Here are some refreshing farm bill developments, in light of last week's retrograde move by a House agriculture subcommittee to throw more billions of your bucks in this direction for another five years.

THIS JUST IN: Citizens Against Government Waste proclaimed said subcommittee members "Porkers of the Month."

OXFAM STUDY: AFRICAN FARMERS STAND TO GAIN FROM COTTON SUBSIDY REFORM
Our friends at Oxfam have done terrific work to keep the heat on the U.S. subsidy system, and the report launched today is but the latest contribution.

A typical cotton producing household in West Africa has about 10 family members, an average life expectancy of about 48 years and an adult literacy rate of less than 25 percent. Cotton is often the only source of cash income for these families who live on less than $1 a day per person. Added income from increased cotton prices could make a world of difference, according to Oxfam. The study found that with a complete removal of US cotton subsidies, the world price of cotton would increase by 6-14%, prices that West African farmers would receive for their cotton would increase by 5-12%, and household income would increase by 2.3 to 5.7%. This increase would result in additional income that could cover all health care costs of four to ten individuals for an entire year, or schooling costs for one to ten children, or a one year supply of food for one or two children.

“This data clearly exposes the hypocrisy of our policies, giving international aid with one hand and taking with the other through unfair trade rules,” said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America. “With Congress looking at the Farm Bill right now, and renewed interest in the Doha round, this study shows how reform could help millions of poor people who are ready to lift themselves out of poverty through farming and fair trade.”

As Celia Dugger summarized it in this morning's NYT:

Oxfam has acknowledged that cotton farmers in West Africa are contending with many problems beyond American subsidies. Cotton prices have declined, production costs have risen and yields in Africa have stagnated.

“Subsidy reform alone will not resolve all the challenges facing the cotton sector,” Oxfam said. “But it could significantly ease the burden on poor cotton farmers struggling to support their families.”

HALF OF CALIFORNIA'S CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION STANDS UP
FOR FARM BILL REFORM
Hat tip to the California Coalition for Food and Farming for whipping a great letter from 26 of the state's representatives in the U.S. House, urging an extension of the same old, tired, wasteful subsidy system established in 2002 that totally screws California.

Not! Check it out (from the Coalition's release):

In a strong show of unity, 26 members of the California Congressional delegation representing urban and suburban districts have joined together to urge House Agricultural Committee Chairman Collin C. Peterson (D-MN) and Ranking Member Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) for major reforms in the 2007 Farm Bill. In a letter today to the leadership of the House Ag Committee, the Congressional delegation expanded its traditional focus on food stamp and nutrition programs, and advocated for a significant expansion of programs that increase markets for organic, family and beginning farmers, promote healthier local food systems, and provide farmers the resources they need to protect our environment and preserve our farmland. Despite widespread support, these programs have failed to garner sufficient mandatory funding levels in the House subcommittee mark up process. House Ag Committee members will have an opportunity to consider further amendments on these programs in full committee mark up later this month.

Do go on!

“California’s urban members of Congress are hearing from their constituents that they want a serious reprioritization of Farm Bill funding. Now more than ever, we have the opportunity to create a new urban-rural partnership that supports sustainable agriculture and links California’s specialty crop growers need for markets with schools’ and low income communities’ need for healthier food,” said Kari Hamerschlag, policy director for the California Coalition for Food and Farming, which, with the California Food and Justice Coalition, worked to garner support among the delegation

Thanks for sending this along, Kari. This move rocks!

Help Kari and the gang get the other half of California's reps on board by signing up for their action alerts.

It was set for next Tuesday and Wednesday (June 26-27). If the outcome is the same as the subcommittee, they might as well go ahead on schedule. A status quo bill, with no concessions to critics and reformers, invites rewriting on the House floor.

Mr. Peterson has his work cut out for him--balancing the pressure to renew the existing bill from within the committee against pressure for change coming mostly outside the committee.

Earlier today, the House subcommittee with responsibility for federal crop subsidy policy voted to extend for another five years the very same dysfunctional subsidy policies that were put in place by the widely discredited 2002 Farm Bill.

Today’s vote is Exhibit A in the case for not letting farm subsidy policies be decided by the subsidized. The subcommittee asked itself: Is the current inequitable crop subsidy system the best that we can do with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money every year?

And the subcommittee answered, unanimously: Yup!

The subcommittee couldn’t even bring itself to protect taxpayers by tightening limits on federal payments to the largest, wealthiest subsidized farming operations in the country. If anyone wants to see who the very biggest winners were today, go to the list.

This vote should serve as a rallying cry for everyone who seeks reform of our broken federal farm subsidy system.

Districts represented by the 18 subcommittee members collected $8.2 billion in crop subsidies between 2003 and 2005, almost a quarter of all crop subsidies. Here's the breakdown.

The rhetoric we heard today was all about the need to preserve the status quo in our farm subsidy system in order to feed and clothe America—and the world.

The reality we saw today was the farm subsidy lobby once again crowding around the government trough.

Oddly enough, our analysis shows that a number of subcommittee members who voted to extend the status quo have, by doing so, almost certainly voted against the interests of their own constituents, who would benefit from reforms to make the programs fairer and more equitable. Instead, this bill will continue to funnel over 90 percent of farm subsidies to the producers of just five favored crops.

The subcommittee has guaranteed that those who have been the big winners in the farm subsidy sweepstakes in the past--selected billionaires, plantation-scale farm operations, absentee landlords and others—will be big winners for another five years.

Tomorrow, the House Committee on Agriculture Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities and Risk Management will mark up Title I of the Farm Bill. This will present the members with an historic opportunity to move the farm bill into the 21st century, ensuring an equitable distribution of resources across crops and farmers, while providing additional funds for conservation, nutrition and energy. The 18 members on the Subcommittee (out of 435 members in the House, or 4 percent) received $10.013 billion in farm subsidies from 2003 through 2005. This constitutes 23.2 percent of total subsidies nationwide. Of the five programs targeted for payment limits, these 18 members receive $8.227 billion, 23.7 percent of the nationwide total for these programs. Download the documents below (PDF alert) for a complete state by state ranking of subsidy recipients and how the payments are distributed in the districts of those members on the Agriculture Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities and Risk Management.

Download file
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They get allergic smelling hay
They just adore a penthouse view
Darling they love you
But give them Park Avenue!

Why would farm subsidies be paid to people living in Manhattan and surrounding burroghs?

Eva explains.

Our friends at Environmental Defense have partnered with Stonyfield Farms to raise awareness with Congress about the need for more support for farm stewardship. Head on over to Environmental Defense's site for more information on how you can help with their campaign.

The media response to our Farm Policy Analysis Database launch Tuesday has been phenomenal. Reading through the hundreds of stories, I was struck by the reactions from defenders of the farm subsidy fraternity.

First from the AP/Texas Star Telegram

Roger Haldenby, a spokesman for the Plains Cotton Growers, said the environmental group's numbers are off. The National Cotton Council has tried to verify the numbers, comparing them to figures from actual tax documents provided by the Farm Services Agency.

"And in most cases those numbers have not matched," he said. "The Environmental Working Group has got a history of not getting the numbers absolutely correct."

Two huge problems with those statements.

First, and please correct me if I am wrong, but if as Mr. Haldenby suggests in an Associated Press story the government’s Farm Services Agency (FSA) provided 1099 tax information to an agribusiness lobby, that would be illegal.

Second, how is Mr. Haldenby able to make a statement that our numbers are wrong without backing it up with facts and data of his own? Our statements and analysis are substantiated by hard data provided by the USDA (and they should be commended for the effort they put into getting us the information). In the event that the USDA data prove to be incorrect, we would correct the database immediately.

"If the department says that the data they provided to us are wrong, we'll change," Cook said.

Other industry lobbyists are critical of our database, of course. No surprise.

From Agriculture.com

McCauley [Ken McCauley, National Corn Growers Association president] said the EWG database should have no impact on the development of the 2007 farm bill.

"There's no more ammunition in this database than is already out there," McCauley said.

Maybe he’s right, maybe it’s wishful thinking on his part. We’ll know soon enough as the farm bill debate unfolds, but his observation reminds us of statements from the subsidy lobby that have appeared in hundreds of news stories over the years to the effect that there’s nothing new in our database.

How about 358,000 recipients whose total benefits are $9.8 billion whose names did not have a penny next to them for 2003-2005 in our previous database? How about the totally new lists of subsidy beneficiaries? Now that’s ammunition.

Who supports our efforts you may ask…how about a couple of US Senators?

From the same Agriculture.com story

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin Tuesday welcomed the information released by the Environmental Working Group, calling it "a tremendous tool for us to use in crafting the 2007 farm bill." Harkin unsuccessfully tried to put firm caps on farm program payments in the 2002 farm bill and has expressed an interest in doing do so again this year. Harkin said that farm program payment limits are too high and that "the system has loopholes that you can drive a combine through.

And another farm state Senator, Charles Grassley

Senator Chuck Grassley says it's a good idea and one he's been pushing for years. "I led an effort to get the USDA to cut through and to split up those corporate payments so we knew what individuals got instead of hiding it behind non-entities that nobody knows anything about that showed millions of dollars going to one entity, maybe a cooperative down in rice country in Arkansas, but you don't know what individuals were getting," he says.

Half the money went to just 19 districts (out of 435) in 2003-2005.

Despite USDA's effort, some of them aren't people because the department was unable to trace payments beyond these "ultimate beneficiaries," such as King Ranch, a public company.

Then there are the top 20 farm businesses receiving farm subsidies over the same period.

To follow the money, click the businesses to find the beneficiaries to whom USDA attributed subsidy benefits. Then you can click beneficiaries to trace the benefit flow back to any farm businesses those benefits may have passed through (and see other beneficiaries, if any).

From the tip of Key West...

...to the outskirts of Fairbanks.

Our T1 is full to the brim, folks, as Scripps News is reporting.

But just in case things open up, here's a nice view of San Francisco from the top of...

...a big ol' pile of your money.

Chris Campbell is the VP for information Technology at EWG, and he's the guy behind the amazing EWG farm subsidy databases, including this new one--not to mention all of our other computer investigations and tools. Our ED, Richard Wiles, likes to say that Chris is one of the most important players in the environmental movement. No argument from me. He also makes the best beer.

The Google Maps feature was implemented by EWG's renowned Institute For Intergalactic Geospatial Analysis Consisting of One Guy With A Computer Somewhere In Connecticut. The guy is EWG Senior Analyst Sean Gray. What took him so long I couldn't say.

Carrie Gouldin handled graphic design of both the database pages and Mulch, though frankly if she'd started on it earlier she'd be a lot happier with the result. Personally, I think it's great.

The first outsider we showed it to is our former EWG colleague Clark Williams-Derry, now head of research at the Sightline Institute in Seattle. Clark got the database to work on the Web during breaks between Marathon levels, and he also added in the names, as I recall, after they became available to the world following the Washington Post FOIA court case in 1996. Clark's squeals as the Google maps loaded were worth the whole project.

Andrew Art, now a lawyer here in town, was the guy who got the database to the point where, one Friday night back in the mid-1990s during beer #2.5 (estimate), he was able to ask me: What do you want to search? I said 90210, and back then the list that popped up was, in its way, every bit as exciting as what you see when you type in that ZIP code now--that is, if it will load under the traffic we're now experiencing. (Sean has implemented a "link to map" feature above the map windows throughout the site. Please link responsibly.) It was also Andrew who came across the Washington Post's 1996 court victory under the Freedom of Information Act and filed our first FOIAs for the names of subsidy recipients...then filed the appeal...at which point USDA began providing the data. I can't tell you how much of our work here at EWG was shaped by Andrew's thinking about computer technology and analysis in the early days of the organization--including the hiring of Chris Campbell.

Wendy Hoffman (nee Cohen) is now (undoubtedly) doing the kind of amazing work at EPA that she did here at EWG, including doggedly, doggedly, doggedly pursuing data under FOIA (she was dogged by the way). She's the one who got USDA to cough up the original set of payment info by 9-digit ZIP code--which arrived on 40 or more mainframe computer tapes--back in 1993-94. Working with Andrew, she got this whole thing started.

As I did at the press conference yesterday, let me also pay tribute to the team of people at USDA who worked so hard to put the underlying data together that made the new EWG database possible. Not even we understand how challenging it was to get the data from the field, and then get it in shape to meet the mandate Congress set in Section 1614 of the 2002 Farm Bill--to track benefits right down to individuals. But they did it, and I hope we've done well by their efforts.

Margaret O'Dell and the board of The Joyce Foundation trusted us 15 years ago when we said this approach had the potential to change the farm policy debate in ways that would benefit conservation. Needless to say, none of this would have happened if they hadn't placed that first bet.

If I've forgotten important points or people Chris, then, as usual, change this...

To....

We are currently experiencing over 7,000 hits per hour on the new database. In the 6 hours since the Farm Policy Analysis Database launched at noon EST, we've logged 42,000 hits.

For decades, American taxpayers have provided tens of billions of dollars in federal farm subsidies to some of the largest and wealthiest farm businesses in the nation. But thousands of people who benefited from the subsidy flow were shielded from public view behind layers of partnerships, joint ventures, limited liability corporations, cooperatives, and other business structures that obscured their personal subsidy claims.

Not anymore.

A new online database, developed by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) from millions of previously unpublished USDA subsidy records, provides nearly full disclosure of federal farm subsidy beneficiaries for the first time. The disclosures include individuals, sometimes numbering in the dozens, whose subsidy benefits pass through one or more plantation-scale farm businesses that produce vast quantities of subsidized cotton, rice and other crops. Many of those businesses receive millions in USDA crop subsidies each year, and according to the new USDA data, pass six-figure benefits through to many people. In many cases, these individuals have not previously had subsidy benefits attributed to them by name.

As the 2007 farm bill reauthorization enters its critical final phase, the new EWG Policy Analysis Database underscores the need for Congress to rethink the fundamental goals of farm programs and to enact new rules for determining who will benefit - and how they will benefit - from federal assistance to agriculture and rural America for the next 5 years.

Some 350,000 people who previously have not been identified as direct recipients of federal farm subsidy money by EWG have actually been the beneficiaries of almost a third of the $34.75 billion in crop subsidies provided by American taxpayers between 2003 and 2005 alone. EWG's original online Farm Subsidy Database, based on over 140 million USDA subsidy payment records, has drawn millions of searches of farm subsidy recipients since it first went public, in November of 2001. The new data show that despite that detail, EWG and, for that matter, USDA itself, have been unable to track over one-third of all subsidies to their ultimate beneficiaries - until now.

The lists of top subsidy beneficiaries have changed dramatically. Just about every ranking of subsidy payments has changed in this new database because, for the first time, USDA has tracked subsidy benefits as they pass through tens of thousands of farm business entities—agribusiness cooperatives, partnerships, joint ventures and corporations—and has assigned virtually all farm subsidy 'benefits' to individuals. The Farm Bill 2007 Policy Analysis Database bases all of its rankings and analyses on this new benefits tracking data.

Specifically, some 358,057 individuals now have a dollar value for subsidy benefits associated with their names for the first time in our system—and they received $9.8 billion in crop subsidy benefits alone between 2003 and 2005. In the database, those individuals have a double asterisk after their name, indicating that all of their subsidy benefits were in the form of pass-through(s) from a farm business(es) in which they had an ownership interest. A single asterisk means both payments made directly and pass-through subsidies are attributed to the individual by USDA. Listings with no asterisk are for individuals or entities that received all of their subsidy directly from USDA.

The most important distinction we make in our analysis is between subsidies paid to farm businesses and subsidy benefits passed through those businesses to individuals (and, very occasionally, to other types of entities). You can see the distinction on pages like these.

We can't post all the links because the story is in hundreds of media outlets.

But not even the reporters who've covered the database have seen the version my colleagues Chris Campbell and Sean Gray finished polishing yesterday afternoon. That's the one that will go public today, at 12 noon Eastern time.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention, Mulch will undergo some significant changes too. For one thing, the route to access for our new Farm Bill 2007 Web site will be through Mulch...

Tens of thousands of people who have benefited from billions in federal farm subsidy payments have been shielded from public view for decades, behind layers of partnerships, joint ventures, corporations and other business structures that obscured their personal subsidy claims. Not anymore.

EWG’s new 2007 Farm Bill Database provides full disclosure, starting here at Mulch at 12 noon Eastern time, June 12.

Just as things are really heating up on the 2007 farm bill debate. And we're not just talkin' about Washington in July, either...

Our press conference is tomorrow at 10:00 a.m.

And look for a surprising new feature on the Web site when we light it up.

Under its Total Aggregate Measurement of Support (Total AMS) commitment, the U.S. is allowed to provide support of up to $US19.1 billion annually in agricultural trade-distorting subsidies. Canada’s position is that the U.S. has exceeded its Total AMS commitment in each of 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004 and 2005.

The press release and a backgrounder from Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada are here.

And here we thought they'd only sue us over corn.

Canada has gone to the World Trade Organization to fight what it calls harmful American farm subsidies.

International Trade Minister David Emerson has asked for a WTO panel to rule on whether U.S. agriculture subsidies breach that country's own international trade rules.

Emerson says requesting a panel is the latest step in Canada's fight against U.S. subsidies that are hurting Canadian farmers.

Canada argues that the U.S. is breaking WTO rules by providing American farmers with export credit guarantees to sell corn, wheat, soybeans, sugar and other products on the international market.

More here.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune ran an alarming story today about the rising cost of food:

In the past year, food prices have increased 3.7 percent and are on track to jump by as much as 7 percent by year's end. The current increase is more than double the 1.8 percent jump seen the year before, according to the consumer price index.

Meanwhile, gas prices rose 2.9 percent. Only the cost of health care rose more, and then just slightly.

And the culprit?

While food prices are rising pretty much across the board, items related to corn are affected the most. That's because increasing demand for ethanol, made from corn, is driving up corn prices, which farmers use to feed their poultry and cattle. The high price of corn is also affecting prices of everything from cereal and other products with corn as an ingredient to the oils used to make potato chips. But corn is only one culprit. Higher labor, packaging and fuel costs all play a role. Bad weather in California and Florida was the main contributor to a 20 percent spike in citrus fruit prices as well as higher prices for some vegetables.