Let Them Eat Farm Subsidies

In the March 21st edition of Think Progress, Pat Garofalo reports that the House Agricultural Committee is proposing to reduce funding for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, otherwise known as food stamps, as a deficit reduction measure.  As Garofalo notes, this is a time when nearly one in five households are food insecure.  Food insecurity is defined by the USDA as lacking access at some time during the year to adequate food for active healthy living for household members.   A 2009 USDA report showed that 49 million people, including nearly 17 million children, were food insecure. That was an increase of 30% from December 2007, the start of the current recession.

The House Agriculture Committee reported to the House Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan (R-WI),  that SNAP funding had tripled over the last ten years and that much of the increase had come through government action rather than macroeconomic forces.

Garofalo acknowledges this fact but points out that those increased benefits have already been reduced to pay for a jobs bill passed last year.

By contrast the chairman of the committee Frank Lucas (R-OK) and the ranking member Collin Peterson (D-MN) are proposing that “tens of billions” in annual agricultural subsidies also administered by the USDA should be exempt from any reductions.  They are calling for cuts to the food stamp program only.

Agricultural subsidies were enacted in the 1930s during the Great Depression when farm-household incomes plummeted.  They were meant to be a temporary measure to deal with the emergency presented by harsh economic times.  Now, over 80 years later the “temporary” subsidies are a fixture of the US budget.  Garofalo points out that 61% of agricultural subsidies go to just ten percent of subsidized farmers and that 90% of the subsidies go toward production of just five crops -  corn, wheat, rice, soy and cotton. 

Meanwhile fruits, vegetables and livestock production which account for 2/3 of the annual US agricultural production receive no subsidies at all. 

It is not small family farms that receive this largesse.  Garofalo quotes Annie Shattuck of the Institute for Food and Development Policy as saying “most of that 90% went to the large farming corporations”.  Shattuck goes on to say, “much of those commodities were not used for food, but for animal feed and industrial applications”.  Critics of farm subsidies on the right and the left have been calling for reforms in agricultural subsidies but have seen no substantive progress toward reform.  With both the House and Senate Agricultural Committees dominated by farm state representatives, meaningful reform is unlikely.

Garofalo is clearly writing for all those who join me in watching with growing alarm as this new House majority insists on putting the sacrifice required to bring down our deficit on the shoulders of those least able to bear it.  At a time of high unemployment and increasing food costs it is a shameful display of callous disregard for struggling, and hungry, families.