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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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In Our View: Farm Policy Lacks Sense

Feds cut subsidies for hungry people, while paying others not to grow crops

The Columbian
Published:

Sometimes, many times, more times than would seem possible, United States farm policy looks as though it were designed with all of the logic and none of the artistry of a Jackson Pollock painting.

Consider this report that arrived recently from Bloomberg News: “A growing demand for organics, and the near-total reliance by U.S. farmers on genetically modified corn and soybeans, is driving a surge in imports from other nations where crops largely are free of bio-engeneering.”

Yes, the nation that is the world’s top producer of corn and soybeans is importing large amounts of those commodities. Last year, corn imports from Romania rose to $11.6 million from $545,000 the year before. Meanwhile, soybean imports from India more than doubled to $73.8 million. This is because of increasing demand for unmodified crops in this country and a supply that hasn’t kept pace.

Free-market advocates might contend that is simply how things work. They might say that when the market reaches the point where it makes economic sense for farmers to grow unmodified crops, then farmers will do exactly that. But farms must be organic for three years in order to be certified as such, and the cost of altering their practices and taking a financial hit during that time period serves as a disincentive for many growers.

And that is where U.S. policy becomes abstract on a Pollock-like scale — because there is nothing laissez-faire about American farms. The industry long has been altered by vast government subsidies that undermine the traditional supply-and-demand rules of macroeconomics. As reported by The Economist earlier this year: “According to the Government Accountability Office, between 2007 and 2011, Uncle Sam paid some $3 million in subsidies to 2,300 farms where no crop of any sort was grown. Between 2008 and 2012, $10.6 million was paid to farmers who had been dead for more than a year. . . .

“American farm subsidies are egregiously expensive, harvesting $20 billion a year from taxpayers’ pockets. Most of the money goes to big, rich farmers producing staple commodities such as corn and soybeans in states such as Iowa.”

While Americans like to romanticize the notion of small-time farmers in touch with the land, the truth is that huge agribusiness has bastardized that agrarian vision. And Congress has been complicit. Last year’s farm bill approved nearly $1 trillion in spending over a decade and created new subsidies for rice and peanut growers that kick in when prices drop. It should be noted that the same bill cut $8 billion in food stamps over the next 10 years.

So, to summarize, the federal government cuts subsidies for hungry people but pays others to not grow crops, even if they have died.

Needless to say, farm policy has been nonsensical since long before a growing demand for organic produce was added to the equation. “If there were a market incentive for more people to produce organic corn, there would be more of it,” Paul Bertels, vice president with the National Corn Growers Association, told Bloomberg. That might make sense in a free market, but subsidies — paid in states where voters have a penchant for hypocritically railing against government assistance — have obliterated the logic of the argument. As The Economist wrote: “Few voters realize how much of their money is given to farmers and even fewer would change their vote because of it.”

And so, big agriculture continues to milk taxpayers — one drip at a time.

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