A Farm Bill With More For The Healthy
Less For The Wealthy
My colleague, EWG senior analyst Michelle Perez, had a great op-ed in the Des Moines Register yesterday.
On Monday and Tuesday in Cedar Rapids, the Lance Armstrong Foundation is sponsoring a Presidential Cancer Forum. Armstrong serves on the President's Cancer Panel, which released a report this year concluding that processed forms of corn and soybeans - heavily subsidized commodity crops - "are known contributors to obesity and chronic diseases, including cancer."Armstrong sees what we at the Environmental Working Group see: a flawed federal policy that continues to spend too much money supporting too few crops while ignoring the nutritional and environmental challenges it imposes.
At EWG, we also see that current farm policy hurts small family farmers by spending most of taxpayers' money on a handful of profitable agribusinesses and wealthy absentee landowners. When Maurice Wilder, a real-estate developer reportedly worth $500 million, receives roughly $1 million a year in federal farm subsidies, you know that the system is broken.
The rest in the jump.
In a cruel twist of irony, farm subsidies provide big farm operations with liquidity to outbid their small- and medium-sized neighbors for cropland. The result? Big farmers get bigger, small farmers are pushed off the land, and people and jobs leave rural communities. Consolidation has become a government-subsidized reality.The Environmental Working Group advocates a forward-looking policy that is as much about food and the environment as it is about farming. We agree with the original intent of the farm subsidy system: to provide a safety net for small- and medium-sized farmers in need. We also agree with the Bush administration that farm policy should eliminate subsidies to the wealthiest farmers.
These freed-up funds could make fresh fruits and vegetables more affordable and available to the 26 million poor Americans who rely on nutrition programs. Funds diverted from wealthy operations could also provide more support to more farmers to solve environmental challenges on their land.
The recently passed House version of the 2007 farm bill does little to address concerns. The proposed means test of $1 million in adjusted gross income will filter out a minute 0.2 percent of subsidy recipients. In addition, conservation spending in the proposed bill is an afterthought compared to commodity spending.
To find more money for conservation and nutrition, policymakers should stand up for reform for the greater good against the powerful and well-funded subsidy lobby. There is still an opportunity for real reform in the Senate farm bill. We hope elected officials listen to the chorus calling for a farm bill that serves the needs of all Americans.
Comments
Great article. Preserving the small/medium size farmer is the backbone of this country. Allowing the mega-farms to just get larger ends up literally putting all the eggs into 1 basket (pun intended).
Posted by: Malok | August 27, 2007 1:41 PM
Fair enough, now define "small" or "medium" sized farms for me.
Posted by: Ron Lee | August 27, 2007 4:48 PM
Thanks for the link to the great op ed piece. Your group continues to be one of the most cohesive voices in this debate. We appreciate all you do.
Posted by: deliberately | September 1, 2007 8:10 AM
EWG is good at telling only part of the story, as usual. Farm subsidies are only 14% of the entire Farm Bill. This money is used to keep your food inexpensive, like spending less than 10% of your income on food, when foreign countries spend as much as 50% of their income! Why don't you talk of the Food Stamps and Welfare funding, in which over 70% of the Farm Bill Budget is used to pay for! Watch who shows up to receive their Food Stamps sometime. These people smoke cigarettes(costing $5.00/pack), wear designer label clothing, and drive new cars(one driver per car)!! I realize you won't print this for others to read, but you will know not everyone in the U.S. thinks you are intelligent enough to speak the truth!
MS. CHINN: Why on earth wouldn't we publish such a predictably pedestrian--and borderline bigoted--defense of farm subsidies? We're more than happy to put these views on display, since so many (but by no means all) subsidy recipients seem to share them. As for our views on Food Stamps and the difference between publishing that information and farm subsidy data, I wrote about that here:
http://www.mulchblog.com/2007/03/why_dont_we_publish_the_names.php
One reason why the nutrition programs cost so much is that , while the "benefits" are low ($1/meal for Food Stamps) and uniform (no one gets $1,000 per meal), the programs serve tens of millions of program participants (28 million for Food Stamps alone, one-third of them children).
As for subsidies being the factor that makes our food cheap, the argument is hardly worth addressing. Were it not for ethanol we'd still be producing far more than we need domestically of corn, soybeans, wheat and rice, and we export the surplus. When those export markets are inadequate versus production, taxpayers pick up the tab. (Oh, and we're plenty dumb in the big city, but we ain't eatin' cotton just yet). And we don't give farm bill income support to the produce aisle or the meat department. Last I checked, that counts as food.
And of course, despite the high prices and projected record income, the subsidy lobby still wants its handouts--$5+ billion in direct payments every year. So much for the line that farmers don't like subsidies and would like to earn their way in the market but just don't have the choice. They have a choice. They want the handouts.
Thanks for posting, Ms. Chin. I can tell you've been playing in the minor leagues on farm policy issues for a long time, talking to people who mostly agree with you. --COOK
Posted by: Kathy Chinn | September 1, 2007 11:01 AM
Then why didn't you post my response, Mr. Cook. I'd just like to know what a "small" or "medium" sized farm is defined as. Then we could continue this debate, although you have posted about 50% of my comments on this forum, none of which has been refuted by the way.
Posted by: Ron Lee | September 3, 2007 10:00 AM