2012 Farm Bill reference page

My personal scratch pad for the 2012 Farm Bill hoopla. What’s going on…?

I’ll outline how the final product might look once some of the mess is cleaned up in Congress. Right now we await House debate on its 600-page bill. Politico says that might not happen any time soon:

The House Agriculture Committee has given birth to a 600-page farm bill that Republican leaders seem to want nothing to do with. And just months from Election Day, it could prove to be a headache for House GOP leadership.

Republicans are likely to try to extend the current farm policy that they’ve consistently decried as broken. And they won’t even do it this month, GOP aides say — they’ll likely wait until September.

The reality is that GOP leaders are worried about a messy floor fight over divisive regional policies months before voters head to the ballot boxes. Odd couples could abound: The far left and far right would likely vote against the bill on the floor, the former thinking the bill cuts too much from food stamps, the latter insisting cuts aren’t deep enough. There’s also division over how much the government should be subsidizing the farm industry and whether it should control commodity prices. Arguing complex farm policy on the House floor in this political climate gives many Republican members pause.

If the House can’t pass a bill, then it would go into negotiations with the Senate with a weak negotiating stance.

What do experts think about what they’ve seen so far? (I don’t care to read the (predictable) positions of the Big Ag lobby. Any honest insight they might have into the economic implications of the bill will also be captured by more objective sources that I have come to respect and trust.)

Michael Pollan doesn’t like it:

The good news in the House’s otherwise horrible farm bill: Most of Pingree’s provisions are in it.pingree.house.gov/index.php?opti… [more on this below]

— Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) July 12, 2012

Others have called it “simply the worst piece of farm and food legislation in decades” and “unconscionable.”

The Environmental Working Group lists some specific problems. I paraphrase and comment:

• Cuts nutrition assistance ($16 billion in SNAP funding) during hard economic times. Nearly half who will lose out are kids.
• The Lucas-Peterson farm bill will give mega-farms even more tax dollars (in the form of income support, not price support, as explained below by Iowa farmer George Naylor) to drive out small family farmers.
• Expands crop insurance by $9.5 billion without consideration of reforms such as payment limits, means testing and administrative reforms–all of which are applied to SNAP.
• Cuts conservation programs by $6 billion. (This one is close to the heart, and I’m looking forward to expert analysis on the likely impact of these cuts on wetland and prairie ecosystems, in particular.)
• Includes anti-environmental riders–gutting rules that protect water quality and wildlife from agricultural pesticides; as well as environmental protections on logging.
• Has few incentives for healthy diets (health care cost inflation be damned).
• Exempts GMO crops from environmental reviews and sets arbitrary deadlines on FDA regulators.
• Guts state food and farm standards: a last-minute amendment to prevent states from setting their own standards for farm and food production. This one reeeeeeks of Monsanto, ADM, Cargill, Tyson…chemicals and sewage.
• Repeals organic certification support program. Problems abound with this system.  It needs to be revamped.

• 87% of SNAP beneficiaries are children, senior citizens on fixed incomes, or single parents (including veterans)
• On O’Reilly, Charles Krauthammer on why the program is now at $75B/year:

We have a political ideology of liberalism in Washington which believes that a measure of success of government is how many people it ‘helps.’ For them this is a great success – they want to see the natural American aversion to taking a handout whittled down. The conservative view is that if you’re truly destitute, of course society has an obligation to help you, but the liberal idea is that the role of government is to sustain as many people as possible and to make sure there are no risks in life. That’s why you get the growth of these programs.

The CBO says it’s because many people became eligible after the bank bailouts:

Almost two-thirds of the growth in spending on SNAP benefits between 2007 and 2011 stemmed from the increase in the number of participants. Labor market conditions deteriorated dramatically between 2007 and 2009 and have been slow to recover; since 2007, both the number of people eligible for the program and the share of those who are eligible and who participate in the program have risen.

Other memorable moments include: 

• Mark Bittman: We’re talking about 45 million people. To say that this chunk of America is full of bums looking for handouts is “cynical and insulting.” The same people scorning food stamps think that unemployment isn’t a problem.
• 1% of food stamps are illegally trafficked, while 2% of members of the House of Representatives have plead or been found guilty of crimes.
• Should there be restrictions on what people can buy with SNAP benefits? For example, should people be able to purchase “non-foods” like soda, which ultimately subsidizes corporations that do nothing for nutrition? Mark Bittman has written about this before.
• Why does the small-government, free-market ideology “disappear into the ether” when the Farm Bill comes around?

George Naylor, past president of the National Family Farm Coalition, Iowa corn and soy farmer. Source: here

I found the interview with Iowa corn and soy farmer George Naylor very interesting. I’ve come across him before in Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fresh. Paraphrased:

Don’t confuse income support with price support. Right now, we support income: the government pays me and Monsanto wins because they get a dirt-cheap product. If farmers were guaranteed a minimum price–a price guarantee, rather than income support, just as the original New Deal farm programs were designed–they could be more of a player in the market; and the government wouldn’t have to have subsidy payments.

But what we have now is another program in a long line of programs since the 1950’s which guarantees cheap commodities to the big food corporations to produce cheap processed food, meat, milk, eggs. A terrible side effect of this program is that land is used unwisely. Just look at what’s happening to the commons, to our farmland.

I need to learn more about how the price support programs used to work, and how they could/should work today. I know how some price systems have worked in Africa…not so hot.

Here are snippets from a short 2007 interview with Naylor:

If we were charging the real beneficiaries of our agricultural system—which are the multinational corporations that buy our commodities—if they were charging them a fair price for it and every farmer had a share of the national market like we used to under the real New Deal programs, then government payments wouldn’t have to be a major feature of the farm program. And we wouldn’t be talking about limiting payments to farmers. Because the real beneficiaries of the government programs, for many years now, have been the big corporations that buy very cheap commodities…And therefore take over the livestock sector of agriculture because they’re buying corn and soybeans very cheaply, that they turn into industrial animal feed to feed in industrial feed lots, whether it’s hogs, or cattle, or chicken, or dairy cows.

The overall riding issue in all of this is whether we’re going to let the free market determine farm product prices. As long as we are running agriculture under the WTO or NAFTA so that big corporations can get fruits and vegetables or grain or meat or whatever anywhere in the world, then regardless of what kind of farmer you are, you’re likely to get a lousy price for it. And the farmers in those countries will get a lousy price for it too, because it’s all one world market now, one international market for agricultural commodities.

So it’s really free trade and free markets that are the culprit and the only reason that the United States, hypocritically, uses subsidies is to keep its agricultural system from falling completely apart.

They [Congress] have one question to answer—and that’s whose side are they on? Are they on the side of the working people in this country and family farmers, or are they on the side of multinational corporations and wealthy people all around the world who benefit from those people’s labor? It’s not rocket science to figure out labor laws and farm programs and trade rules that will benefit family farmers and working people on the one hand, versus those that basically depend on free trade and free markets, like big corporations want. They can make their choice.