Editorial: Cap the subsidies/Get leaner, fairer farm policy

Minneapolis Star Tribune
Wednesday, June 8, 2005

http://www.startribune.com/stories/561/5445000.html

Editorial: Cap the subsidies/Get leaner, fairer farm policy

The people who represent Minnesota in Congress face a summer of excruciating choices as they assemble a federal budget for 2006. The government is deep in red ink, Washington lacks the money for military operations overseas and pressing needs at home, and still President Bush wants more tax cuts.

Given this bind, however, one choice should be easy: Lawmakers should adopt a bipartisan proposal by Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, to cap federal agriculture subsidies at $250,000 per farm. It would free up billions of dollars for deficit reduction, rural conservation and other worthy purposes, it would bring some equity to a grossly inequitable farm program, and it's been endorsed by leading conservation groups and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. It's also included in President Bush's budget for next year.

So what's the hang-up? The chairmen of the House and Senate agriculture committees, which write the farm part of the budget, are Southern lawmakers with big constituencies of cotton and rice farmers, who stand to lose the most from a cap on subsidies. Insiders say the Grassley-Dorgan proposal could die a quiet death in the Senate Agriculture Committee and never make it to broader Senate deliberations over the budget. That's why it's crucial that two Minnesotans on the committee, Democrat Mark Dayton and Republican Norm Coleman, lend their support.

There's always been a powerful equity argument for the subsidy caps. Some 70 percent of federal subsidy payments go to just 10 percent of farms, generally huge operations that collect checks in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The typical small farmer -- the rural yeoman whom taxpayers actually want to help -- collects about $2,000.

This year there's an additional and more urgent case. Congress' budget czars have ordered the agriculture committees to produce billions of dollars in budget savings from their jurisdictions. If some of that money doesn't come from subsidies to big farms, it will have to come from nutrition programs for poor families -- at a time when the nation's poverty rate is climbing -- or from federal conservation programs, which already are badly underfunded.

Some lawmakers object that capping subsidies would break a promise contained in the 2002 farm bill, which doesn't expire until 2007. But Congress and the president are going to disappoint a lot of constituencies this year -- the Pentagon, the highway lobby, Medicare recipients, pharmaceutical companies, Wall Street investors, the working poor -- if they are serious about bringing federal deficits under control. There's no reason why large, wealthy farmers shouldn't contribute their share.

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