If the Department of Agriculture were honest, that’s what it would call itself.
“One reasonable reform would be to institute a ‘no-double-dipping’ provision that would require farmers to choose between either subsidized crop insurance coverage or (ARC and PLC),” says Caroline Kitchens of R Street.
Meantime, the farmers’ lead advocate, a man named Zippy, goes around telling everyone that the farmers have already sacrificed enough, so don’t go cutting more. The members involved all dutifully repeat the talking point.
“At the time of passage, the 2014 farm bill was estimated to contribute $23 billion to deficit reduction over 10 years,” Zippy says, innocently forgetting to note that those savings never materialized.
The House Agriculture Committee, meanwhile, is looking to overhaul one subsidy — for cotton — that didn’t lavish quite enough money on agribusiness. The Stacked Income Protection Plan, apparently, has not adequately protected the incomes of the stacked, according to Ag Committee Chair Mike Conaway, R-Texas.
Kitchens endorses several of the modest reforms contained in the Assisting Family Farmers Through Insurance Reform Measures (AFFIRM) Act, which was introduced in the House by Reps. Ron Kind, D-Wis., and Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and in the Senate by Sens. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H. Most of them are aimed at reducing the flow of money to big agribusiness. According to one recent analysis, 77 percent of farm subsidies flow to the top 10 percent of the industry.
