The following is a guest post by Anne Schechinger, Midwest Director of the Environmental Working Group, and Jared Hayes, senior policy analyst at EWG, a nonprofit organization specializing in research and advocacy in the areas of agricultural subsidies, toxic chemicals, drinking water pollutants, and corporate accountability."
The nearly $900 billion federal Farm Bill expired Tuesday at midnight, and Congress left for their October recess on Monday. The next chance of passing a farm bill will be in the lame-duck session after the election.
Funds won't run out of the current bill extension until the end of the year, but the impact is broad and wide for millions of farmers across the country. This political impasse reflects fundamental differences between lawmakers over the future of food and farm policy.
On one side is the proposed House Farm Bill that failed to pass – a plan for the few, not the many. The failure to pass the bill highlights the ongoing political nature of farm and food assistance, providing just enough support to prevent extreme hunger or public outcry.
The House Farm Bill failed to help most farmers, especially the family farmers legislators love to invoke. Most farmers would get nothing.
Instead, the bill dramatically increased subsidies for a few thousand farmers in just a handful of states, making it easier for the largest and most successful farmers – many of whom have annual household incomes of over $1 million – to collect unlimited subsidies.
This increase in farm subsidies for wealthy farmers would be the largest in more than a generation, even though farm bankruptcies are at a 20-year low.
Ostensibly to pay for this giveaway, the House bill wanted to cut anti-hunger assistance by $30 billion. But that cruel proposal wouldn’t fully cover the proposed farm subsidy increase.
The shortfall would be funded by adding to the deficit – something the same legislators behind this plan often claim to oppose.
Increasing subsidies would also likely hurt farmers of color, who are largely ineligible for the plan’s increased subsidies.
Almost no Americans would be served by the House bill.
Several disparate groups know this.
Conservatives who hate increasing subsidies, weakening payment limits and deficit spending are appalled by the plan.
Anti-hunger groups oppose its efforts to cut food assistance.
Family farm advocates warn the bill will drive up the cost of land, equipment and inputs, making it harder for small farmers to stay in business.
But everyone should be opposed to the House’s farm bill.
For example, those most affected by climate change. Funding intended to help farmers prepare for extreme weather would be repurposed, and new limits would be placed on the Department of Agriculture’s ability to respond to weather disasters.
And those who care about children. Hundreds of state and local ordinances designed to protect kids from toxic pesticides would be wiped off the books.
Another troubling component of the House farm bill is a group of policy changes that would allow even more people who don’t even live or work on a farm to receive farm subsidies.
The 2018 Farm Bill expanded subsidy loopholes to allow a farmer’s cousins, nieces and nephews, and all members of “general partnerships,” to receive payments, whether or not they live or work on a farm.
House leaders claim their bill puts “more farm in the farm bill.” But the reality is that, as Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) recently noted, the House Farm Bill is really a “Farm Bill for the few.”
Her proposed farm bill would support all parts of agriculture, including young farmers and farmers of color, not just the largest and most successful – and mostly white – farmers, as these charts demonstrate.
A strong farm bill should help the many farmers who get little or no support from the so-called farm safety net. One way to do that, as Sen. Jeanne Shaheen recently proposed, would be to cut wasteful subsidies to crop insurance agents and companies, with the savings redirected to programs that would help smaller, more diversified farms.
Arguably the most troubling aspect of the House bill was the false promise it provided farmers – even those few who would benefit. As House Agriculture Committee Ranking Member David Scott (D-Ga.) recently said, “farmers deserve better” than a “bill with no future,” because it is unlikely to be enacted into law.
Let’s make a new farm bill count for all farmers, not just a few.
