A food bill, not a farm bill
Boston Globe, November 7, 2007

A NEW bipartisan approach to the national farm bill offers the Senate a chance to break from the big-crop subsidies that fatten the American waistline and steal markets from farmers in developing countries all over the world. If the Senate hews instead to the traditional commodity programs already endorsed by the House of Representatives, President Bush should exercise his threatened veto.

Indiana's Richard Lugar and New Jersey's Frank Lautenberg want to stop the costly practice of subsidizing wheat, corn, soy, cotton, and rice crops even when prices are high, as they are now. Their bill, to be offered in the Senate this week, would switch to a government system of revenue insurance, premium-free for both ranchers and farmers, including vegetable and fruit growers who now get little benefit from the farm bill. For commodity farmers, the program would kick in only when bad weather or a collapse in prices caused their income to drop more than 15 percent.

Commodity subsidies underlie the nation's system of junk and fast food by supplying manufacturers with all the low-cost ingredients they need, including high-fructose corn syrup, and by ensuring cheap grain for the feedlots that fatten livestock. This has encouraged a US diet so high in fat and cholesterol that health officials fear obesity, diabetes, and heart disease could cause an actual shortening in US life expectancy. Cuts in subsidies leave more money for schools to buy nutritious local food for lunch programs.

On the international front, highly subsidized US crops often make it impossible for developing-country farmers to compete even in their own markets. Increasingly, the World Trade Organization is ruling that these subsidies violate its rules, exposing the United States to retaliatory actions.

The environmental costs of the status quo range from fertilizer runoff into streams, and eventually oceans, to the massive manure lagoons of big livestock producers. With less government money going into crop subsidies, more would be available to finance conservation to protect aquifers and watersheds, preserve wildlife habitat, improve soil conditions, and encourage small local farms.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi let that chamber pass a farm bill that preserved commodity subsidies for fear that a reform bill might jeopardize the reelection of first-term Democrats in the seven states that now enjoy more than half of all farm bill spending. That kind of calculation is just the sort of special-interest politicking that is making voters nationwide question what was gained by giving the Democrats power. If the Senate follows this example and approves a bill without the Lugar-Lautenberg provisions, it will richly deserve a veto from Bush. It would be folly for Democrats to make him the reformer on this issue.