Conferees from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives soon will meet to merge an overdue farm bill authorizing hundreds of billions of tax dollars over the next five years to pay for federal farm subsidies, nutrition programs, food stamps, rural development, land conservation, renewable energy and rural development.
The farm bill’s impact reaches far beyond the borders of Rural America, from its anti-hunger and school lunch programs to the consequencesU.S.farm policy plays in international trade and its increasing influence onU.S.energy security. Many also argue the federal farm program reaches too deeply into the pockets ofU.S.taxpayers.
Since the Great Depression, the farm bill has provided a safety net to protectU.S.food security and along the way preserve a way of life in Rural America.
At the policy tables inWashingtonI remind my colleagues what my farm neighbors and participants attending my town meetings repeatedly declare. The farm safety net has gone haywire. A grossly imbalanced federal farm payment system, where 73 percent of payments are pocketed by 10 percent of the recipients, has helped to inflate land prices, entice big producers to get bigger, and muck up the playing field for beginning farmers. If we keep this up, we’ll loseAmerica’s support for the farm program.
This year there were several attempts on the floor of the U.S. Senate to rein in severely imbalanced crop subsidies. However, the interests of the influential farm lobby, particularly Southern growers, trumped a bipartisan effort I championed alongside Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) to legislate reasonable and just farm price supports that target smaller family farms.
The rest of the farm bill aside, lawmakers turned their backs on genuine payment limit reforms that would save $1.15 billion through the next decade. Lawmakers like to bicker about budget deficits, pay-go rules and war spending. But when given the chance to approve a measure that would trim $1.15 billion worth of fat from the new farm bill, a coalition of lawmakers instead chose to smear lipstick all over a pig and call it a good day for American agriculture.
Senators who voted last week against the Dorgan-Grassley amendment essentially bought a pig in a poke. Insisting the underlying Senate bill includes payment reforms is really a joke.
Likewise, it’s downright laughable to think taxpayers believe a $1 million payment “limit” included in the House farm bill is reasonable and prudent.
Mega-producers are laughing all the way to the bank. Unfettered payments will continue to fritter away tax dollars and help the largest farming operations lock out the next generation of family farmers from buying or leasing land to get started.
Consider the facts. In this area, the Senate-passed bill does NOT: prevent doubling of current law payment limits; or, place limits on marketing loan gains and loan deficiency payments. It also fails to apply an enforceable measuring stick that would ensure recipients (or stockholders) are actively engaged on a ‘regular, substantial and continuous basis’ to prevent absentee managers from cashing U.S. Treasury checks just for looping into a conference call.
Where do reforms go from here? I’m issuing a friendly reminder to my colleagues serving on the farm bill conference: You have another chance to fix the payment disparity. Remember, the Dorgan-Grassley legislation doesn’t “go after” the large farming operators. In a free marketplace, farms can grow as large as they want. But taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill that’s feeding farm consolidation and concentration sweeping through American agriculture.
The Dorgan-Grassley legislation would enact a strict, attributable payment limit per farm of $250,000 annually ($40,000 on direct payments, $60,000 counter-cyclical payments, $150,000 on loan deficiency payments and marketing loan gains). Friends, that’s one-quarter of a million dollars. From where I come from, that’s an awful lot of money. And it’s taxpayer money to boot.
Don’t be fooled by those who suggest the existing $360,000 payment limit is either fair or enforceable. With the addition of peanuts, wool, mohair and honey in the 2002 farm bill, producers were given the opportunity to add one of those crops and bump up their payment “cap” to $720,000.
Let’s stop trying to pull the wool over the eyes of each other and the American taxpayer. As the conferees sit down with the Democratic and Republican leadership, please seize this second chance to do the right thing. If Uncle Sam continues to subsidize every last acre and bushel of row crop production, we may as well hammer the final nail into the coffin of family farming as we know it.
If conferees forfeit this final opportunity on the 2007 farm bill to do the right thing, all the lipstick and perfume in the world can’t fool the taxpaying public into crowning this part of the bill real reform. No more than pigs can fly.