative publicity for commodity programs.

Farmers across the political spectrum who happen to collect subsidies from taxpayers commonly unpack a familiar talking point to blunt criticism of the payments, and we'll hear it again when we roll out our dramatic new database June 12. "We don't keep the money, it's not 'profit'," they'll say. "We just turn right around and pay it out to cover our expenses." Which expenses, they seem to believe, are higher than the urban majority (who "don't know where their food comes from") could possibly comprehend.

I've often wondered why so many farmers seem to think a New Yorker paying $2,300 a month for an efficiency, or a suburbanite buying a four dollar latte for the cup holder of her $40,000 SUV, will register shocked sympathy upon hearing that a combine (whatever that is) costs $180,000--when you couldn't touch a 1 BDR condo for that price on either coast. Someone's out of touch here, and I'm not sure its all of us who supposedly don't know milk doesn't come in a carton. My experience is just the opposite. I've seen many a farmer's eyes widen at the prices on a DC menu (though it must be said they invariably fight you for the check), and many a Beltway denizen drool over small-town real estate prices.

Nonetheless, this particular circling of the subsidy wagons amounts to saying that farm payments don't benefit the people or businesses who actually collect them from the taxpayer. The real beneficiaries, the argument goes, are the businesses farmers buy their inputs from, the banks that lend them money to own and operate their farms, the feedlots and grain conglomerates that buy the "cheap food" (or cotton) the subsidies pay farmers to grow in excess.

Translated to those of us in the paved world, this tortured defense amounts to saying that your salary isn't really paid to you, but to the bank that holds the note on your car or the mortgage on your home, or to the landlord who owns that $2,300-a-month efficiency you're renting. Will he ever fix the dishwasher? You're just the middleman, the pass through. After all, is it really your paycheck if most of it flies out the window to pay the cell phone, restaurant and dry cleaning bills, buy health insurance, keep your kid in college, or cover that vacation to Cancun?

No one knows how farmers who receive subsidies spend them, of course. No government rules stipulate how farmers must use their payments, any more than regulations out of Washington prescribe how seniors must spend their Social Security checks. Farm subsidies can be plowed into the farm or into a vacation home. It's no one's business but theirs.

Given the meager amount most recipients collect--a few hundred bucks a year--subsidies can't possibly make most farmers rich (two-thirds of farmers collect no farm bill subsidies at all). Then again, some recipients are significantly enriched by subsidies, particularly if they are landowners whose investments are both secured and inflated in value by a steady stream of taxpayer support. USDA studies (like this one) routinely show that the biggest recipients have net worths far in excess of most Americans.

...slightly over one percent of farm households received about 25% of total government payments to farm households, and about one-fifth of one percent of farm households received almost 9% of all payments. Moreover, households in the highest payment category (more than $150,000 of government payments) averaged more than $2.1 million dollars of net worth. By these tenancy-adjusted measures of well-being, a disproportionate share of government payments went to well-off farmers in 1999.

Which is to say that wealth and income status officially have almost nothing to do with qualifying for farm subsidies. A person of very considerable means, with an adjusted gross income of up to $2.5 million per year under federal rules, can legally collect farm subsidies that range from trivial amounts to seven figures. Taxpayers are well within their rights to take offense, or at least raise an eyebrow, all along that wasteful continuum. And big farmers (earning 75 percent of that $2.5 million AGI from agriculture) are exempt from even this laughable eligibility "limit".

It's also no doubt the case that some of the very largest recipients of federal farm subsidies, far from being enriched by the taxpayers' money, would not have been able to survive at all, much less expand their operations, without a constant infusion of big government checks.

But what is to be said about a government policy that obligates taxpayers to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in unencumbered aid every year, for years on end and with no end in sight, just to keep one business and its owners on the brink of insolvency? Isn't that policy just as bad, in its way, as a subsidy that makes the wealthy wealthier? And why do we do so much for farm businesses and by comparison so little for factory workers laid off by foreign competition, or small businesses that struggle year after year?

Let's be clear. Farm subsidies go to, and benefit, the businesses and people who collect them, no matter what bills it helps them pay, no matter how bitterly or resentfully they pay them--with taxpayers' money. Should common sense fail to parse meaning here, it is plain enough in any dictionary you might care to consult:

...a direct pecuniary aid furnished by a government to a private industrial undertaking, a charity organization, or the like. (Random House)

Monetary assistance granted by a government to a person or group in support of an enterprise regarded as being in the public interest. (American Heritage)

...a grant paid by a government to an enterprise that benefits the public. (WordNet)

A grant made by a government to some individual or business in order to maintain an acceptable standard of living or to stimulate economic growth. (American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy)

The important policy questions in this farm bill cycle have much less to do with what becomes of subsidy payments than with who receives them, and why. Congress has sloppily decreed through the years that you can collect farm subsidies whether you really need them or just because they're there for the collecting. You'd be stupid not to partake either way.

Which is why our original Farm Subsidy Database, and even more so its forthcoming upgrade, affords views of farm policy that alternate between high purpose and high satire.

Mulch. It's good.

Happy Memorial Day.

So it would seem.

Always a good idea to drop by The Ethicurean when you have a sec, but this item from DairyQueen (we're not worthy!) deserves special attention.

The House’s Agriculture Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry has added this language to its markup of the Farm Bill:

No State or locality shall make any law prohibiting the use in commerce of an article that the Secretary of Agriculture has inspected and passed; or determined to be of non-regulated status.

Basically, this vague-sounding sentence would override state laws prohibiting or regulating the use of genetically modified food, food from clones, or other types of food so long as they were approved by USDA. So, bye-bye to the bans on GMO planting enacted by three California counties (Mendocino, Trinity and Marin), adios to cloned-food-labeling bills introduced by California legislators, so long to Washington State legislation that prohibits planting of GE canola in areas near the state’s large non-GE seed production. The USDA is the decider. States are the soldiers who don’t question orders.

EWG has not taken positions on GMOs in the past--it's been outside our research area. But we do object, in principle, to proposals that would preempt by federal fiat state and local efforts that are intended to strengthen protection of the environment or public health.

DairyQueen--Your Highness--EWG will add this issue to our Farm Bill agenda and pass the word along to our colleagues.

Much thanks.

As prices at the pump inch towards the 1981 record (adjusted for inflation), ethanolics and petrolists face off on the front of The NYT this morning to apportion the blame ("Oil Industry Says Biofuel Push May Keep Gas Prices High").

The news? Oil companies don't like ethanol. They don't make it--not yet, anyway. And with all the subsidies and mandates pushing cornstarch-based ethanol towards its supposed 15 billion gallon maximum production level--which level amounts to a pile of assumptions propped up by 'what-ifs'--the oil companies are stomping their little feet and refusing to build more domestic refineries.

It's not just that their feelings are hurt after being caught cheating on Clean Air Act rules and lying about it. They just can't afford it.

"Big Oil companies are reaping record profits," the chairman [Rep. Bart Stupak, D-TN] said. During the first three months of 2007, he pointed out, Royal Dutch Shell's profits were $7.3 billion, Chevron made $4.7 billion, ConocoPhillips made $3.5 billion and ExxonMobil's profits were $9.2 billion.

But it turns out chutzpah can be made from either crude oil or corn. Back to the Times:

As a result of the push for biofuels, and encouraged by federal subsidies and grants [and a federal mandate to make 7.5 billion gallons of it by 2012!--KC], dozens of ethanol distilleries are being planned. These investments should double the annual production of ethanol from corn to 15 billion gallons by 2012 from about 6 billion gallons today.

But given farmland constraints and the need to use corn for food, that is as much ethanol as can possibly be produced from corn, according to the ethanol industry’s own calculations. Ethanol producers recognize that it is not clear how an additional 20 billion gallons of ethanol — President Bush has called for 35 billion gallons of biofuels by 2017 — would be produced from cellulose or biomass.

“The current thinking is that based on today’s technology, we suspect corn-based ethanol will generate at least 15 billion gallons,” said Brian Jennings, the executive vice president of the American Coalition for Ethanol, an association of ethanol and corn producers. “Beyond that, it’s uncertain. The marketplace will make that determination on where it will come from.”

You have to hand it to an industry--oh, and how we do hand it to this one--that is largely a creature of taxpayer and consumer subsidies when it can stand back, take in the big picture, and predict that "the marketplace" will eventually sort things out. Can't wait to see how the invisible hand sorts out the huge increases in gas and food prices in a year when we're at 15 billion gallons of ethanol and 100-plus million acres of corn and we come up short of....rain.

Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors: If we can send a man to the moon, surely--I say, surely--we can figure out how to water corn with assumptions!

Congress meanwhile has fingered the real culprit: price-gougers in the gas biz. The hunt for them is in full cry again on the Hill. (Can someone send in evidence of success from past hunts--preferably captured gas-gougers sprawled across the hood of a big, regulation black congressional SUV?) The heartless crooks would face stiff penalties under a House-passed bill, by golly. Except Snidely--I mean, Bush--will veto it.

Which will leave the true innocents in this saga bound, gagged and stretched across the interstate. The NYT finale...

Some consumers, meanwhile, are trying to drive less or are simply absorbing the higher cost. “I’m already driving the minimum,” said Dennis Zygnowicz, 51, of Garden City, Mich., who recently stopped at a Shell station and paid about $12 to put less than four gallons in his GMC Jimmy. “The only way I could do any less would be to ride a bike.”

They don't make the Jimmy anymore. It got well under 15 mpg in the city.

But come to think of it, Dennis, I think I'll drive the Colnago today.

Essential reading from Keith Good.

That's Environmental Defense attorney Scott Faber's succinct summation of how the House conservation subcommittee mark up went down today.

Members of a House Agriculture subcommittee were thwarted by a lack of money on Tuesday from expanding "green payments" to farmers and from creating a $305 million program to combat asthma-causing dust.

Lawmakers put the ideas on the table during the first bill-drafting session for the farm law being written this year. But they withdrew them without a vote in hopes that money will become available this summer to pay for the programs.

Here's the coverage by Chuck Abbott of Reuters.

California Democrat Dennis Cardoza said stewardship programs must be expanded so that fruit, vegetable, nut and nursery crop growers can meet a mounting regulatory burden and so that specialty crop growers get a more equitable share of supports.

He proposed a $305 million air quality program to combat dust and ozone but withdrew it because there was no money.

"This is one of the most important issues we have," said Cardoza, who said 300 congressional districts violate federal standards for clean air. "Air quality problems are going to be putting farmers out of business in my state."

Observers said that when Rep. Steve King (R-IA) wondered aloud if farmers in his district would understand why money would be spent on air pollution problems of California farmers, Rep. Cardoza wondered right back if farmers in his district would understand corn subsidies to Iowa.

Folks, this is getting interesting. And the question being begged is very simple:

Does the make up of the House Agriculture Committee reflect the full House on matters of food, agriculture, nutrition and food assistance, conservation, and biofuels...or does it reflect the narrower interests of subsidized agriculture?

From Congressional Quarterly:

Chairman’s Money Shuffle Creates Friction Over House Farm Bill Aides say members of the House Agriculture Committee are unhappy with how Chairman Collin C. Peterson has handled this year’s farm bill so far.

The dissatisfaction intensified last night 21] [May , aides said, when Peterson told panel members that his draft of the legislation would spend all of a proposed $20 billion “reserve fund” that was meant to pay for new initiatives. The announcement complicated today’s subcommittee markup of portions of the bill. Members withdrew numerous amendments because of the budgetary constraints. The Conservation, Credit, Energy, and Research Subcommittee is expected to continue its markup of the $3.8 billion conservation title of the bill throughout Tuesday afternoon.

Peterson, D-Minn., told members last night that he had spread out the $20 billion cushion across the draft bill’s 10 titles, but he would not tell members where it would go, according to aides.

The announcement frustrated both Democrats and Republicans who were counting on those funds to support new programs.

The committee can spend the extra $20 billion as long as the cost is offset somewhere else in the budget. The House leadership, however, has made no promises that it has found sufficient offsets.

Ken Cook will be on NPR's Marketplace report tonight at 6:30 EST.

He talks about the 2007 Farm Bill and its implications on conservation, bio-fuels, nutrition, the commodity title, and food stamps.

Station locater.

Rep. Tim Holden's conservation subcommittee takes the first shot at legislating the 2007 farm bill today. A flurry of amendments to Chairman Peterson's mark is expected, but the big questions have to do with money. Demand will far exceed supply if Holden is constrained by his initial funding allocation, which prohibits taking funds from other titles of the bill, including Title I--which funds the commodity programs. For example, the $26 billion or so in "fixed direct payments" that taxpayers will be making over the next 5 years even if subsidy crop prices are sky high, as they are now.

Mr. Peterson has held out the possibility of additional conservation spending through the "reserve fund" established for agriculture. But that fund will exist only if money can be found by offsetting reductions elsewhere in the budget. It also presumes that conservation, rural development, food stamps and research will be competitive with all the other demands that are being made to fill nearly two dozen other reserve funds.

Anyone fancy meeting with the House leadership to press them to put conservation ahead of, say, the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which has its own $50 billion reserve ready for funding if paid for by savings elsewhere?

Just give me a second here to check my schedule....Aw, damn, I'm busy.

Forever.

[Click to enlarge] This ad was in today's Roll Call. Pretty powerful stuff when you consider nearly 200 lawmakers support more conservation out of the 2007 farm bill.

It's the Full Monty of farm subsidy disclosure. And the results are eye-popping.

Well, maybe not this eye-popping.

EWG will launch an entirely new database of farm subsidy recipients and beneficiaries on June 12. It will be searchable to the public first thing that morning.

Based on data compiled by USDA pursuant to Section 1614 of the 2002 Farm Bill, our site will track $43.12 billion in subsidy benefits provided under Title I (commodity) and Title II (conservation) programs for 2003-2005, right down to individual beneficiaries--A.K.A. "warm bodies" or "natural persons" in USDA parlance.

It is the first time subsidy tracking to this degree has been possible.

We obtained the data in December, 2006, after years of Freedom of Information Act requests and appeals. Hat tip to those at USDA who worked so hard to comply with the law and produce the new data.

Hundreds of thousands of people who've never had a penny next to their names in our Farm Subsidy Database will now be disclosed as beneficiaries of subsidies that pass through all manner of farm businesses--coops, partnerships, joint ventures, corporations and so forth. And pass-through subsidy benefits to thousands of these folks run to six-figures year after year.

Those "top recipient" lists that generate tens of thousands of searches on our current site every day? Just about every one of those rankings is about to change, particularly in rice and cotton country. But there are surprises everywhere.

And what exactly makes these data new? As USDA put it when releasing it:

• It is the first time payments made to entities (corporations, co-ops, etc) have been attributed down to “natural persons.”

• For example, previous releases of payment data would show one large payment to a co-op. The 1614 database shows the benefits attributed to each member of the co-op.

• Certificate gains will also be attributed to individuals.

And how did USDA track benefits down to "natural persons"?

• Benefits are attributed to members of an entity by apportioning the benefits according to each member’s percentage share of that entity.

• The share percentage is found in the permitted entity file [which was released in May, 2006].

Stay tuned. We'll be dropping more hints about the new site in the days ahead.

BTW, it's called the EWG Farm Bill 2007 Policy Analysis Database. It will fully link to the Farm Subsidy Database that's already public.

When Food Stamp Challenge participant Rep. Jan Schakowski (IL-9) says "hold the Mayo", it's not out of choice.

For lunch, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Illinois Democrat, had tuna fish -- no mayonnaise -- on white bread bought for 89 cents a loaf. "I couldn't afford the mayo," she said, adding that she sliced tomatoes she bought razor-thin to make them last but "splurged on some broccoli."

Here's the link to the Congressional Food Stamp Challenge. Great stuff.

Recent news items have noted that Rep. Jim McGovern, his wife, and several other MOCs have decided to call attention to the need to increase Food Stamp Program benefits by trying to feed themselves for a week on the amount of money provided by the program. From the Sun Chronicle in Massachusetts:

Like a lot of Americans, the McGoverns went grocery shopping Monday for their weekly food supply. But unlike most, U.S. Rep. James McGovern (MA-3) and his wife, Lisa, limited themselves to $42 worth of food for the two of them. The groceries must last them seven days as they experiment with what it would be to live like the average food stamp recipient on $3 a day. James McGovern is trying to bring attention to the lack of funding for food stamps as Congress gets ready to reauthorize the Farm Bill, which includes the appropriations for nutrition. The minimum benefit of $10 a month has not been increased since the 1970s, he said. Even the average benefit of $21 per person a week is too low to adequately feed people, he said. "What we in Congress need to do is determine what is appropriate and necessary. We need a debate on our priorities," he said. So starting today, McGovern, his wife and four other members of Congress will feed themselves on $3 a day for a week.

I was on hand at the National Immigration Forum's 25th Anniversary Dinner at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where Rep. Jim McGovern was recognized for his extraordinary leadership on immigration reform issues, both as a Member of Congress and as a staffer to former Rep. Joe Moakley. Towards the end of his remarks, in which he paid tribute as others had to the Forum's founder, my friend and colleague in farm subsidy reform, Rick Swartz, McGovern said he had to leave without eating the very nice meal before us.

Why? Because it would have been cheating on his pledge to live on a Food Stamp budget this week. That's about a buck per meal, and the spread at the Mayflower would have blown the whole week's budget and then some.

Keith Good over at Farm Policy.com referenced this NY Times editorial about new energy legislation about to be introduced. Senators Bingaman and Domenichi have a three part proposal:

It seeks to reduce oil consumption by quintupling the production of biofuels — principally ethanol from sources other than corn — by 2022. It would mandate stronger efficiency standards for energy-intensive household appliances, including lighting fixtures and refrigerators. And, perhaps most important, it would try to bring to commercial scale the government’s nascent efforts to build coal-fired power plants capable of capturing and storing emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

I would argue that while capturing coal plant emissions of carbon dioxide is a noble endeavor and essential to stemming global warming, increasing the production of non-corn based biofuels by a factor of five is a huge deal. There is a growing census that policy makers need to take action on the transition to cellulosic ethanol and expanding biodiesel production. It will be curious to see how this provision fares in the competition for dollars with corn based ethanol.

No committee chair of right mind in Washington would surrender her jurisdiction to the committee of the whole and invite the writing of signature legislation on the House or Senate floor. But House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson seems to be saying lately that when it comes to the upcoming farm bill, the House floor simply has no role at all, except to approve whatever the 46 House members who make up his committee decide is right.

They'll shoot us an outline presently.

The sprawling, ominbus farm bill will be written in his committee, Chairman Peterson says, and anyone who has strong convictions about any of its important and costly components, from food stamps to trade to subsidies to conservation, ought to have gotten on his committee in the first place. Second option: pass those thoughts onto a committee member. They'll see what they can do.

What's odd about this posture is the contrast it strikes with Peterson's style to date, which harkens back, refreshingly, to legendary committee chairman Kika de la Garza, the last Democrat to hold the position 14 years ago. Instead of shutting out critics or nonfarm interest groups and fashioning policy in a tight huddle with the subsidy fraternity--in the manner of his Republican predecessors--Peterson has invited one and all to meet with him personally, and has clearly encouraged ecumenism in committee proceedings. Examine the committee's witness roster these past few months and you will see a greater diversity of viewpoints than that body has deigned to acknowledge in over a decade, with animal welfare groups, environmentalists, sustainable agriculture experts and anti-hunger organizations mixed in with farm organizations, crop subsidy lobbyists, and all manner of officials in between. Agriculture Secretary Johanns' farm bill reform ideas frosted agriculture's subsidy sector, which has hoovered up so much taxpayer money, for so long, they actually think it's theirs. Peterson received Johanns' ideas with equanimity.

All this openness doesn't amount to much, of course, if the committee fails to act on any of the ideas proposed, and the committee's word is the last word on final legislation, with no views to the contrary entertained on the House floor. Peterson has himself proclaimed more than once that some very important reforms are simply off the table--tighter payment limits, for instance, or shifts of money from one title (say, commodity subsidies) to another (conservation and nutrition).

And he has said all along that his table is the only table. He says he has the firm assurance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the farm bill will be written by his committee, not on the floor. Presumably he means that while the bill will come to the committee of the whole with an open rule that allows amendments, Speaker Pelosi will enforce caucus discipline to ensure the committee's work passes largely undisturbed; ditto for the fruits of conference.

Which raises the question on everyones' minds these days: how will Speaker Pelosi handle the pressure for farm bill reform that began mounting before the ink dried on the notorious 2002 version? After all, not a single progressive group in America supports the farm bill framework now in place, with its inequities, injustices, and misguided, wasteful spending priorities. Indeed, we have never seen so many progressive organizations actively working on farm bill reform. And they are finding they have far more in common with conservatives than they have with any farm groups, who by and large are clinging to the status quo, along with the politicians who represent them. Most of whom, naturally, are on the agriculture committee.

Will Pelosi really instruct--or tacitly signal--Democrats to approve whatever the House Agriculture Committee delivers, sometime this summer or fall? Will she discourage consideration of ideas found in the proliferation of "marker bills" that seek to tighten payment limits; shift billions out of commodity subsidies and into conservation, nutrition and rural development; give fruit and vegetable producers meaningful support; or refashion the farm safety net altogether? Will she say that when it comes to farm policy, the House has 46 members, not 435?

Is Mr. Peterson's fiat Speaker Pelosi's choice?

The National Biodiesel Board announced today a call for the 2007 Farm Bill to include specific pro-biodiesel provisions.