Finally, a chance to reform farm subsidies:
Congress could make historic progress this year
Star Tribune, Minneapolis, Minnesota
May 21, 2007

For as long as anyone can remember, fair-minded reformers in Washington have been trying to wean American farmers from government subsidies, design a more sensible rural safety net and let market signals, rather than federal regulations, guide the nation's food supply

Last week a big, bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a remarkable bill to do just that. It even saves money for taxpayers and speeds up the development of renewable biofuels. The Food & Agriculture Risk Management Act is a radical break from past farm policy, and it sidesteps the normal process for writing agriculture legislation. But it points farm policy in exactly the right direction, and if it doesn't exert some influence on the big farm bill that Congress will write this summer, then the process will be a failure

At the heart of the "Farm21'' bill is a dramatic overhaul of the farm safety net. The government's three big payment streams would be gradually phased down and converted to "risk-management accounts,'' held and managed by farmers to cushion themselves against the annual swings of commodity markets

Because agriculture really is an unusually volatile business, farmers deserve some sort of economic stabilizer. But most commercial farms today are well-capitalized, well-managed small businesses; given the right tools, they can afford to manage market risk much the way other business owners do

The bill's authors estimate that converting traditional crop subsidies to these risk management accounts would save $20 billion over the next five years, enough to fund increased research on renewable biofuels, expand rural conservation programs that are now badly underfunded, boost funding for nutrition programs and even make a contribution to reducing the federal deficit

What's interesting is that the bill's chief sponsors come from the heart of farm country. The Senate author is Republican Richard Lugar of Indiana, where corn is king. A lead House sponsor is Democrat Ron Kind from the great farm state of Wisconsin. They're not anti-farmer. They just want government money spent fairly and wisely. "Too many farmers are producing for the government paycheck, not for the marketplace,'' Kind said in an interview last week

The bill's biggest drawback is that it did not originate in the House or Senate agriculture committees, traditionally the drafting places for major farm legislation, and it hasn't earned the embrace of the two powerful committee chairmen, Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa

But this bill addresses so many urgent national priorities - energy and resource conservation, deficit reduction, a fair and orderly international trade policy - that no one on Capitol Hill can afford to ignore it

POTENTIAL SAVINGS

Authors of "Farm21'' say they could reduce farm subsidies by $20 billion over the next five years, then use the savings to accelerate research on renewable biofuels, expand conservation and nutrition programs, and pay down the federal deficit