The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=691848
Posted: Nov. 30, 2007

Editorial: Farm bill a bitter harvest for just about everybody
The legislation moving through Congress is needlessly wasteful and has problems by the bushel: It distorts agricultural markets and hurts international trade efforts.
From the Journal Sentinel

"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.

Consider these items about how Wisconsin benefits from the current system, according to the Environmental Working Group:

• 52% of all farmers and ranchers do not collect government subsidy payments in Wisconsin, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

• Among subsidy recipients, 10% collected 62% of all subsidies amounting to $2.44 billion over 11 years.

• Recipients in the top 10% averaged $19,786 in annual payments between 1995 and 2005. The bottom 80% of the recipients saw only $817 on average per year.

The farm support system no longer even helps those it was meant to help.

President Bush has threatened to veto whichever bill reaches his desk, and he should. And if Congress has any sense at all, it should sustain that veto.

But don't expect much from Congress. It already had a chance this year to start real reform of the nation's farm policy and instead decided to sit on its hands.

Last summer, Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), along with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and a bipartisan group of other representatives, introduced an amendment to the House farm bill that would have helped curb excessive subsidy programs.

Kind's amendment would have offered a far lower income cutoff for subsidies, replaced price guarantees with a revenue-based safety net and reduced direct payments over time. The amendment also would have channeled more funds to hunger assistance, conservation, the development of rural business and reducing the federal budget deficit.

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.

And as often happens in Washington, the moment passed. The House instead approved a bill that expands government largess to farmers. As we pointed out in July, the House bill was trumpeted as reform by Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) yet did little to scale back subsidies and actually increased price targets for some commodity crops. The bill also allowed farmers to make up to $1 million of adjusted gross income and still receive subsidies.

The Senate is considering an even more generous measure.

As Kind pointed out in an interview on the front page of this section, "Change is always difficult in Washington. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is change the status quo."

Not everything in the pending legislation should be tossed. In providing money, for example, to fight pollution and help farmers with conservation efforts, Congress is taking necessary steps to promote cleaner water and a healthier environment. One of the nation's primary remaining pollution problems involves runoff, a significant amount of which occurs in rural areas. Helping farmers deal with runoff is essential.

But there aren't enough such good things in the legislation to warrant passage. "Pretty much everywhere you look, farm subsidies are being increased," Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist and adjunct scholar at a conservative think tank, told The Washington Post.

And there are a slew of smaller giveaways, including money for peanut warehousers and a new $5.1 billion disaster trust fund to cover weather losses of farmers and ranchers. That measure is being pushed by Western senators, whose states have been plagued by droughts and other natural disasters.

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.