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| Corporate Farm Subsidies The Hypocrisy of Farm Subsidies NY Times When Mexican corn farmers tramp through their fields behind donkey-drawn
plows, they have one goal: to eke out a living. Increasingly, however,
they find themselves saddled with mountains of unsold produce because
farmers in Kansas and Nebraska sell their own corn in Mexico at
prices well below those of the Mexicans. This is not primarily due
to higher efficiency. The Americans' real advantage comes from huge
taxpayer-provided subsidies that allow them to sell overseas at
20 percent below the actual cost of production. In other words,
we subsidize our farmers so heavily that they can undersell poor
competitors abroad. And just to make sure, we have tariff barriers
in place that make it extremely hard for many third world farmers
to sell in the United States. The same is true for their efforts
to sell in Europe and Japan. The world's farming system is rigged
in favor of the rich. The developed world pays out more than $300 billion a year in farm
subsidies, seven times what it gives in development aid. Western leaders regularly and rightly tout the virtues of free
trade to the underdeveloped world and energetically press for the
dismantling of tariffs on manufactured goods and the removal of
barriers to free investment. But in the one area where most developed
countries enjoy the advantages of cheaper production costs, the
West is unwilling to practice free trade itself.
New York Times In South Dakota, which received $3.2 billion in farm subsidies over the last five years and stands to gain an even larger amount in the coming decade, candidates of both parties swore to uphold the status quo. Supporters of subsidies say they keep entire counties from going under and ensure a cheap and abundant food supply. But opponents say that the biggest checks go to large corporate farms and do little to stem rural decline. The farm bill signed in May by President Bush -- and backed by both parties -- will, over the next 10 years, distribute two-thirds of $125 billion in payments to the top 10 percent of farms, according to an analysis done by the Environmental Working Group, a conservation group. These payments go to farm businesses that cannot make money in the global market without government help, or they are funneled to people who agree to take certain crops out of production. But farmers who are just getting by tend to be out of the subsidy loop. About 1.2 million of the nation's 2 million farms do less than $10,000 a year in annual sales, the Agriculture Department reports. (full article here) |