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
With deliberations on the 2012 farm bill due to begin in January, EWG looks at how the industrial agriculture lobby dominates the hearing process, leaving little room for good food reformers.
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The secret farm bill thankfully is dead for the time being. Here's 5 lessons to keep in mind for the 2012 farm bill debate.
Read MoreDetails became public today of a farm bill proposal written in secret by the top leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture committees and sent this week to the Congressional “Super Committee.” As Environmental Working Group had predicted, huge grain and cotton operations would harvest a windfall in taxpayer dollars while hardworking American families that are just scraping by would be badly hurt by cuts to vital nutrition programs such as SNAP (formerly called food stamps).
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The Congressional Super Committee was created to make tough budget choices, but the leaders of the Ag Committees appear to be going in the opposite direction with more lavish subsidy giveaways to mega farms. EWG has new details about the secret farm bill that have started leaking out today.
Read MoreIndustrial agriculture’s lobbyists and a handful of their powerful Congressional allies have been working overtime to skirt the usual democratic process and write a new five-year farm bill behind closed doors.
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Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook and Senior Vice President Craig Cox today demanded that the top agriculture committee leaders make public new cost estimates for a five-year farm bill they are drafting behind closed doors and seeking to insert into the “Super Committee” budget-cutting process.
Read MoreThe Congressional Super Committee was created to make tough budget choices, but the leaders of the Ag Committees appear to be going in the opposite direction with more lavish subsidy giveaways to mega farms.
Read MoreDemocrats in farm country tried hard to turn Congress’ failure to pass a federal farm bill into a political liability for their Republican opponents. It didn’t work.
Read MoreThe leaders of Congress' Agriculture Committees continue to deliberate the next farm bill in secret, and the conventional wisdom now is that direct payments may see cuts or be entirely banished in the final product. We hope so.
Read MoreThe Environmental Working Group released a new Direct Payment Database today, giving taxpayers a look inside the complex agriculture partnerships and corporations that got the lion’s share of $4.7 billion in federal direct payments to farmers in 2009. EWG found that the ten agribusinesses receiving the biggest payouts raked in a total of $5.4 million. The biggest payments went to large agribusinesses in the southern states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee and Mississippi.
Read MoreIt’s been two weeks since EWG president Ken Cook first sounded the alarm that a “secret” farm bill was in the works. He called out the industrial agriculture lobby and a handful of their powerful Congressional allies after it became clear that they were working overtime to write a new farm bill behind closed doors and slip it into law through the congressional “Super Committee.”
Read MoreA newly released report on subsidized federal revenue insurance for industrial crop farmers shows that the government has failed to control its costs and big insurance companies and agents continue to reap billions of dollars in windfall profits. Environmental Working Group, which has long advocated meaningful reform of this misguided policy, commissioned economics professor Dr. Bruce Babcock of Iowa State University to do the analysis.
Read MoreA secret farm bill will leave out healthy food and hurt California. Nearly 70 environmental, public health, nutrition, food and farm groups – including EWG – are calling on California’s congressional delegation to take a stand in the current debate over food and agriculture policy.
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Industrial agriculture’s allies are hijacking the farm bill process. The farm subsidy lobby and a handful of their powerful Congressional allies are working overtime to skirt normal democratic processes, write a farm bill behind closed doors and slip it into law through the congressional Super Committee. But their plan to write a secret farm bill is finally showing up on the political radar.
Read MoreA timely new book explores how America’s food, farm and energy policies got derailed by greedy lobbyists and government subsidies.
Read MoreThe Congressional Super Committee may decide the fate of the hotly debated “direct payment” subsidies for farmers in the next several weeks -- most likely in a smoke filled room without democratic action or input from good food reformers. With some powerful lawmakers urging that all farm program decisions be made in secret, it is crucial to understand the long, tangled and sorry history of one of the federal government’s more wasteful programs.
Read MoreIf the next farm bill gets written without input from healthy food reformers, maybe it’s time to occupy the agriculture committees?
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