When the Senate voted on the farm bill last February, it included a cap of $275,000 for subsidy payments to individual farmers. The House put its own stamp of approval on the idea of limits in a non-binding resolution just two weeks ago, stating that the budget savings should be used to pay for conservation programs.
Limits on commodity subsidy payments make sense. Why? Because at present, just three percent of farms receive two-thirds of all commodity subsidies, according to the Environmental Working Group (EWG). Payments are concentrated to a tiny fraction of the nation’s very largest farms, making it tougher for small farms to compete with their larger neighbors. Diverting cash from commodity subsidies to conservation also makes sense, since it helps all farmers, everywhere, not just specific farmers producing a particular commodity, and it helps to preserve the environment to boot. Besides, a bill that’s touted as helping save the small family farm ought not target its subsidies to large industrial farm operations.
But somehow the members of the House and Senate let the foxes into the henhouse when they got together to negotiate a final bill. They produced a bill that effectively gutted the payment limits. The farm bill they sent to the House, approved on Thursday, had new limits of $360,000 per farmer with enough loopholes attached that the limit is not really a limit. In addition, conservation programs to protect streams and wildlife and curb sprawl lost almost $3 billion compared to the bill originally passed by the Senate, according to EWG.
How did this happen? With tough mid-term elections coming up, agribusiness is seeding campaign coffers with contributions, giving an average of $15,000 to House members and $36,000 to Senators toward the 2002 elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The 21 core members of the conference committee, the lawmakers who made the decision to gut the payment limits, House and Senate members alike, have gotten much more, an average of $66,000 apiece, from agribusiness. President George Bush, who has said he would sign the bill, got $2.6 million from agribusiness for his 2000 campaign. Overall, agribusiness is always a generous source of campaign money, providing nearly $261 million to federal politicians and campaigns since 1989, two-thirds of that to Republicans.
Unfortunately, the more cash agribusiness floats to Congress, the more lopsided the farm bill that results. The farm bill passed by the House on Thursday will cost $180 billion over ten years, and includes $40 billion in increased commodity subsidies for large farmers. “The bigger you get, the more money you get,” Chuck Hassebrook of the Center for Rural Affairs, a Nebraska-based nonprofit representing family farmers, told The North Platte Telegraph, describing the farm bill that came out of conference committee. Thanks to Congress, Old McDonald must have a very big farm to succeed.
