Last day for comments on closing corporate farm subsidy loophole

by: desmoinesdem

Sun Apr 05, 2009 at 15:43:38 PM PDT

President Barack Obama promised during his budget speech to a joint session of Congress in February to "end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them." Food Democracy Now's action alert noted,

Today's current subsidy system allows large corporate farms to take advantage of subsidy loopholes that place independent family farmers at a serious competitive disadvantage.

Because of loosely written management and labor requirements in the Farm Bill, corporate farmers are allowed to use multiple partnerships, passive investors and sham "paper" farms to funnel huge multimillion dollar annual subsidy payments to corporate entities that don't do any real work on the farm, but use the ownership as an entitlement to bilk payments from the government.

As a result, giant corporate millionaire "farmers" are driving independent family farmers off the land, using their ill-gotten gains, supplied courtesy of taxpayers, to outbid small, midsized and new farmers who want to buy or rent new crop ground.

Food Democracy Now provided a sample e-mail that you can cope and paste into your own message. I've posted it after the jump, and you can also find it here. If you can put the message in your own words, that's wonderful, but any comment you can send by the close of business on Monday is better than nothing.

However you write the main text of your message, put this in the subject line:

Comment on Farm Program Payment Limitation Rule, Federal Register, Vol. 74, No. 23, February 5, 2009

Kids vs. Farmers? No! I Say It's Everyone Vs. Greedy, Immoral Corporations

by: Jill Richardson

Tue Mar 10, 2009 at 14:51:03 PM PDT

"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.

Is Obama's Budget Answering My Loftiest Hopes and Dreams?

by: Jill Richardson

Thu Feb 26, 2009 at 12:19:29 PM PST

In the past, Obama has supported capping subsidies at $250,000 per farm and closing all of the existing loopholes. But what does he mean about direct payments? We've had two days to speculate, and today he delivered his budget that fills in the details.