Somebody Has the Upper Hand, But It Isn't the American Farmer
Nancy Scola, The Huffington Post, October 24, 2007

On the soundtrack of the documentary Life and Debt, about the impact of the World Bank and the IMF in Jamaica, there's a song by Jamaican dub poet Mutabaruka that contains this line: "American farmers get the upper hand/while our farmers [are] going one to one." Watch the movie, and it's easy to see what Mutabaruka is upset about -- Jamaicans standing in line to buy cheap Idaho potatoes while more pricey spuds grown in the island soil sit and rot.

American produce in Jamaican markets is cheaper, of course, in part because of the enormous subsidies that prop up American agriculture. Jamaica is in incredible debt to global lenders like the IMF and World Bank. And in an effort to dig themselves out, they embraced the neo-liberal open-market approach that the IMF likes best. And the effect, naturally, is that the Jamaican tuber has to compete head to head with the American spud given a leg up by its government. To some extent, a potato is a potato. And so Jamaicans buy the cheaper ones.

But U.S. ag subsidies are in some ways the worst of both worlds. They send American products out into the world with a distinct advantage. That no doubt weakens the ability of Caribbean farmers, for example, to compete in the new world order. But it's not like they're really all that helpful for their American counterparts. More than 2/3 of U.S. farmers don't get any commodity payments at all. It's mostly the big corporate agricultural companies who benefit.

And yet Congress today is ready to continue for five more years the subsidy-driven American agricultural model. The great deal of talk over the last few months about farm policy reform has been largely for naught. There's no real change to the payments for growing certain crops and for not growing others. You have to look with a pretty powerful magnifying glass to find any reform in the bill at all.

There have been Democratic senators like Ag Chairman Tom Harkin (Iowa) who have pushed for real change, but then there are Democratic senators like Kent Conrad (North Dakota) who have fought to keep the status quo going full steam ahead. Senators Dick Lugar (R-Indiana) and Frank Lautenberg (D-New Jersey -- the Garden State!) angled for a change in farm policy that would hand payments to farmers only when they run in to trouble -- not as a matter of course.

But today it doesn't look like the Lugar-Lautenberg bill has much of a chance. Real farm policy reform won't, until either the politicking around the bill moves outside the fraught bubble of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Or, of course, until several farm state Senators screw up the enormous political courage it will take to cause change.

Until then, somebody has the upper hand. And it's not the Jamaican farmer, for sure. But we can't really say it's the American farmer either.