Only under one of two circumstances.

The first is when the WTO rules that the violation is outright illegal. That was the case with export subsidies (like the Step 2 program) in Brazil's victory over the United States on cotton subsidies. Congress had no choice but to repeal the program, and did.

The second is when a transgression gains the aggrieved party a WTO-approved shot at trade retaliation, and they take it. Brazil finally has won that shot, years after the WTO determined that an array of domestic U.S. cotton subsidies caused "serious prejudice" to cotton growers in Brazil and elsewhere. The WTO has recently ruled that the elimination of Step 2 and modifications to U.S. loan programs that subsidized exports were insufficient remedies to Brazil's original complaint.

If Brazil does not now press forward, and quickly, with sanctions that have a bite, the subsidy lobby and its defenders in Congress will be reaffirmed in their view that, where U.S. farm programs are concerned, the WTO is mostly there to be ignored.

Nothing breeds disdain or disrespect faster in a red-blooded, red-state, law 'n order type than the whiff of an opponent who is soft on crime.

To the extent that forcing change in our domestic subsidies--meaning reductions in the level of support, not outright elimination--was the goal, Brazil might just as well have wallowed in the tar pits of Doha if it dallies further in pursuing the cotton complaint to a meaningful conclusion. The new, broader subsidy case Brazil has initiated against the US, alleging a breach in our allowed "aggregate measure of support", will be seen as a theoretical threat, years distant, if the clear win on domestic cotton subsidies comes to naught (notwithstanding Canada's pursuit of a parallel complaint). And Brazil's standing as a leader for the developing world at the WTO will suffer a serious, perhaps irretrievable, setback.

Acting USDA Secretary Chuck Conner, like Mike Johanns before him, has described the increased crop target prices and loan rates in the House and Senate farm bills as "a bullseye on the back of the American farmer" at the WTO.

That won't matter one wit to the subsidy lobby if they conclude their adversaries in Geneva are firing blanks.

UPDATE: The AP ran a piece this morning about the increased risk of WTO litigation posed by the House and Senate bills, featuring an interview with straight-shooting (and soon to retire) Keith Collins, USDA's chief economist.

The subsidy challenges by U.S. trading partners have been lodged through the World Trade Organization. A WTO ruling in December slammed the U.S. for not sufficiently complying with an earlier ruling that cotton subsidies need to be curtailed.

Substantial counter-cyclical farm payments and marketing-assistance loan programs are still under fire, Collins said, and Congress' proposals don't address the problems.

"Under the House and Senate farm bill proposals," he said, "they do not reform domestic programs in a way that would eliminate such challenges and, in fact, they may aggravate such challenges."

EWG is making the case that the fight for a fair, sensible farm bill is not over, just because both the House and Senate leadership chose to cut and run at the behest of the subsidy lobby. We have no intention of giving up on reform. And we're not the only ones arguing the point: virtually every newspaper in the country is telling congressional leaders to press for reform during the House-Senate conference. The Philadelphia Inquirer weighs in today:

When Congress returns to work next month, lawmakers need to improve a farm bill by modernizing the way taxpayers subsidize crops.

The $286 billion farm bill approved by the Senate preserves many outdated rules and overcompensates big corporate farms, not the family farm of lore. Five crops in about 30 congressional districts receive a major chunk of the subsidies. More than half the aid goes to large, commercial agribusinesses.

What began as a Depression-era safety net for the nation's breadbasket has grown into a corporate welfare program for some of the richest agricultural producers. About 10 percent of the nation's farms receive 75 percent of the subsidies. . .

. . .The Senate bill allocates more than $5 billion for "permanent disaster relief." In other words, the checks keep coming no matter what happens.

The House version of the farm bill isn't much better. It provides subsidies for single farmers who earn up to $1 million, or farm couples who make $2 million per year. The Senate bill has no income caps for farmers. The current cutoff is $2.5 million.

That's enough to keep the John Deere and the Mercedes running for another year.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune says there's "one last chance" for farm bill reform. But it may be a more of a fat chance, given who will be around the table as conferees and the willingess of House and Senate leaders to do the business of the subsidy lobby:

We didn't really need to be reminded, but the U.S. Senate has shown once again that money often stands in the way of sensible progress in Washington.

After a six-week impasse, the Senate passed a $286 billion farm bill that makes only minor changes to the bloated agricultural subsidy system that rewards rich farmers for being farmers. . .

. . .next month House and Senate conferees will have another chance to at least put stricter limits on subsidies for farmers who don't need a taxpayer bailout to make a living.

Until then, if you're a wealthy farmer in America, it's a wonderful life.

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer condemns the Senate's sell-out of reform while praising Sherrod Brown's courage in pursing reform.

What's wrong with the Senate bill? For starters, it sustains the crop subsidies that made sense during the New Deal but are impossible to justify with farm income at record levels. It also keeps those subsidies flowing to the wealthiest farmers and fails to impose a reasonable cap on this taxpayer-supported aid. It creates a new relief program for farmers and ranchers who choose to operate in areas where weather disasters are frequent and predictable. At the same time, it protects subsidies to private crop insurance companies.

And the Cincinnati Post unloads on Another Fat Farm Bill:

Senators left Washington to adjourn for the year bearing a gift for every U.S. consumer. Unfortunately, it was a lump of coal: the Farm Bill.

Congress had an opportunity to wean large commercial farming operations from taxpayer subsidies, and treat agricultural entities as businesses, rather than recipients of corporate welfare. It didn't.

In June 2005, Brazilian trade experts raised the prospect of an unusual form of trade retaliation if the United States failed to rectify aspects of its cotton subsidies found by the WTO to cause "serious prejudice" against cotton farmers in Brazil and other countries. The idea was to allow retaliation not in goods, but through legalized infringement upon U.S. intellectual property rights. In other words, Brazil would fight back through WTO-sanctioned acts of piracy.

As EWG wrote at the time:

What if the U.S. does not comply with the WTO's broad rulings and fails to reform its multi-billion dollar cotton subsidy programs to Brazil's satisfaction? What retaliatory trade measures could Brazil possibly adopt that would force an economic giant like the United States to change a politically entrenched farm subsidy system?

The beginnings of an answer may be unveiled in Brasilia today, at a congressional hearing convened to examine a novel trade retaliation strategy: At issue is how Brazil might compel cotton subsidy reforms here by suspending the intellectual property rights protection American companies now enjoy in Brazil for a wide array of knowledge-based products, from pharmaceuticals, computers, software, and biotechnology, to books, musical recordings and films.

In other words, no reform by the U.S. in response to the WTO cotton decision might mean no patent or copyright protection in Brazil for targeted American drugs, computers, biotech crops, or the latest music CDs and DVD movies.

If the David-and-Goliath audacity of the proposal calls to mind the boldness of Brazil's long-shot WTO challenges both to America's cotton subsidies and to the European Union's sugar support system (another case Brazil recently won), it is hardly a coincidence. Both initiatives are the brainchild of Dr. Pedro de Camargo Neto, a former Brazilian trade negotiator and government official who wants to make sure his country has 'Plan B' prepared in case the United States stalls or evades the serious cotton subsidy reforms Brazil seeks.

In Trade Ruling, Antigua Wins a Right to Piracy

PARIS — In an unusual ruling on Friday at the World Trade Organization, the Caribbean nation of Antigua won the right to violate copyright protections on goods like films and music from the United States — an award worth up to $21 million — as part of a dispute between the countries over online gambling.

The award follows a W.T.O. ruling that Washington had wrongly blocked online gambling operators on the island from the American market at the same time it allowed online wagering on horse racing. . .

. . .Yet the ruling is significant in that it grants a rare form of compensation: the right of one country, in this case Antigua, to violate intellectual property laws of another — the United States — by allowing it to distribute copies of American music, movie and software products.

“That has only been done once before and is, I believe, a very potent weapon,” said Mark Mendel, a lawyer representing Antigua, after the ruling. “I hope that the United States government will now see the wisdom in reaching some accommodation with Antigua over this dispute.”

. . .do a little reading about the $286 billion farm bill the Senate passed on Friday."

So says The Salt Lake Tribune in yesterday's editorial, "Harvest of shame: Senate farm bill feeds subsidies to agribusiness".

The bill expands the already bloated subsidies for wheat, barley, oats and soybeans, despite record prices for those crops. It does not reduce direct payments, which many farmers receive for simply owning land and growing crops on it. These antiquated policies subsidize rich investors, feed the unhealthy American diet, distort international trade and enable the rape of the environment. Yet the Senate rejected attempts to reform this entitlement program for agribusiness, despite the willingness of about half the Senate to vote for at least some reforms.

The whole deal's in the jump. The hits just keep on comin'.

We'll start with this excellent editorial from the Denver Post. Many, many more after the jump.

Farm Bill is a Loser For Taxpayers, Environment
Denver Post

The $286 billion farm bill approved last week by the U.S. Senate is an insult to American taxpayers and a threat to the environment. If it reaches President Bush's desk in its current indefensible form, he should keep his promise to veto it.

Space doesn't allow listing all the reasons Bush should reject this woeful bill, so let's start with the fact that it would give welfare to millionaires.

As passed by the Senate, your hard-earned tax dollars would go to agri-businessmen who earn as much as $2.5 million a year in adjusted gross income. The Senate's only concession toward curbing this welfare for the rich was to lower that cap to $750,000 in 2010 — nearly four times as high as the $200,000 ceiling Bush had sought.

Those numbers refer to income limits on those farmers eligible for taxpayer handouts, not to the size of the giveaways themselves. A separate effort to scale back those subsidies from the current maximum of $360,000 to $250,000 was also defeated by a vote of 56-43.

We should specify that vote was 56 in favor of limiting subsidies, and just 43 against such a limit. The pork barrelers stacked the deck against the reform amendments by requiring them to garner 60 votes to pass instead of the usual 51-vote majority.

As Ken Cook of the Environmental Working Group, which supported the defeated reforms, said, "This whole thing was rigged to benefit the subsidy lobby."

Very well, it's time to turn the tables and require the wastrel lobby to get a two-thirds majority before it can raid your pocketbook.

Given that the final measure cleared the Senate on a 79-14 vote, it may look like the big spenders could override such a veto. But a closer look gives hope for reformers. Colorado Republican Wayne Allard, for example, supported most reform efforts while Democrat Ken Salazar voted to keep giving welfare to millionaires. Allard approved the final bill, but we are confident he would join other fiscal conservatives and environmentally conscious senators to uphold a veto.

Then, the wastrel lobby can finally be forced to compromise and end the shameful practice of welfare for millionaires.

Charles Lane uncorked this beaut last week, after the Dorgan-Grassley and Klobuchar amendments went down. It's a fitting contribution to the legacy of the late Peter Milius, who roared on the Post's editorial page about the inequities and inanities of farm bills for many years.

A measure to limit bloated farm subsidies is approved by a 13-vote margin. But it won't become law.

AN AMENDMENT to the 2007 farm bill that would have limited federal payments to well-to-do farmers failed in the Senate yesterday. The vote was 56-43 -- in favor of the measure. How can a bill backed by a substantial bipartisan majority not pass? Welcome to the wonderful world of agriculture politics.

The legislation, sponsored by Sens. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), would have capped government supports at $250,000 per year per farm. To be sure, that figure is more than five times the median household income in the United States. But, given that a lucky 570 farms received $250,000 or more in 2005, and that two-thirds of crop supports benefit just 10 percent of farms, this would have been progress.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) did not see it that way. She dug in her heels against the amendment. According to her, it was unfair to producers of "capital-intensive" crops such as rice and cotton. It supposedly would have made U.S. agriculture less competitive in the global marketplace, potentially making us as dependent on foreign crops as we are on foreign oil -- at a time when "news reports continue to highlight cases of dangerous imported food." Left unsaid in Ms. Lincoln's statement was that 26 farms in her home state received $250,000 or more in 2005, according to government statistics compiled by the Environmental Working Group. The recipients include farms run by the Arkansas Department of Corrections, which produces cotton and other crops using convict labor. Federal subsidies to a state plantation worked by prisoners who don't get paid: now that's enterprising...

...Now Ms. Lincoln has something to crow about on her next trip to the cotton and rice fields of Arkansas. But for a Democratic Party ostensibly committed to fiscal discipline, majority rule and economic equality, this episode is a major embarrassment.

Bear with us. It's hard to keep up with all the editorial pages that have savaged the Senate's sell-out farm bill.

"A temporary solution to deal with an emergency."

That's how aid to farmers was described when it was introduced during the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt. And in the 1930s, in the Dust Bowl and Depression years, aid for struggling farmers was necessary and right. But that was then, and this is now.

Now, aid to farmers means sending taxpayer money to millionaire farmers and to those who aren't really farmers. It means major funding for farmers who grow five row crops - wheat, corn, soybeans, rice and cotton - and no subsidies for 60% of all farmers. It means that three-fourths of all subsidies go to 10% of farms. It means sending $1.1 billion, according to federal figures cited in a recent Time magazine article, to dead people.

And it means spending a proposed $286 billion or more of taxpayer money over the next several years in farm bills pending in Congress. The proposed bills - heralded by supporters as reform - in fact do very little to reform the current system and much to simply perpetuate a giant government giveaway program, welfare for corporate agriculture....

...It was a golden moment for reform. Farmers are reaping near-record profits. The median farmer enjoys five times the net worth of the median non-farm household, according to Time. Crop prices have soared, in no small part because of the federal government's promotion of corn ethanol.

Fiscal conservatives and other farm program critics were ready to cut the sprawling farm subsidy program; Bush declared himself on the side of the reformers...

... The nation's farm policy is not only unfair and a waste of money. It's hurting the country's health by helping to foster an obesity epidemic through its crop-support policy. It's hurting the environment and contributing to energy and water shortages. It's hurting free trade by supporting an international system of protectionism for agriculture.

The initial farm supports provided by Congress in the 1930s may have made sense. Today, the system not only makes no sense at all as good government policy, but it is in fact a blight on the nation.

President Bush, veto this bill.

Full editorial in the jump.

More editorial opinion condemning the Senate's gift to the subsidy lobby.

The $286 billion farm bill approved last week by the U.S. Senate is an insult to American taxpayers and a threat to the environment. If it reaches President Bush's desk in its current indefensible form, he should keep his promise to veto it.

Space doesn't allow listing all the reasons Bush should reject this woeful bill, so let's start with the fact that it would give welfare to millionaires.

Full editorial in the jump.

I confess, I’m not a professional Democratic political consultant. If I were, I’d lose a lot more often. And I‘d have a beach house.

But I would offer one amateur observation to congressional Democrats looking back at the past week:

If your public approval ratings are in the toilet, stop flushing.

Kevin over at Life has taught us explains how the senate's sell out on farm bill reform this past week fits into the public's dismal take on congress. His "hat trick of bad legislation" from the senate this week spans the farm bill, energy bill and Iraq war funding, and might explain congress's 32 percent approval rating the WaPo reported earlier this week.

Bush was at 33.

And what a shameful abdication of leadership it represents.

If enacted, this bill will cause billions of dollars in federal subsidies to pour out to farms earning record net incomes. Billions of dollars will find their way to a narrow group of mega-farms at the very top of the subsidy pyramid, taxpayers' money that they'll use to buy out tens of thousands of family farms beneath them. Billions more will go to farms that harvest disaster checks as often as they harvest crops.

The added funds for conservation and nutrition are mere down payments, at best, that will still leave most of the nation's agricultural resource and environmental challenges unaddressed, and America's poorest and hungriest underserved.

As for the sham reforms to limit subsidy payments to the biggest, richest farm operations in the country, EWG's online database of subsidy recipients will show in the years ahead just how outrageously the subsidy lobby and its defenders in the Senate have misled the American people.

Let me rephrase that: when politicians say this bill is going to significantly curb excessive subsidy payments to the wealthy, they're lying.

EWG has no intention of giving up the fight for a fair, equitable farm bill, starting with our next major update to the farm subsidy database, coming next month.

From Oxfam's release:

“The Senate voted this morning to drive a stake in the heart of farm bill reform and to continue current federal farm subsidies largely unchanged”, said Raymond C. Offenheiser, President of Oxfam America. “By a vote of 56-43, Senators rejected a key reform measure -- the Dorgan-Grassley Payment Limits amendment -- which would have established a $250,000 limit for federal farm subsidy payments to agricultural producers. Should other farm reform amendments be defeated, the Senate farm bill will largely keep intact the existing rules for payments to farmers which have often been sidestepped in creative ways leading to million dollar payments for many large, wealthy farmers.”

Full release in the jump.

From their release today:

“Senator Kent Conrad engineered the defeat of this amendment. More than anyone else, he is responsible for continuing the policy of destroying family farming and undermining rural communities by subsidizing mega farms to drive smaller operations out of business,” said Chuck Hassebrook, Executive Director of the Center for Rural Affairs.

The amendment, sponsored by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) would have closed loopholes, placed a hard cap of $250,000 on payments and invested the savings in small business development, beginning farmers and other initiatives to create future in rural America.

“Conrad has proven that southerners are not the primary obstacle to a farm policy that strengthens America’s rural communities. The responsibility for killing reform lies with a small handful of Midwest and Great Plains Senators who sided with selfish interest over the good of the overwhelming majority of farmers and rural people. Conrad is their leader,” continued Hassebrook.

The whole deal's in the jump.

Another spectacular display of Democrats caving to special interests.

A bipartisan, majority vote of 56 in favor of tightening subsidy limits on the biggest, wealthiest farms in the country was not enough to ensure passage this morning.

That's because parliamentary sabotage engineered by Democrats in favor of the subsidy lobby required a super majority vote of 60 for the Dorgan-Grassley payment "limit" amendment to prevail. As a result, this Congress will perpetuate the current, unlimited taxpayer handouts to big rice and cotton farms. Sen. Amy Klobuchar's tightening of means-testing will walk into the same Democratic procedural trap later today.

And in arranging the defeat of these two amendments, Democrats not only kept subsidies flowing unfettered to giant farms. They also prevented the savings these amendments would have generated from being invested in food stamps, conservation, organic agriculture and other chronically underfunded programs.

We will be providing detailed responses to this pathetic performance in days, months, and years ahead.

Next up: the Senate will provide an unprecedented subsidy to crop farmers--corn in particular but all other major field crops by extension--by mandating an outrageous increase in the amount of ethanol everyone in America will be forced to put in their gas tanks. That will keep crop prices high for years--and then we'll load subsidies right on top.

Now that's something Senate Democrats will have no trouble making happen.

That's the question we'll finally see answered in the Senate later this morning. It lodges most directly against Democrats. Some of them have decided they have to swallow unlimited payments to gigantic rice and cotton operations, almost all of them in the South, in exchange for modest assistance for their own farmers in New England or the midwest.

The math tells it all. The Senate agriculture committee's subsidy limit "reforms", like their House counterparts, will save trivial amounts of money--perhaps $50 million per year--precisely because they were fashioned by the subsidy lobby to have no impact.

Mission accomplished.

The Dorgan-Grassley and Klobuchar amendments save more because they trim more from the subsidies that go to the very largest operations.

Even so, the savings will total up to only a few hundred million dollars per year, at most, leaving over $8 billion going to the subsidized crops. By voting against real reform amendments, senators will also be voting against reinvestment of the savings in critically underfunded nutrition programs like Food Stamps, which unlike subsidy handouts are brutally means-tested, as well as conservation, organic farming and other priorities.

And what would the resulting set of "limits" amount to if Dorgan-Grassley and Klobuchar were to become the law of the land? The Washington Post's bottom line can't be repeated often enough:

Note that even if both of these amendments pass, a farm family making $749,999 a year could still receive a $249,999 handout from the taxpayers. For a Democratic Congress eager to restore a modicum of balance to the distribution of income in America, this should be a very easy call.

Senate Democrats have been decrying Republican filibusters all year long, and they've forced one cloture vote after another to define the GOP as obstructionists.

But faced with a filibuster threat from within their own ranks, Senate Democrats have made a deal to require 60 votes on key farm bill reform amendments in a bid to avoid an embarrassing intra-party cloture fight that could saddle them with the blame for another farm bill delay, and blunt their favorite anti-Republican talking point.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), staunch proponent of unlimited, multi-million-dollar subsidies in perpetuity to plantation-scale operations in the South, threatened to filibuster at least one proposed farm bill amendment, the Dorgan-Grassley payment limit reform. It would "limit" subsidies to $250,000 per farm per year.

Everyone saw Sen. Lincoln's filibuster threat coming. The choice was to let her make good on it, then file for cloture to cut off debate and proceed to the farm bill.

If cloture had failed to gain 60 votes, a Democrat's filibuster would have been blamed for killing the farm bill in the Senate this year. So far Democrats have pretty successfully managed to blame Republicans for that possibility, particularly among farm groups who have grown increasingly impatient with the Senate impasse.

Which is precisely why, with so much pressure building in both parties for the Senate to pass a farm bill before the Christmas recess, it is almost certain that a cloture vote would have prevailed over Lincoln's filibuster at this stage. Almost all Democrats, and a large number of Republicans, would have voted to cut-off the filibuster.

That high-profile dust-up, played over multiple news cycles, would have been embarrassing not just to Lincoln, but to Senate Democrats in general, who have (often justifiably) made Republicans' procedural roadblocks a central explanation for their legislative difficulties this year.

But once cloture had been imposed, it would have meant that these key farm bill reform votes could have prevailed in the old-fashioned, 50-vote majority way. That's not what the subsidy lobby wanted or their protectors in either party wanted.

Instead, Senate Democrats put reform at risk and gave the subsidy lobby yet another procedural advantage by agreeing to a special deal that requires 60 votes for passage of Dorgan-Grassley's payment limit amendment or Amy Klobuchar's tightening of 'means testing' (and several amendments by Sen. Gregg). The Washington Post succinctly described the combined effect of these amendments:

Note that even if both of these amendments pass, a farm family making $749,999 a year could still receive a $249,999 handout from the taxpayers. For a Democratic Congress eager to restore a modicum of balance to the distribution of income in America, this should be a very easy call.

If these reform votes now fail because they get 59 votes or less, we'll be placing the blame squarely, and relentlessly, where it belongs--on Democrats, who talk a big game about equity, fairness, progress and making change, then once again give the subsidy lobby every legislative advantage to perpetuate the wasteful, scandalous status quo.

And it didn't even take a pork chop on a stick to convince the Senate Democrats to cave.

While it is subject to change, we understand that the first vote, on Dorgan-Grassley, is set for 9:15 a.m. tomorrow morning. Votes on Klobuchar's AGI amendment and the Brown-Sununu-McCaskill RESCU amendment will follow.

Plus a ride in a four-wheeler runnin' on ethanol! I wouldn't have believed it if Chairman Peterson himself hadn't divulged the back story to the indefatigable Ms. Lochhead in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

Even the staunchest supporters of crop subsidies are worried that widespread publicity about huge farming operations getting millions of dollars of subsidies is jeopardizing support for farm programs.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Colin Peterson, D-Minn., told Farm Journal Forum on Monday that Pelosi "has taken a lot of flak, to say the least," for pushing farm subsidies through the House. "She got the heck beat out of her by the San Francisco paper and others around the country, but she stood up to it, and I think she understands ... what people are up to," Peterson, a staunch subsidy supporter, said.

Pelosi's role on the farm bill will be critical heading into next months' negotiations with the Senate to produce a final bill. Peterson said he believes Pelosi was won over to farm programs during a visit to his district for an annual Farm Fest.

"She just had a great time, and her staff did, and they bonded with the farmers and she was eating pork chops on a stick and riding around in an ethanol four-wheeler," Peterson said. "And that had a lot to do with her being as engaged and helpful as she was in finally getting the bill through."

Reformers might have countered with our own on-message culinary offering. Maybe a crappy school lunch slopped all over a cafeteria tray.

Still, the pesky reform problem just won't go away, even after Speaker Pelosi did her best to help the subsidy lobby kill it:

Peterson said debate over payment limits has him "about ready to tear my hair out," but that he now believes some limits on subsidies are inevitable. "We're just going to keep getting the hell beat out of us," he said. "If we can have farm payments go to people who actually farm, that would be a good start."

And now you know what we know. When we find out more, we'll pass it on.

Bar crop subsidies to nonfarmers: House ag chief

Tue Dec 11, 2007 5:57pm EST

By Charles Abbott

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congress should "make a serious effort" to prevent federal farm subsidies from going to nonfarmers, the House Agriculture Committee chairman said in looking toward final adjustments in the new U.S. farm law.

Senators were to vote in coming days on two proposals to tighten farm subsidy rules. One would put a "hard" cap of $250,000 a year on payments per farm. The other would deny payments to people with an adjusted gross income above $750,000.

House Agriculture Committee chairman Collin Peterson has suggested a more sweeping step.

At a conference sponsored by Farm Journal magazine, the Minnesota Democrat said lawmakers should "make a serious effort to eliminate nonfarmers from farm payments."

To reach that point, Peterson said in a speech late on Monday, "one thing we're looking at" is whether the new farm law should spell out who qualifies as a farmer. Another step would be to change how the law defines a farm.

A spokeswoman said on Tuesday that further details were not available.

Peterson said he would present his ideas when House and Senate negotiators meet to write a final, compromise version of the five-year farm bill.

Subsidies are supposed to go only to people "actively engaged" in farming, but there are many complaints the term is poorly defined and laxly enforced. The Senate proposal for a "hard" cap on payments also would toughen the definition.

In February, the Agriculture Department reported there were 2.09 million U.S. farms. A farm is "any establishment from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were sold or would normally be sold during the year."

Sixteen percent, or about 334,000 farms, have more than $100,000 a year in sales and account for 60 percent of the 932 million acres of farmland.

Peterson said there were only 350,000 commercial-size farms. He said many measurements of U.S. agriculture were skewed by the large number of farms that are part-time or hobby operations and not the owner's chief occupation.

"It's going to move a lot of land to cash rent" if nonfarmers cannot collect payments directly, Peterson said.

At the moment, people are considered engaged in farming if they provide land, equipment, capital, labor or management.

(Reporting by Charles Abbott; editing by Jim Marshall)

EWG has been lobbying on an array of Senate floor amendments.

Dorgan-Grassley is our top priority, of course, and has been for years. We were furious when House leadership deep-sixed Rep Earl Blumenauer's version in Rules Committee, before it could even hit the floor (we replay his indignant House floor speech in the jump--never forget this one, folks). We're pretty sure it would have won (which is why Pelosi obeyed Peterson's instructions to kill it) and then we'd have had a House position coming into conference. So we're pushing Dorgan-Grassley hard for the win this week, as we are for Sen. Klobuchar's amendment to further trim the adjusted gross income means test in the committee bill--bringing them southward to the somewhat less insane "limit" of $250,000 and you're out as a part timer, and $750,000 if you're full-time farming.

But another amendment that could do some real good is RESCU. It takes $2 billion in taxpayers' money back from crop insurance companies and invests it in conservation, McGovern-Dole, food stamps, and deficit reduction.

UPDATE: Someone asked what "McGovern-Dole" means. Sorry for the Beltway-speak.

Here's a fact sheet. Take a look, and if you like what you see, make some calls. We're encouraged by the interest we're seeing in Senate offices.

Brown-Sununu-McCaskill Reduction of Excess Subsidies to Crop Underwriters (RESCU) Amendment

Problem
Since 2000, farmers have received $10.5 billion in benefits from the crop insurance program - but it has cost taxpayers almost $19 billion to deliver those benefits. In fact, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), crop insurance companies take 40 cents out of every dollar that Congress appropriates to farmers.

Savings
This amendment cuts more than $2 billion in wasteful spending from the federal crop insurance program and uses the savings to fund over $1 billion in improvements to the Food Stamp Program, $400 million for conservation programs, $200 million for the McGovern-Dole Food for Education program, and over $600 million for deficit reduction.

Reduces windfall delivery subsidies.
The federal government reimburses crop insurance companies the costs of delivering crop insurance policies. These administrative and operating (A&O) subsidies are based on a percent of total premium. Rising commodity prices have driven up premiums so that A&O subsidies are now over three times what they were 10 years ago, even though the cost of administering the policies has stayed the same.

To account for higher commodity prices, this amendment reduces the A&O reimbursement rate to the 2004-2006 national per policy average. This level is still higher than any year prior to 2006 (see chart below). The amendment does not apply to states that have large crop losses, i.e. states with an insurance loss ratio of 1.2 or over. It also does not apply to the 16 states defined as underserved by USDA. These states include: Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Reduces excessive insurance company profits.
According to GAO, crop insurance companies earn taxpayer-subsidized profits that are more than double industry averages. This amendment would require that insurers share a portion of their underwriting gains (or losses) with federal taxpayers by increasing the federal share of risk from 5 percent to 15 percent.

Stops industry collusion.
This amendment eliminates the provision in the committee-passed bill that exempts insurance companies from anti-trust laws by allowing them to collude during the renegotiation of their risk sharing agreement with the federal government.

Farmers will not pay more for crop insurance.
This amendment does not reduce premium subsidies to farmers. Premium subsidies are set by law and this amendment does not change them

Are all those striking TV and motion picture writers moonlighting as subsidy satirists?

How else to explain the over-the-top rhetoric heard on the Senate floor last week, with more to come the next few days, to the effect that the Dorgan-Grassley payment limit amendment, or the Klobuchar-Durbin-Brown amendment to kick a few rich people out of subsidy programs, will spell the end food production in America. I know, I know: this hits you cotton boll eaters out there purty darned hard.

And to make things worse, here I am, pasting in a re-run from an earlier post to debunk the subsidy lobby's xenophobic excesses.

Which excesses come down to this: eat poisoned foreign food, starve, or provide unlimited subsidies to the very largest rice and cotton operations in the South.

Forever.

That evidently is our choice. Never mind that the subsidy lid in Dorgan-Grassley will affect only a relatively small portion of southern farms. It couldn't possibly affect very many operations if it is reducing commodity program spending by just over $100 million per year (against projected annual expenditures of more than $8 billion).

Never mind that any of the operations that might be affected will have options for dealing with it, as the Commission on the Application of Payment Limitations To Agriculture made clear in 2003, in response to a congressional mandate in the 2002 farm bill. Here are those options, in one concise chart from Chapter 5 of that report.

This is a graphic depiction of how a gigantic farm might respond to tightened subsidy limits. It's not a chart of how America will become "dependent for our food like we are for our oil" on foreign countries if Dorgan-Grassley becomes law.

Let's also note the irony of the cotton and rice lobby scaremongering about the United States coming to rely on imported food if subsidy limits are tightened, when those very commodities rely so utterly for economic solvency on the export of their products. About half of the U.S. rice crop and 70 percent (or more) of the cotton crop is exported each year. That's right: American cotton and rice survive by the grace of foreign countries who are willing to rely on a "foreign source" of food and fiber. Us.

Take a look at the top farm subsidy beneficiaries starting with the Arkansas Department of Corrections, and subsidized farm businesses in Arkansas, for the three "program" years 2003-2005. Click on a few of those businesses and you'll commonly see a dozen or more pass-through beneficiaries collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars every year from taxpayers through these big operations.

And now, to steal a page from Dan Owens over at the Blog for Rural America, check out this example of what some of these operations look like: the 9,875 acre "Mississippi River Plantation/ Rice & Deer & Ducks" spread at the top of this page. Asking price: $35 million. Click through, scroll down, and see one of this property's biggest selling points: Government money, charted by year, and every single year it's above $200,000.

You can Google up any number of operations like this where the most important streams flowing through the property are not of fresh water but taxpayers' loot.

Based on the chart, had Dorgan-Grassley's farm subsidy cap of $250,000 been in effect, it would have trimmed the money for this $35 million Mississippi operation. But not by much in most years, and in some years, perhaps not at all.

Since when were taxpayers obligated to provide unlimited subsidies to cotton and rice businesses, when those businesses can comply with Dorgan-Grassley and still be worth $35 mil?

Since we started giving unlimited subsidies to gigantic rice and cotton plantations, that's when. It's time for change.

Mind you, it's not easy to explain to most American how $250,000 per year can possibily be called a non-repayable subsidy "limit." I've been trying for years, and here's the answer that works the fastest with almost anyone.

"But of course $250,000 is a limit--in Washington."

Juliet Eilperin reports in the Washington Post this morning on a problem that will only get worse when Congress mandates more ethanol production through an expanded renewable fuel standard.

Atrazine, the second most widely used weedkiller in the country, is showing up in some streams and rivers at levels high enough to potentially harm amphibians, fish and aquatic ecosystems, according to the findings of an extensive Environmental Protection Agency database that has not been made public.

The analysis -- conducted by the chemical's manufacturer, Syngenta Crop Protection -- suggests that atrazine has entered streams and rivers in the Midwest at a rate that could harm those ecosystems, several scientific experts said. In two Missouri watersheds, the level of atrazine spiked to reach a "level of concern" in both 2004 and 2005, according to the EPA, and an Indiana watershed exceeded the threshold