Plow it Under
Submitted by jgehring on Fri, 05/09/2008 - 3:50pm.
Story summary:
After weeks of wheeling and dealing, a House-Senate conference committee has finally produced a farm bill. And what an unlovely creation it is. The nearly $300 billion, five-year legislation brims with subsidies for everything from biofuels to historic-barn preservation. It includes a dubious sugar-to-ethanol program and billions of dollars for a permanent disaster relief fund that essentially pays farmers to grow crops on land too dry to sustain them.
Plow it Under
Washington Post
5-9-08
The farm bill perpetuates the multibillion-dollar system of direct payments to corn, wheat, rice, cotton and soybean growers, with only minimal limitations on how much of this corporate welfare rich farmers can receive. To be sure, food stamps and other nutrition programs account for about two-thirds of the bill's cost. These would grow by roughly $10 billion, a needed increase, given rising food prices. Attaching wasteful subsidies to the poor's nutritional safety net is the oldest trick in the agriculture politics book.