Since the Great Depression, lobbying by farmers has proved particularly lucrative but has threatened to detach agricultural production from the objective of efficiently producing food for consumers. Today, farm policy consists of an array of subsidies, regulations, spending programs, and land-use restrictions, which are widely blamed for the increased cost of food, environmental degradation, fiscal burdens, and the failure of global trade negotiations.

For several decades, the American Enterprise Institute has brought together researchers to assess the impacts of existing farm programs, and to help provide the analytical underpinning for future reform efforts. In advance of a new round of legislation in 2007, AEI commissioned twenty-one working papers from the nation's leading agricultural economists to evaluate the legitimacy of specific rationales for government intervention in the marketplace.

Contributors to this series presented their findings and an anthology summarizing the research at AEI on Thursday, May 17, 2007.

This publication, and the research and conference that led to it, were funded by the American Enterprise Institute's Inez and William Mabie Endowment for Agricultural Policy Research.