Top 10 Things You Should Know About The Farm Bill | Environmental Working Group

With all of the discussion discussion in Washington about cutting costs, it is really disgusting that they have not taken the Farm Bill into account. I guess that the fact Representative Ryan is from a farm state makes a difference. The Environmental Working Group has provided a concise list of what we mostly don't know about the cost of our food and why our taxes are so high.

Here is just one item from their list.

1) The farm bill doles out billions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies to the largest five commodity crops: corn, cotton, rice, wheat and soybeans. Those payments go out, regardless of need, and they mostly fail to help the nation’s real working farm and ranch families. In fact, since 1995, just 10 percent of American farms – the largest and wealthiest operations – have raked in 74 percent of all subsidy payments.

The last time the farm subsidies came up for review, both our Democratic Senators, Feinstein and Boxer, supported the continuation of business as usual. Guess they know which side of the aisle is buttered.

A Farm Bill Without Subsidies

Working with Jill Bussiere of the Wisconsin Green Party, I have published an OpEd regarding Farm Subsidies and our do-nothing congress.

You can read it here:

I would ask that you read the OpEd and then let your Congress Critters understand that we need solutions that work in the 21st Century, not a continuation of the outmoded, ineffectual partisan gamesmanship that they are currently handing out.

If you want a really weird opinion on Farm Subsidies, check out the reply to this question at the CNN -> YouTube Republican Debate. Watch Romney dance.

Down on the farm

I would like to call attention to another fine article concerning the Farm Bill of 2007. This time, the San Francisco Chronicle almost gets it. Unfortunately, Carolyn Lockhead still had to play the "fair and balanced" game, giving multiple views without taking the easy step of providing the information that would tell the reader what was truth and what was spin. But that is media coverage of politics from the beltway.

It is incomprehensible that either of our Senators could have the slightest doubt about continuing the current subsidy practices. If subsidies for American Cotton are in this bill, the President will have to veto it. This may be the first time that he is more correct than Congress. Allowing cotton subsidies to continue will open up major international trade problems and the costs could be $Billions. But I have written about this recently.

The Chronicle's quote from Dennis Cardoza (D-CA 18)is typical of the political BS the Democrats use to try and hold on to farm country seats.

"The traditional support that Republicans and this president receive from farm country is evaporating rapidly," said Cardoza, who secured new money to research and market fruits and vegetables. "They're more concerned about foreign corporations dodging American taxes than they were for real hardworking, salt-of-the earth people plowing the fields in the Midwest."

I am not sure what he means. When a majority of cotton subsidies go to less than 10% of all cotton farmers, something is amiss. The current system is set up for big business agriculture and gentleman farmers with a penthouse in the city. It dodes not go to those "real hardworking, salt-of-the earth people plowing the fields in the Midwest."

The minimum acceptable change in the subsidy structure is for the Senate to accept the Dorgan-Grassley limits on subsidy payment.

There is a natural affinity between the ecological and grassroots democracy goals of the Green Party and the needs of small farmers and rural communities. In California, Green Party efforts backed Restore the Delta as this non-profit brought fishing, farming and environmental interests together to try and preserve this hub of California's water supply.

Maybe this congress will muddle through with a barely acceptable bill, one with Dorgan-Grassley. But it will still favor everything that is big: farms, agri-business, transportation costs, energy use. Fundamental change will happen when the farmers and Greens align their efforts for a food policy that prioritizes a sustainable economy that benefits the health of our citizens, our land, and our farmers.

Lockhead does us a favor at the end of her Chronicle Story. She allows Wisconsin Representative Ron Kind to get in a few last words.

What subsidy supporters cannot explain, Kind argued, "is why we have a farm bill where 70 percent of the people in production agriculture get nothing ... including the specialty crop producers. And they're not going bankrupt. They're not being driven out of business. So the question is, why do these five main grain crops deserve so much of the subsidies and so much of the money, when it's concentrated in so few hands? That's the great story in all this."

Kind had an amendment to this bill and it was killed by Pelosi playing power calculus with farm country votes. The only Californian to side with Kind was Oakland's Barbara Lee. She got it right, again.

Water Wars and Cotton Farmers

There are two issues that I have raised in the past few years concerning the cotton farmers of California.

• Government price supports for cotton have created the situation where US Cotton was being delivered to the world markets at prices lower than what sub-Saharan Africa could produce.
  
• This tax payer subsidized cotton in the San Joaquin Valley of California was soaking up a large amount of our precious water supplies.

I had asked that the Agricultural Plank of the GPCA platform be modified to call for an end to these price supports of commodity crops: cotton, corn, soy beans, wheat, sugar. I had written here before about the need to stop growing cotton in the desert.

Finally, we see signs that both of these positions have been the correct one. It is all in this story by Garance Burke (AP).

Cotton also has lost ground for another reason that became apparent this week as the Senate debated the 2007 farm bill: The United States' cotton
subsidy program is enmeshed in a global trade battle.

Whenever you hear a politician talk about "fair trade" they mean fair for us, not the other guy. It is finally catching up with the US. Unfortunately, it has already done significant damage to those countries that were the victims of such un-fair trade.

We now have the interesting situation where the Democratic Congress, even the environmental Barbara Boxer, is trying to court the favor of Red State Farmers and the Bush Administration is threatening to veto the entire Farm Bill of 2007 until they can hide the problems that this policy has created in some back room secretly negotiated deal.

As a result, Burke tells us some cotton farmers are abandoning the crop.

Growing cotton has rarely been a more risky proposition than it is now, which is precisely why cotton farmer Frank Williams is planning to sow his fields with wheat.

From Williams' California fields to the Texas plains, farmers are plowing under cotton - once the king of U.S. agriculture - to seed crops that make more money.

The real effects on water depends on what crops these farmers intend to grow instead of cotton. The farmer cited in Burke's story is turning to wheat.

We can probably do just as well growing grain with just the same amount of water or less," said Williams, 56, who will uproot all the downy Upland cotton he grows in Firebaugh, along the Central Valley's western edge, leaving in only an organic variety. "It's just not worth it."

This year, cotton acreage nationwide dropped by about 29 percent, hitting a 22-year low at 10.8 million acres, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Acreage dropped by about 23 percent in Texas, the national leader, and by 19 percent in California, which ranks fourth in domestic production.

The sharpest declines were in the Southeast and Mississippi Delta regions, where drought has parched fields that grew the crop since before the Civil War.

The responsible reaction is to consider how our changing, warming climate is going to affect agriculture and to start making adjustments to crops, water use, etc. now. In fact, as concerns water for agriculture, if the global warming driven changes in rainfall do not force us to do so, then supplying the needs of a growing population will.

The timing is right for more aggressive action by the public (I am taling to you, readers) to tell our congressional delegation that the Farm Bill has to change.

There are several options. The Grassley - Dorgan Amendment would limit the amount of money that any one enterprise might get from these subsidies. This should be at the top of the list. Another option is to change the subsidies to an insurance program.

Still, the threat of billions of dollars in sanctions helped motivate Sens. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., to write an amendment they plan to introduce on the Senate floor next week to eliminate subsidies for cotton and all other commodities and replace them with an insurance-type program that all farmers could participate in.

Not a single one will say that it is time to kill such subsidies. However, we do know that this Farm Bill, as currently written, is a recipe for disaster.

Boxer plays politics with the farm bill

For some reason, Sen. Barbara Boxer is beginning to sound like Richard Pombo when talking about the Farm Bill of 2007. It looks as if she thinks it is necessary to win over the California Farm Bureau for the Democrats just to stay in office. I have news for Sen. Boxer. It isn't going to happen.

The Center for Rural Affairs, based in Nebraska, makes a case for this bi-partisan farm bill that everyone should pay attention to. We squander a lot of money on irrational farm subsidies each year and I am not talking about a few family farmers. The biggest share of that money goes to the large corporate farms.

Boxer and the California Democratic Party care nothing for the family farm. They care nothing for the middle class, for the small town business that is getting squeezed in to bankruptcy by the power that corporate America has over our government.

The following is an update from the Center for Rural Affairs that I received just this afternoon. Please read it. Then, we need to let the family farm owners understand that there is only one party that hears what they say and that party's color is Green.

In August, we asked you to contact Senator Barbara Boxer in support of strong payment limits. Despite the efforts of many Californians, Senator Boxer continues to publicly oppose this common-sense, bipartisan reform. Senator Dianne Feinstein has not publicly announced her position on payment limits. Soon the Senate will vote on the 2007 Farm Bill.

California's Senators need to hear from Californians who support farm programs that work for all of California, not farm programs that provide an unfair advantage to a few mega-farms. How your Senators vote will have decisive influence over the future of rural America.

On the key issues of Farm Bill subsidy reform, your Senators have a choice. They can support a Farm Bill that finally closes the loopholes and ends million-dollar payments to the nation's largest farms, or they can stand by while others push for a status-quo bill that will continue the unlimited payments that subsidize the destruction of family farms and rural communities.

Your Senators need to hear that you want them to support a farm bill that closes the loopholes and places a strict limit on farm program payments.

Rather then supporting corporate agri-businesses interests, the Farm Bill should support family farmers, ranchers and rural communities. By acting today, you can tell your Senators that the Farm Bill should support the values of hard work, fairness and genuine economic opportunity. It should not provide the largest farms in the country with money to drive their family farm neighbors out of business.

Powerful interests are pressuring your Senators to pass another status-quo bill that continues the unlimited payments. By taking action today, you can fight back.

Use this link to take action online today.

Thank you for taking action. You can follow the unfolding debate at our Blog for Rural America, and in the coming weeks we will let you know when you can make a difference by writing again.

Hit 'em when they ain't lookn'.

The attention of Congress is now almost entirely on the big issues: the war in Iraq and what way to better support the troops.

The major political blogs are taking on the question of corruption. dengre, as always, keeps the attention of dailykos on the aftermath of the Abramoff Scandal and the House cleaning that is still in order. While that is going on, the folks at redstates.com are taking on corruption themselves, starting with California Representative Ken Calvert. They understand that being unwilling to address this issue costs them vote, seats, power.

The Green Party of CA is going through a period of self flagellation and factional fighting that must warm the cockles of a -heart and justify every spoiler rationalization that they have ever voiced.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, Monsanto is at work, pushing the GMO favoring legislation that they failed to get through California's legislature in 2006. Yesterday,House Committee on Agriculture, Livestock, Dairy and Poultry Subcommittee, met to mark up the Farm Bill of 2007.
This bill includes the following seemingly innocuous language.

SEC. 123. EFFECT OF USDA INSPECTION AND DETERMINATION OF NON-REGULATED STATUS.
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no State or locality shall make any law prohibiting the use in commerce of an article that the Secretary of Agriculture has—
(1) inspected and passed; or
(2) determined to be of non-regulated status.

The effect of this bill is to once more, override the expressed wishes of many states and local constituencies in favor of a "big government knows best how to protect all of you mentality."

I would have expected this from a Richard Pombo. I was very concerned in that he appeared to be next in line to chair the Agriculture Committee had he remained in a Republican Congress. Happily, he is gone and the Republicans no longer have complete control over Congress.

It must be the Corporate indebted Democrats who are sponsoring this legislation. We have a strong movement for sustainable agriculture in California. In many counties, Greens, like Erica Martenson in Napa, are leading the effort to protect local agriculture from the onslaught of unregulated use of genetically modified organisms. We know that non-regulated GE crops will contaminate neighboring crops. Everyone knows this but Congress would take away our protection from the unscrupulous Monsanto's of this world.

There are three California Representatives on that sub-committee: Joe Baca (CA-43), Dennis Cardoza (CA-18) and Jim Costa (CA-20). All are Democrats. All three need to hear from us regarding the elimination of this un-necessary, un-democratic big government appropriation of the rights of local government to protect their citizens.

It is time Greens stopped discussing bylaws and started to protect our interests, the other parties are not doing it.