Feeding our hungry with the Farm Bill
Morning Sentinel, November 6, 2007

Food, and this nation's complex relationship to its production and distribution, is the topic this week in Washington, D.C., where the Senate has begun what is expected to be a month-long debate on reauthorization of the Farm Bill.

As you might expect, the bill concerns farms, farmers and farming. It's a massive piece of legislation whose $300 million scope also encompasses a range of programs from wetlands conservation to alleviating hunger.

The Farm Bill has historically included big subsidies to farmers. In the Depression-era 1930s, those subsidies helped farmers get through terrible economic times and widespread crop failures. Yet those programs have since grown into widely criticized payment schemes in which corporate farmers whose home addresses are in New York City or Washington, D.C., for example, can get hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal subsidies even if their crops are flourishing.

According to Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a Republican, family farmer and former chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, the farm bill's subsidies go to only one out of three farmers, and six percent of farms get more than 70 percent of those payments. Those payments are made to farmers in only a handful of states -- eight at last count -- and to farmers growing only a narrow range of crops that include cotton, soybeans and corn. You can bet Maine farmers aren't on the list of beneficiaries of those big subsidies.

Contrast that kind of concentrated largesse with another critical aspect of the farm bill: nutrition programs. These are the chronically underfunded programs that supply food stamps to the nation's hungry, many of whom are the working poor, elderly and children. These programs also provide emergency food deliveries to food pantries.

Neither program feeds all the people who need them, in part because outdated eligibility rules cut people off before they have enough income and assets to feed their families. The average food stamp benefit per person, per meal is a ludicrous $1. The minimum benefit is $10 a month and has been for years. And emergency food pantry deliveries have been cut by almost half over just the last year, both in Maine and other states across the country.

Reformers from both parties who care about the distorted farm subsidy payments -- including President George Bush -- set their sights on cutting those payments dramatically in the new farm bill and spreading the remaining resources out to a wider population of farmers across the nation.

Advocates for the hungry -- including many religious organizations -- argued that with even a small shifting of resources, subsidy payments to corporate farmers could be transformed into food for the poor. But when the farm bill emerged from the House earlier this year, reform wasn't in the picture. The subsidies remained largely intact. Ditto with the Senate version that was passed out of committee more recently. The House version of the bill contained a small increase in food stamp payments and relaxing of eligibility requirements; the Senate bill didn't even go that far. Both perpetuated a shameful status quo.

Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins have said they are in favor of strengthening the farm bill's nutrition programs. Collins has even signed on to an alternate proposal by Sen. Richard Lugar and New Jersey Democrat Sen. Frank Lautenberg that would substitute the bloated crop payments with an honest-to-goodness crop insurance program that would legitimately benefit all farmers. It would thus save money and redirect those savings into conservation programs and, equally important, into nutrition programs.

Stay tuned for a big, long fight as the Senate grapples with the question of whether it's fair to subsidize farmers who don't need the money while shorting hungry Americans who do. At least, we hope they grapple with the question. We urge our state's two senators to do all they can to keep the equity issue alive in the Farm Bill debate and do everything within their power to shift our tax dollars to those who face almost every day wondering where their next meal will come from.