Fat of the land

It's time to curb outsized farm subsidies

Published June 18, 2007 at midnight

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Maurice Wilder, who owns a farm in Wray, Colo., received $2.46 million in farm subsidies from 2003 to 2005, more than any individual in the country, according to the Environmental Working Group. Wilder's businesses also own farms in Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska, South Dakota and Texas, and checks go to his residence in tony Clearwater, Fla.

We're not talking about the Joads here.

Five years ago, Congress (with the help of the Bush administration) let the nation's wealthiest agricultural interests pig out at the taxpayer trough, passing a 10-year, $170-billion farm bill.

Much of this subsidy system is welfare for the well-to-do: Roughly two-thirds of the benefits have flowed to 10 percent of the recipients.

The payments have had other harmful effects. They've socked consumers with higher food prices; degraded the environment by encouraging ecologically suspect farming practices; and eroded America's clout in trade negotiations, because domestic farm subsidies are treated by trade bodies like tariffs on food imports.

The bill must be renewed this year. And fortunately, there's a chance that some of the damage can be undone.

A rather ragtag alliance of fiscal hawks, environmentalists, anti-hunger activists and free-traders is attempting to unravel the tangle of ag subsidies. This time, the Bush administration may be an ally.

The White House is talking about cutting off subsidies entirely to any farm household with an annual adjusted income of $200,000.

The reformers haven't set out their own plan, but there's talk of some sort of direct income test, like the Bush proposal, or capping the amount of money that could go to a single household.

Either would certainly be a huge step forward. Anyone can now cash checks from Uncle Sam. That's how in recent years billionaires Edgar Bronfman Sr. of Seagrams distillery fame and cosmetics king Leonard Lauder have been able to collect thousands in federal payments from farms they owned.

Others on Uncle Sam's gravy train include former NBA great Scottie Pippen, David Rockefeller (grandson of oil tycoon John D.) and media mogul Ted Turner.

This stunning information comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It has been placed online in a searchable database by the Environmental Working Group, which has been posting the data for a number of years.

The database lists 1.5 million subsidy recipients who collected $34.75 billion from 2003 to 2005. It offers plenty of info about who is getting what.

This year, the USDA began listing everything each individual received; previously, a person could set up various corporations, making their total payments impossible to track. So the database now includes 358,000 recipients who were not in previous tallies; those newbies collected nearly $10 billion from 2003 to 2005. (To view the database, and to see maps that show where some of the largest urban "farmers" reside, visit www.mulchblog.com.)

Slightly more than 50,000 individuals collected payments from two or more farm businesses.

After Wilder, the Coloradan collecting the most is Melva De Rondon of Littleton, at No. 581, who received $517,953 from a farm in Kansas.

The good news, we suppose, is that overall Coloradans collected a relative pittance: $382 million in payments, a mere 1.1 percent of the total. Roughly seven-eighths of that went to residents of the 4th Congressional District, but Rep. Marilyn Musgrave has told us she's inclined to support a farm bill that's much friendlier to taxpayers.

As Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook told us, there's nothing illegal about these mega-operations. But they show how badly broken the current, Depression-vintage farm programs have become. And why Congress needs to restore some fiscal sanity to the system.

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