Wayne W. Myers, MD
The inaccurately named “Farm Bill,” usually renewed about every five years, seems likely to be reauthorized in 2012. Even if you have you have no interest in farming, there are some things you should know about this $300 billion monster.
The first major element to consider is that there will be a lot of money involved. The largest provisions in the bill are driven by formulas rather than appropriations, so spending on programs authorized by the bill varies from year to year, depending on factors ranging from unemployment to wheat prices. The annual dollar cost is about three times the cost of the Iraq war.
If the new bill follows the outline of the current measure, there will be 12-15 “titles.” Many of these will be of interest only to rural people, but we should all be aware of the big provisions. The first in the current bill provides over $100 billion a year in “commodity payments” to growers of cotton, corn, wheat, soybeans, rice, and legumes and oil seeds (the payments include owners of land that grows these commodities). The structuring of the “commodity payments” is very complex, is different for every commodity and is changed in every farm bill. The reason for the frequent changes? There is no good way to give away all that money without messing up domestic and international markets and incentives.
The current bill has had numerous international and domestic implications. It has driven Haitian rice farmers out of business, kept West African cotton farmers in dire poverty and driven up Mexican corn prices. U.S. cotton policy has been judged illegal by the World Trade Organization in an action brought by Brazil, but the penalty levied was not sufficient to motivate a U.S. policy change. The scheme for converting petroleum-plus-corn-plus-government-subsidies to ethanol-plus-private-profit is widely debated. The commodity programs will be hard to phase out, though most of the money goes to three states: Texas, Iowa and Illinois. The value of the payments has been factored into land values. Discontinuing the payments would be likely to precipitate a land mortgage crisis.
The second major element to consider is Title IV in the current bill, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as the Food Stamp Program. In November 2010, 43 million Americans -- about one in seven -- received Food Stamps averaging $133 per individual per month in value. That equates to an expenditure of about $70 billion per year.
The Farm Bill, with its commodities and export titles, is being defended as a jobs bill, a whole new twist. This is ironic, since for decades industrial agriculture has been bragging about how few farmers it takes to produce a ton of food as it drives most farmers off the land. Now lobbyists are pitching commodity exports as pulling America out of the recession.
Wayne Myers can be reached at wwm@midcoast.com.