President Bush’s proposed cuts in agricultural subsidies have not received good press here in the Midwest.
Democrats are attacking the cuts as emblematic of a budget strategy that is rotten at the core. Republicans criticize them as misguided, but minor blemishes in an otherwise prudent and thoughtful budget. Both parties vow to make sure that such cuts don’t get implemented.
No one has the guts to say that this is an opportune moment to fundamentally re-examine agricultural policies that are socially and intellectually bankrupt and that have done more to hurt rural America than to help it. This is unfortunate.
Let me say at the outset that I have received a good share of farm subsidies in my life. I grew up in a farm family that got payments from programs during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Later, I farmed myself and received benefits from USDA’s wool program, its feed-grain programs and various soil conservation programs in the 1970s and 1980s. I now receive some $2,000 per year for land in the Federal Conservation Reserve program.
Thus, I am not a disinterested party. Many might think it’s hypocritical for me to snap at the hand that has fed me, and friends who support the programs might call me a traitor.
Nevertheless, the evidence is overwhelming that these policies failed to achieve their stated goals of improving farm incomes and maintaining an agricultural sector with large numbers of diversified farms. They rather have done much to harm rural society, encouraging concentration and industrialization in farming. If not abolished, federal farm programs need drastic change. As structured, they are an egregious waste of taxpayer dollars.
We did take a sweeping look at rural society and farm policies a quarter-century ago, at the end of the Carter administration. Minnesotan Bob Berglund, the best U.S. agriculture secretary in the past century, initiated a series of studies on the effects and effectiveness of 50 years of agricultural programs. They were distilled into a report titled “A Time to Choose.” Unfortunately, the report emerged just as Jimmy Carter failed to win re-election. The incoming Reagan administration didn’t give a darn about the structure of agriculture or the true effects of various subsidy programs. The “time to choose” was lost.
Four farm bills have passed since Berglund’s attempt to look at fundamentals. Changes to ameliorate the adverse environmental effects of subsidy programs did occur in 1985 and 1990. Little else has changed.
The number of farms continues to drop, and average farm size continues to grow. Farm income is now more unequally divided than incomes in Brazil. A handful of large and often quite profitable farms capture the bulk of federal outlays. Several times as many small farms get the dregs.
Technology plays an important role in the changing structure of farming and rural communities. But it is also time to recognize that many changes we deplore occurred because of our federal ag programs and not despite them.
© 2005 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.