Farm Subsidies

5 Pages 1300 Words

Nobody Can Win

The United States senate is about to pass a bill for $171 billions dollars on farm subsides. Most people just think that is that farm subsidies are designed to help struggling family farmers make ends meet. In reality, current farm policy only helps two out of every three farm subsidy dollars to the top 10 percent of subsidy recipients, while completely shutting 60 % of farmers out of subsidy programs. The ceilings that are in place on most farm subsidy programs are rarely enforced by Congress or the Department of Agriculture, and contain several loopholes allowing the largest farms and agribusinesses to bypass these limits. The results is a system charging taxpayers billions of dollars for subsidizing the largest farms, who then use these funds to buy out small farms and consolidate the agriculture industry. Far from remedying this problem, the House-passed Farm Security Act of 2001 and Senate’s Agriculture Conservation and Rural Enhancement both increase subsidies and further forwarded them to large farms and agribusinesses.
Farm subsidy limits do exist – in theory. The 1996 Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act included ceilings on the amount of farm subsidies an individual can receive per farm program and per property. These limits by no means prevent large farms from collecting millions annually. For example, Congress since 1998 has passed annual “emergency supplemental” bills increasing Production Flexibility Contract payments as much as 100 %. Marketing loan gains and loan deficiency payments are supposed to contain $75,000 payment limits, they were written to allow farmers to continue receiving money beyond the subsidy limit and then just forfeit their crops to government to settle the loan. Predictably, the Congress has been Against to seeing tens of thousands of farmers forfeit their harvest to the federal government, where the Department of Agriculture would have to store and even...