The Issue
Subsidies
EWG’s renowned farm subsidy database reveals that taxpayer support goes mostly to large, profitable operations, not to sustainable family farms that truly need the help. We’re working to change a badly broken system.
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The Latest on Subsidies
Something remarkable happened in Washington last week. In a historic, game-changing vote, the Senate voted to put America’s taxpayers and its soil and water ahead of special interests and the corn ethanol lobby.
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Ken Cook's TEDx talk on the US farm subsidy system and the need for people to advocate for a Farm Bill that's also a Healthy Food bill.
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With Congress’s appetite for ethanol souring, the corn ethanol lobby is digging deep for reasons to continue lavish government support for the environmentally damaging fuel. The Renewable Fuels Association – in a gambit to co-opt the annual gas price debate – is adorning Washington DC city buses with ads claiming that corn ethanol reduces gas prices by $0.89 per gallon.
Read MoreA majority of the House of Representatives today approved an amendment that would end U.S. taxpayer-funded subsidies for Brazilian cotton farmers in one of a series of votes on an appropriations bill to fund agriculture and rural development programs for fiscal year 2012.
Read MoreTuesday’s (May 31) votes by the House Appropriations Committee represented one such baby step. For the first time in years, the committee in charge of setting federal spending levels decided that government payments to absentee land owners and wealthy farm operations should be trimmed to reflect today’s budget realities. It signaled that extravagant or irrational farm subsidies might finally have to give way.
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The House Appropriations Committee is set to vote today on a spending bill that makes deep cuts to a broad range of food assistance programs that provide vital nutritional support for the poor, including pregnant women and children.
Read MoreWhen the corn ethanol lobby is fighting to defend its trifecta of government subsidies, it routinely rolls out its favorite “level playing field” talking point.
Read MoreA federal judge granted preliminary approval on May 13th of the $1.25 billion settlement for black farmers for decades of discrimination at the hands of the US Department of Agriculture. President Obama signed the funding legislation for the settlement in a White House ceremony on December 8th.
Read MoreCoalitions often help bring about real change for the public good. Not this one though.
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Bad federal policy and intensifying storms are washing away the rich dark soils in the Midwest that made this country an agricultural powerhouse and that remain the essential foundation of a healthy and sustainable food system in the future.
Read MoreIn a time of robust farm income and tight budgets, the House Republican budget resolution takes a small but welcome step toward a more equitable and sensible support structure for American farmers.
Read MoreThat some members of Congress are farmers is hardly new. Many of the Founding Fathers worked the land. But as the industrial age transformed America’s agrarian society and technology made it possible for fewer farmers to grow more crops on more land, the number of lawmakers actively engaged in agriculture dropped sharply.
Read MoreCraig Cox, Environmental Working Group senior vice-president wrote the following op-ed in today’s (March 25) Des Moines Register. Cox manages EWG’s agriculture programs from our Ames, IA office.
Read MoreLobbyists for the corn-ethanol and the “advanced” biofuels industry had a meeting yesterday (March 21) organized by the United States Department of Agriculture Office of Rural Development to “discuss opportunities to find common ground and synchronize biofuels industry policy,” according to a news report.
Read MoreFederal nutritional guidelines advise us to eat five-to-nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day. That’s not too difficult if you are lucky enough to have access to the fresh and tasty produce grown in Northern California, where I live.
But many folks in this region and in the rest of the country aren’t so lucky.
Read MoreTo judge by the results of their budget-slashing, all-night tea party a few weeks back, Republicans must have swarmed out of their caucus and onto the floor of the House of Representatives with a single rallying cry on their lips.
Women and children first!
Read MoreVolatile food markets and food insecurity contributed to the civic unrest that recently brought down Egypt’s president. To better understand the unfolding reality of global food price volatility, ActionAid and the Environmental Working Group (EWG) today released an interactive map showing which countries are at highest risk of a food crisis due to recent food price hikes.
Read MoreAttending the TEDx Manhattan event on the future of food and farming was a day-long drink from a fire hose of cutting-edge ideas, sobering realities and sincere enthusiasm about how America can eat better and farm more sustainably.
Read MoreThe Obama administration’s proposed 2012 federal budget released today targets several wasteful agriculture programs, including cutting $4.25 billion over 10 years from subsidies to large farm operations, wealthy landowners and the crop insurance program.
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