Reject pork-laden farm bill for healthier Fresh Act
The State, November 7, 2007

The farm bill may be the best example there is of all that is wrong with government.

The only justification for government subsidies to businesses is to ensure an adequate and affordable supply of needed products that would not otherwise be available. The Agriculture Committee bill under debate this week in the U.S. Senate, like the current farm bill, farm bills before it and the one passed this summer by the U.S. House, does just the opposite.

It gives subsidies to millionaires and megacorporations so they will continue to push the family farmer out of business and overproduce commodities that are endangering our health and environment. At a time of record-high commodity prices, farmers are rewarded for growing the corn, wheat, rice and soybeans that are creating an oversupply of cheap, calorie-laden foods that have fueled our obesity epidemic; they’re encouraged to overuse the pesticides that pollute our water and threaten our health. They’re paid to grow so much extra cotton that the taxpayers have to pay to store it — cotton that sucks up the water that actual people in states such as Georgia need to drink.

Meanwhile, the fresh fruits and vegetables that most Americans need more of in their diets receive no subsidies, and so fewer farmers grow them. The result: It’s cheaper to buy a Big Mac than an apple.

The farm bill isn’t about farming at all. It’s about power politics. Politics so over the top that the lobbyists for the third of U.S. farmers who benefit and the lawmakers from the handful of states that rake in the subsidies can easily afford to buy off critics by throwing them multimillion-dollar crumbs. Politics so insurmountable that doing anything more than complaining about the obscene give-aways seemed hopeless.

It might still be hopeless, but at least this year people who care about public health and the environment and even world hunger are teaming up with fiscal conservatives to fight the legislation — or at least improve it.

The biggest improvement we’ve seen comes from Sens. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., whose Fresh Act amendment would replace billions of dollars in subsidies to commodity farmers with a fully funded insurance program that would cover all farmers — even fruit and vegetable farmers.

That would cut $20 billion off the $288 billion five-year bill, which would be a nice start.

But this being Washington, Sens. Lautenberg and Lugar are using nearly all of the savings to buy support, with provisions to subsidize healthier fruits and vegetables in school lunch programs, to support organic farms and locally based food purchases and research into fruit, nut and vegetable production, to increase the food stamp program and to fund wetlands preservation, open space and soil programs.

We’d rather see a farm bill that confines itself to smart public policy — that is, stepping in where needed to make sure our country has the domestically produced food, fiber and energy it needs at prices Americans can afford — rather than a barrel full of pork. And if anyone can put together such a bill that reforms a Depression-era subsidy program that has outlived its usefulness, that’s what the Congress should pass. But absent that alternative, the Fresh Act might well mark the biggest improvement ever to U.S. farm policy.

Unless they can get the Senate to pass that pork-free overhaul that no one has dared propose, Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint should support the Fresh Act. The other bill showers very little of its largesse on our state’s farmers. And it does much harm to our nation.