Farm aid for the big guys — a growth
Way back during the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt beseeched Congress to pass legislation, the so-called Agriculture Adjustment Act, providing income and price supports for the nation’s struggling farmers.
The taxpayer subsidies were meant to be temporary, to tide the nation’s farmers over until “the president determines that the national emergency in relation to agriculture has ended.”
But as time passed, the supposedly temporary subsidy program transmogrified into a permanent entitlement. Farm welfare rose to sacred status in Washington, much like Social Security and Medicare.
When Republicans won control of both houses of Congress in 1994, they promised to change the way the Democrats had done business for much of the previous half-century or so. And farm reform was one of the changes promised by the party of Gingrich and Dole.
So in 1996, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Freedom to Farm Act. Its aim was to reintroduce the nation’s farmers — gradually — to the free market. The government would bend away from its long-standing market-distorting practice of telling farmers what and whatnot to grow. And farmers would be weaned from their dependency on federal crop subsidies.
Alas, it took only a mere matter of years before Congress began backing away from the farm reform law. Before lawmakers approved “emergency” payments to farmers when commodity prices fell in 1998. Which is why farm subsidies cost American taxpayers more than $20 billion last year. When, under terms of the Freedom to Farm law, farm welfare was to be trimmed to $4 billion by this year.
And it’s about to get worse for the taxpayers. For Congress is sending President Bush an election-year farm bill that altogether abandons the 1996 farm reform law that will jack up agriculture spending by nearly 80 percent over the cost of existing programs and cost taxpayers roughly $190 billion over the next 10 years.
The new farm welfare bill not only raises subsidies for grain and cotton growers, who already command a disproportionate share of taxpayer subsidies, it also revives subsidies phased out by the 1996 farm reform law — including payments for honey, wool and mohair.
The lawmakers who approved this massive increase in farm subsidies were unabashed. It will give farmers “stability and predictability,” said Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat.
Well maybe the taxpaying public could be satisfied, somewhat, with Harkin’s defense of the monstrously expensive farm bill if it was primarily benefiting small family farms, if it meant checks for lifelong farmers — like the couple depicted in “American Gothic” famously painted by Grant Wood, who happened to have been born on a farm in Harkin’s home state.
But here’s the dirty little secret about farm subsidies: They disproportionately benefit the most well-off farmers.
Indeed, the Concord Coalition reports that in 1999, a mere 7 percent of farms — those with sales of more than $250,000 — claimed 45 percent of the farm subsidies.
And a list of farmers receiving government payments, published last year by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based advocacy organization, turns up a number of surprising recipients.
The list also included a number of prominent individuals who do not come immediately to mind when one thinks of family farmers. Like David Rockefeller, the former chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and CNN founder Ted Turner.
The big corporations, the colleges and universities, the members of Congress, the prominent individuals hardly should be profiting from federal farm subsidies.
And even authentic full-time farmers, who work the soil or tend the livestock day by day, who owe their entire livelihood to farming, ought to be able to get by without government aid.
For the fact is that three-fifths of the nation’s farmers — including most small family farms — make do without taxpayer handouts. And if they can forgo farm welfare, the other two-fifths of farms ought to be able to do the same.
(Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at [email protected].)