FREEDOM TO FLEECE

Concluding there is pork in a farm bill is a bit like announcing that the farm belt is the true heartland of America: banal enough to induce reading stupor. Yet the bill before the Senate today is truly something else. It’s a 70-percent increase over the current program that gives more cash to agri-corporations, provides more loopholes for agri-corporations and creates incentives for increased production that will mostly benefit agri-corporations.

The big winners in the bill are, not coincidentally, battleground states for the next presidential election. California is the nation’s biggest food producer but its farmers will see little of the new money compared with the grain and cotton farmers of the Midwest and the South. The perennial example of agricultural waste, the sugar subsidy program, which restricts access to sugar at world market prices, is again part of U.S. farm policy. According to the General Accounting Office, it costs consumers an added $1 billion to $2 billion annually, with almost all of the benefits go to a few large sugar processors. At least 20 Fortune 500 companies would receive federal farm subsidies under the proposal.

With funding going from about $100 billion to $173 billion over the next decade, it is not surprising that Maine gets considerably more under this proposal than the previous version, the 1996 Freedom to Farm act, which was supposed to ease farmers away from subsidies. The bloated bill was designed to be big enough to buy senators’ silence, but good for Sen. Susan Collins for standing up for fiscal responsibility and saying no to this wasteful plan. Among the worst examples of pork she cited in her opposition were the lack of limits on how much the big farms could get from taxpayers. In the original Senate version of the bill, a cap of $275,000 was placed on the amount of subsidies per farm per year. That cap was increased in conference to $360,000 but even that wasn’t enough for recipients, so Congress provided ways for farms to avoid the caps altogether.

It is difficult to choose which group is madder about this bill: family farmers, who realize that because most of the bill’s money goes to subsidize farm output, supply will rise and commodity prices will fall; environmentalists, who might like the added protections for open space and wetlands but definitely do not like that much of the money for the environment is backloaded and that the Senate version was much stronger than the compromise; or world trading partners, who are getting weary of the United States demanding that their government cut subsidies while Congress increases them here.

Both President Bush and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle support this bill; it is bipartisan bloat without even an apology for spending enormous amounts on campaign-driven payouts to key states. No question family farmers need and deserve support and no question Maine would have gotten more than the status quo, but the amount of waste in the proposal is so egregious, the Senate should heed Sen. Collins’ strong opposition and reject this bill.