The U.S. Senate should scrap billions in proposed handouts to millionaire agri-businesses and divert the savings to vital soil conservation programs when it takes up a deeply flawed farm bill today.
Ideally, the Senate Agriculture Committee, which includes Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar, should revive a plan by Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., and Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., that would have shifted $12 billion in crop subsidies and payments to farmers over the next five years toward conservation, rural development and nutrition programs.
Much of those savings would have come by heeding President Bush’s plea to limit subsidies to farmers with adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 a year, or $400,000 for a couple. As passed by the House, taxpayer cash will flow like a river to farmers earning five times as much, up to $2 million a year for couples.
The House bill would thus perpetuate seven decades of failed farm policies that date back to the New Deal era. Under the House plan, 93 percent of all subsidies would go to just five row crops: wheat, rice, corn, soybeans and cotton, despite near- record prices for some of those commodities. Ranchers, fruit and vegetable growers and other key agricultural groups get little or nothing.
In the New Deal, the federal government paid farmers not to grow some of their crops, in the hope that restricting supplies of those commodities would raise their prices. When subsidies were thus aimed at reducing production, it made sense to give them to big producers because otherwise the large operators would go on producing surplus commodities and undermining prices.
But in 1996, Congress passed the Freedom to Farm Act and scrapped the requirement that farmers idle some of their acres in return for subsidies. Instead, farmers received fixed cash payments no matter what they did.
Without such production restrictions, there is no reason whatsoever to give taxpayer handouts to millionaires. Payments to farmers earning under $200,000 a year can be defended as helping small producers survive. But just cutting millionaires off the dole would allow $6 billion to be rechanneled to expand soil conservation programs and safeguard America’s most vital physical asset, the land upon which we grow our food.
President Bush, backed by an array of environmental groups, has threatened to veto the farm bill if the Senate doesn’t clean up the House excesses. We hope the Senate adopts the Kind-Flake reforms, but if it doesn’t, we will support a veto by Bush.
Seven decades of subsidizing the destruction of our land are quite enough.
