There's been a lot of talk lately about starving kids vs. stuffed farmers. Vilsack said:
"We will do our best to frame this discussion..so that people understand: 30 million children, 90,000 farmers...It is a tough choice, but it's a choice that folks are going to have to make."
But is that really the question? Kids vs. Farmers? Even if the USDA has a finite budget and money for one program means money taken from somewhere else, let's consider the overall federal budget:
If we need more money for farmers or kids, let's take it from the bloated Pentagon budget instead of pitting farmers and kids against one another. Surely there's a Cold War-era obsolete defense program somewhere we could cut.
But beyond that, both kids and farmers are screwed by the very same companies. All the usual suspects - ADM, Cargill, ConAgra, Tyson, Monsanto, etc. |
| It's true that farmers are not as vulnerable as children, but they are price takers on both ends with no minimum wage. They take whatever price they can to buy crop inputs - seeds, fertilizer, oil - and then they get whatever price they get to sell their crops. Some years if their costs are high but their prices are low, they would suffer losses (and many do!) without the subsidies provided by the federal government.
Certainly some farmers ARE doing just fine without federal subsidies, and I don't have a problem with taking subsidy money away from those who don't need it - particularly if we use the savings to fund conservation programs. But I DO have a problem with something I think Obama is proposing. He wants to limit subsidies based on farmers' gross income. Anyone who makes $500k+ doesn't get direct payments - no matter what their costs are. It's fully possible for a farmer to have $500k in revenues but $600k in costs (and just because he's taking the price the market can bear, not because he's a bad business man). Why should we deny that farmer the federal subsidies meant to be his safety net?
Now, we CAN restructure our subsidies altogether. We can set a price floor, as we have in the past. If the market would set a commodity at $2.50/bu but the government sets the floor at $3.00/bu, then it's the buyers of those commodities - agribusiness giants - who pay the extra $.50/bu, not the taxpayers. That's change I can believe in.
On the other hand, even Vilsack has identified himself that Farm-to-School programs are an ideal way to help farmers and kids together. Rather than letting agribiz corporations buy crops from the farmers at artificially low prices, process them into junk, and sell them back to the kids in their lunches, why not give local farmers some business to buy REAL food - and serve it to kids in their lunches?
No question that reform needs to come to the U.S. subsidy program AND the lunch program, but I think we need to focus on a way to help everyone together, not one group at the expense of the other. The only group I'm interested in screwing over are the corporations who have now spent decades screwing us. |
