Farm aid cinch for tempting disasters
Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, October 3, 2007

WASHINGTON – Taxpayers have spent $26 billion over the past two decades to bail out farmers and ranchers in states where weather disasters are routine, according to a group that tracks farm payments.

Growers and ranchers in 10 disaster-prone states got more than half of the payments. Farmers in states where the weather is less destructive received considerably less.

Hoosier farmers, for instance, got $340.6 million in disaster aid from 1985 to 2005, according to the Environmental Working Group, which obtained payment information from the Agriculture Department.
Farmers and ranchers beset by floods and droughts in North Dakota, by contrast, received nearly $1.9 billion over the 21-year period.

About the same number of farmers and ranchers in each state – 26,800 Hoosiers and 23,900 in North Dakota – accept government subsidies and disaster payments.

Each year, farmers whose crops or livestock are damaged by drought, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes or blight ask Congress for money to help cover their losses.

When Congress provides money to growers in the same states year after year for the same weather-related reasons, the Environmental Working Group’s president said, it encourages people to farm or ranch in climates that don’t make sense for agriculture.

“You have the government sending signals encouraging people to take chances … ” Ken Cook said Tuesday where Mother Nature is saying, ‘You’re pushing things,’ when his group released a report analyzing 21 years of disaster payments.

“For most parts of the country and for most recipients, it’s an occasional thing,” he said of the checks sent to farmers and ranchers when natural disasters strike.

Three-quarters of the country’s growers and ranchers have received disaster aid in three or fewer years over the 21-year period, Cook said, but some farmers ask for bailouts year after year. He said 21,081 farmers and ranchers got disaster payments in at least 11 of the 21 years. Those 21,081 farmers and ranchers got $1 for every $10 in disaster checks distributed by Washington, he said.

Only a handful of Hoosiers – 28 – got disaster aid in more than half the years examined by the Environmental Working Group. One of those recipients, Henry Hilger and Son in Allen County, received disaster payments in 13 of the 21 years for a total of nearly $1.4 million. The other frequent recipients were in other parts of Indiana.

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., has proposed a permanent trust fund for disaster relief programs. The $5 billion fund would take the place of the yearly emergency spending approved by Congress for weather-related payments to U.S. agriculture.

The Finance Committee, which Baucus heads, is scheduled to vote on the bill today.

Cook says the legislation is a bad idea because it doesn’t do anything to discourage growers and ranchers who are trying to grow crops or raise livestock on land that is inhospitable to agriculture.

Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., the former chairman of the Agriculture Committee, agrees.

“Federal farm subsidies are already excessive, focused on only a handful of crops, and mostly go to farmers in a few states,” he said. “Over the past 10 years, farm subsidies have gone to just one out of three farmers.”

“Adding ‘permanent disaster assistance’ only adds to this egregious system, targeting certain crops.”

Lugar has proposed a different approach: a combination of federally backed insurance and tax deferred savings accounts for farmers.

“All farmers could participate regardless of crop or animal raised,” he said. “This would be a more than adequate safety net at much less taxpayer expense, particularly given the changes that are occurring from biofuels production and economies of scale.”