[env-trinity] On the Farm Bill; Farm subsidies help few, harm many; Effects felt here and in Africa

[Tom Stokely]

FARM BILL:

Guest Column: On the Farm Bill; Farm subsidies help few, harm many; Effects felt here and in Africa

San Francisco Chronicle – 11/8/07

By Janet McKinley, of San Francisco, is the chair of Oxfam America's board of directors

 

Californians have a lot at stake in the Farm Bill that is on the U.S. Senate floor this week, and not just because farming is a vibrant part of our economy and culture.

 

Take water, for example. It's been a dry year here and the Legislature is considering issuing billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded bonds to build dams for water storage. But there are many other, more fiscally conservative water supply alternatives than dams. We can start by taking a closer look at the federal Farm Bill.

 

More than 2 million acre-feet of water - that's 2 million football fields covered in one foot of water - are used each year to cultivate cotton in our state, with farmers paying far less than the water's actual cost and a fraction of its true value. 

 

Increasingly, cotton is being treated by commercial farmers in our state as a "marginal" crop, grown when there's sufficient water to harvest the benefit of a subsidy check from the government. Growing cotton in California consumes enough water to meet the needs of more than 10 million residents.

 

Perversely, because federal farm policy ensures that farmers get subsidies for each bale of cotton that they produce, cheap U.S. cotton exports glut the market and depress world prices, triggering tens of millions of dollars in subsidy checks to wealthy growers. So every year, 12,000 mostly large-scale cotton producers representing less than 1 percent of America's farms, get up to $3 billion in government handouts. A quarter of cotton subsidies go to the top 1 percent of recipient farmers, reaching upward of $500,000 per farm.

 

While that policy may have made sense during the Great Depression, it makes no sense today. As taxpayers, we're set up to pay more and more. As Californians, we're set up to export an acre-foot of water that we could have used otherwise here in California with every bale of cotton dumped onto the world market. 

 

Sadly, cotton subsidies would not change under the Farm Bill that is on the Senate floor this week. It would continue farm policy that encourages cotton farmers to produce more cotton with the guarantee of a taxpayer subsidy for every bale of cotton they produce and every acre foot of water they use to produce it.

 

Cotton subsidies also have severe ramifications for international trade, global poverty and national security. Cotton subsidies threaten negotiations on international trade and risk retaliation from our trade allies that could affect a number of sectors of our economy.

 

Recently, I traveled to Mali in West Africa to meet with small-scale cotton farmers. Mali's farmers, many of whom live on a dollar a day, are largely dependent on cotton to support their families. The poverty was jarring. Many of these farmers are illiterate, but they are well aware of the huge subsidies our government pays cotton growers at a time when their government recently removed agricultural price-supports in the lead- up to privatization of the Malian cotton industry in 2008, as prescribed by the World Bank. 

 

A recent study by Dan Sumner at UC Davis found that reforming cotton subsidies would increase world cotton prices, resulting in enough income for poor West African cotton-growing households to feed an additional million children a year. The price-deflating effects of our cotton subsidies now substantially offset the benefits of direct U.S. aid sent to West African countries. So instead of promoting sustainable economies, current policies foster dependence on foreign aid, increased economic instability and resentment of the United States.

 

Faced with the opportunity for change this summer, the U.S. House of Representatives failed to muster the political will to reform the Farm Bill's cotton program. The Senate has its turn this week, but it's unclear whether Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California will support reform or yield to the lobbying power of corporate farm interests.

 

In Mali, a village chief told me that his family has been growing cotton for generations and the situation has never been so dire. He knows that many of the challenges he faces are just the way of things, but he can't understand why a country as prosperous as the United States would harm small, hardworking farmers around the world. He asked me to send this message to our Congress. It's time for all of us to send this message, for so many reasons. #

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/11/08/ED18T84PO.DTL

 
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