News Coverage
End Subsidies to Wealthy; Promote Healthful Foods
Published August 25, 2007
On Monday and Tuesday in Cedar Rapids, the Lance Armstrong Foundation is sponsoring a Presidential Cancer Forum. Armstrong serves on the President's Cancer Panel, which released a report this year concluding that processed forms of corn and soybeans - heavily subsidized commodity crops - "are known contributors to obesity and chronic diseases, including cancer."
Armstrong sees what we at the Environmental Working Group see: a flawed federal policy that continues to spend too much money supporting too few crops while ignoring the nutritional and environmental challenges it imposes.
At EWG, we also see that current farm policy hurts small family farmers by spending most of taxpayers' money on a handful of profitable agribusinesses and wealthy absentee landowners. When Maurice Wilder, a real-estate developer reportedly worth $500 million, receives roughly $1 million a year in federal farm subsidies, you know that the system is broken.
In a cruel twist of irony, farm subsidies provide big farm operations with liquidity to outbid their small- and medium-sized neighbors for cropland. The result? Big farmers get bigger, small farmers are pushed off the land, and people and jobs leave rural communities. Consolidation has become a government-subsidized reality.
The Environmental Working Group advocates a forward-looking policy that is as much about food and the environment as it is about farming. We agree with the original intent of the farm subsidy system: to provide a safety net for small- and medium-sized farmers in need. We also agree with the Bush administration that farm policy should eliminate subsidies to the wealthiest farmers.
These freed-up funds could make fresh fruits and vegetables more affordable and available to the 26 million poor Americans who rely on nutrition programs. Funds diverted from wealthy operations could also provide more support to more farmers to solve environmental challenges on their land.
The recently passed House version of the 2007 farm bill does little to address concerns. The proposed means test of $1 million in adjusted gross income will filter out a minute 0.2 percent of subsidy recipients. In addition, conservation spending in the proposed bill is an afterthought compared to commodity spending.
To find more money for conservation and nutrition, policymakers should stand up for reform for the greater good against the powerful and well-funded subsidy lobby. There is still an opportunity for real reform in the Senate farm bill. We hope elected officials listen to the chorus calling for a farm bill that serves the needs of all Americans.
MICHELLE PEREZ is a senior analyst for the Environmental Working Group.
