The Strib has published an Associated Press article Farm bill again will be battle over crop subsidies, in which the Kind-Flake Farm 21 proposal is mentioned extensively. The darling of many lefty bloggers, FARM-21 deserves more scrutiny than we've seen.
Fortunately, our friend Dan Owen at the Center for Rural Affairs down in Nebraska has taken a close look at it in Ron Kind's FARM 21- Friend or Foe?. Those who think the Kind bill is a godsend for American agriculture should take a close look. Owens' major points:
- While FARM 21 would change the basic structure of farm programs, it does little in the way of making sure that farm program benefits flow to small and mid-size family farms (jump to more about this);
- FARM 21 does not close the loopholes used to avoid farm program payment limits (jump to more about this);
- FARM 21 shifts large amounts of money to conservation programs- a laudable goal- but invests most of that money into the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which subsidizes enormous manure lagoons and the concentration of livestock production (jump to more about this);
- FARM 21 places much-needed resources behind some rural economic development programs, but others receive inadequate amounts (jump to more about this);
- FARM 21 does not include any crucial livestock market competition reforms;
- Despite our criticisms, every farm bill proposal should receive equal consideration (jump to more about this).
Go read the whole thing for some thoughtful analysis, much of it based on a look at the bill by the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, though opinions you'll read on CFRA's blog are those of the CFRA (of course).
Owens attended House Ag Chair Collin Peterson's Farm Bill meeting in Marshall, Minnesota, on Monday. Afterward, we discussed Peterson's statement that he intended to cap EQIP and other conservation payments at $50,000 over the term of a contract, rather than continuing the current level of $450,000. Capping EQIP at that amount would return the program to pre-2002 Farm Bill levels, and it is a change of course for Peterson since May (see this article in Grist, for example).
Excellent work here.
The Farm Bill is highly complex, and few Americans have any idea how much it impacts them and our country — in fact, the world.
In any complexity within our society — e.g., taxes, the law, the military, government itself — those who know the subject best are the ones who make the decisions. This is a double-edged sword, because knowledge can be employed to advance the common good, or it can be used, like money, to benefit primarily a few.
Unfortunately, farm subsidies, while introduced with good intention, have become like a foreign species introduced into an ecosystem to combat once pest, but which has grown to become a pest unto itself.
Keep up the good work on this subject, Ollie, for there are few outside government and for-profit special interests who know it as well as you.
Ollie notes: One of the things that I'm fascinated by now, and wish I had time to discover more information, is the Environmental Working Group's inclusion of all conservation payments in its "crop subsidy" database (some of which, such as EQIP, it pushed for more funding in 2002, even to the point where it joined the National Cattlemen's Beef Association in a letter urging the caps to be raised to $450,000). Many of the programs--WRP, GRP, WHIP, CRP, and CREP--take land out of production, but the EWG has thrown the dollars used for this into the pot. Very curious that it uses payments it argued for in 2002 to bash ag payments in 2007.
Unlike some, I don't favor the approach that's being touted by EWP, Oxfam, Cato etc. of eliminating all programs. More in my next post. I see a much different pest in ag country.
Posted by: Leigh Pomeroy | July 08, 2007 at 09:39 AM