The Furious Spinner

As I was saying, this farm bill really sucks. And this piece in the SF Chronicle sums it up nicely. Carolyn Lochhead writes, "A prominent San Francisco patron of the arts, Constance Bowles — heiress of an early California cattle baron, widow of a former director of UC Berkeley’s Bancroft library and a resident of Pacific Heights — was the largest recipient of federal cotton subsidies in the state of California between 2003 and 2005, collecting more than $1.2 million, according to the latest available data. That is the way U.S. farm programs are designed to work. Five crops — cotton, corn, wheat, rice and soybeans — received 92 percent of the $21 billion in federal farm payments last year. The biggest payments go to the biggest farms."

This again is one of those no-brainers: the Farm Bill affects what you and I and everyone eats in this country. It continues to reward agribusiness. This in turn does keep some food prices low: ingredients which then go into junk food.

Here again Lochhead sums it up well. She writes, "Economists say the subsidies harm most farmers. That’s because they lower crop prices, raise land prices and rents, and give subsidized farmers a financial advantage that has helped drive their neighbors out of business and keep young farmers from getting started."

"'The programs are just outdated,' said Daniel Sumner, director of the UC Agricultural Issues Center and a leading farm economist. 'No one can think of a legitimate reason why we have these farm programs for a handful of crops in the United States.

"'If the best the committee could do is say these payments are to help people in need, and we’re going to define for farm legislation that somebody’s in need if the family makes $2 million a year — a million for the husband and a million for the wife — that’s a little strange. If these are really welfare programs for the needy, we don’t normally cut those off at $1 million. It’s more like $20,000.'"

I'm all for helping out the small farmer. Let's encourage organic, sustainable farming. That's good for you, me, he, she, and we. But this farm bill is welfare for the rich.

Labels: democracy watch, food

2 comments

2 Comments:

Hear, hear... it is happening here too. The big crop producers and feedlot operators receive most of the subsidies, and the little guys who are farming organically and free ranging their critters get almost nothing. In other words, government is paying the biggies, encouraging them to rip us off and feed us garbage. I wonder when it will all end.

We're fighting back in our own way, gowing our own stuff and purchasing everything else at the farm gate, and I hope the locavore movement REALLY takes off here.

By  kerrdeLune (cate), at 10:36 AM  

Yeah locavores!!!! That's too bad about Canada. I have this fantasy (which I had hoped was reality) that Canada is more progressive than we are.

By  Kim Antieau, at 3:27 PM  

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