Growers and Grocers

A 9-month investigation by the Washington Post has left newspapers across the country calling foul over farm subsidies that are going to non-farmers.

According to the Post, it’s not the landowners that are to blame but a poorly written law that was intended to give farmers more freedom to respond to market changes. The law, which allowed farmers to do whatever they wanted with the land except develop it, was intended to phase out subsidies over time, but when farm prices suffered several years later lawmakers reneged at the pushing of farm lobbyists.

Supporters said these annual payments gave farmers the flexibility to switch from one crop to another as market conditions changed, or even to sit it out in a year of low prices. In addition, the payments fit with international trade rules that frown on traditional price supports.
The annual payments were dubbed “transitional” and were supposed to decline over seven years. Many lawmakers assumed they would eventually end. But two years later, farm prices fell sharply, and the Republican-led Congress gave in to the farm lobby.

In the Hartford Courant last week, an editorial lambasted the practice that has doled out $1.3 million to people who aren’t farming anything at all.

The Freedom to Farm law has provided a cash harvest of green to a comparative few privileged landowners at the expense of the American public. In Texas especially, it appears to have set the farming industry on its ear. It’s time Congress overhauled this boondoggle.

The Journal Star in Lincoln, Nebraska concurs with the need for change.

Members of Congress who represent farm states better start cleaning up the farm subsidy programs, or someone else is going to do it for them.

Rules for farm subsidies are too loosely written. Enforcement to make sure subsidies are used for worthwhile purposes is too lax.

Farm Subsidies are going to the wrong hands it seems. What was intended originally as a New Deal shot-in-the-arm for farmers who were hurting from low prices has become a hand out to the rich.

Now that’s great lawmaking.