WASHINGTON (ABP) — Despite pleas from a wide coalition of religious, free-trade and anti-hunger groups, the House passed a massive agriculture bill July 27 with only a handful of reforms.
The chamber approved the 2007 Farm Bill on a mostly partisan vote of 231-191. House Democratic leaders worked until the last minute to ensure its passage, shoring up support by adding increases in funding for federal nutrition and conservation programs and funding for minority farmers who have sued the Department of Agriculture over inequities in its subsidy program.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), speaking in favor of the bill prior to its passage, called it “a landmark achievement for farmers, ranchers and rural Americans. The steps it takes will ensure that future farm bills will never again look like those of the past.”
Pelosi and other House Democratic leaders termed the bill, which emerged from the House Agriculture Committee the week before, as a “reform” bill. But a group of fiscally conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats said it was more like a status-quo boondoggle.
It reauthorizes a number of food- and farm-related federal programs last visited by Congress in 2002. They include crop subsidies, which the government has offered to some farmers for decades in an attempt to stabilize the agricultural economy.
However, in recent decades, the payments have begun to have an unintended effect, often subsidizing the owners of large, wealthy farms while providing little or no help to smaller farmers, many of whom are minorities.
According to the anti-hunger group Oxfam America, the richest 5 percent of U.S. farm owners get more than half of all the “commodity payments,” or federal subsidies.
In an attempt to reform the way that the government provides farmers with crop subsidies, a broad array of organizations supported a bipartisan amendment to the bill. Chiefly sponsored by Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), the amendment would have significantly lowered the income level at which farmers can continue to receive the government payments.
The version of the bill passed by the House, for example, would reduce the cap on the annual income of farmers who can receive the subsidies from $2.5 million to $1 million. But that reduction, according to a Department of Agriculture study, would only affect a couple thousand of the nation's million-plus farms.
Kind's amendment would have denied subsidies to farmers who make more than $500,000 a year — or more than $250,000 annually if less than two thirds of that income is derived from farming, ranching or forestry.
The amendment also would have changed the way the government tries to stabilize crop prices, targeted money specifically to help minority farmers, and used some of the money saved on crop subsidies to help enhance federal conservation and food-stamp programs.
However, despite support from the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the Progressive National Baptist Convention, the Christian anti-hunger group Bread for the World and the anti-tax Club for Growth, Kind's amendment failed on a 117-309 vote.
Oxfam's president, Raymond Offenheiser, said in a statement that the bill showed a failure of political will. “[T]he leadership of both parties failed to deliver when faced with a real opportunity to provide a 21st-century vision for American agriculture and rural stewardship,” he said. “The House Farm Bill makes minimal progress for nutrition, conservation and rural development programs but ignores the rare opportunity to finally overhaul U.S. trade-distorting subsidies that benefit large, corporate operations at the expense of family farmers and rural communities.”
The nation's farm policy has, since the New Deal era, been largely controlled by the members of Congress who sit on the agriculture committees of each chamber. Usually from the Midwest and South, the committee members have steered much of the money for commodities to crops grown in those regions, such as corn, wheat, soybeans and cotton.
And, with strong backing from powerful farm-lobbying groups, they have resisted efforts to change the Farm Bill's structure.
The unintended consequences of the bill, though, are manifold, critics say. Subsidies that go to large farmers but often bypass small operations have exacerbated the trend of smaller farms selling out to their larger, wealthier neighbors.
In turn, the exodus of such farmers from small towns in the nation's heartland has devastated local economies, creating an economic ripple effect. Baptists have begun to notice that problem due to their increasing involvement in rural economic-development efforts, such as CBF's Rural Poverty Initiative.
And the subsidies also have an international effect. For example, cotton growers in sub-Saharan Africa and rice growers in Haiti can't compete with subsidized American imports.
But reforming the subsidy system has proven difficult, no matter who is in charge of Congress. Many of the House Agriculture Committee's members are freshman Democrats elected from conservative farm states. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has made it a priority to protect those seats from Republican hands, and farm-lobbying groups are strong in many of those states.
The groups who supported Kind's amendment said the fight is not over. The Senate is expected to take up the legislation in the fall.
President Bush has also threatened to veto the bill if it is not significantly altered before it comes to his desk.
According to a statement from Bread for the World, the pressure that it and other groups brought to amend the bill did help produce several concessions from House leaders. The bill that ultimately passed the House floor included increases in funding for conservation programs, alternative-fuel research and $100 million to settle lawsuits with minority farmers who have been shut out of the subsidy programs.
It also included a $4 billion increase in the federal food-stamp program. Democrats want to pay for the increase by closing a loophole that allowed many foreign companies with American operations to avoid paying taxes on some of their earnings, but Republican leaders have labeled it an unacceptable tax increase.
The bill is H.R. 2419.
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Read more:
Broad left-right coalition faces stiff opposition to Farm Bill reform (7/26/2007)
Baptists, other Christian leaders push for reform in farm bill (7/18/2007)