What Happens When You Split a Farm Bill?

House legislators from farm-heavy districts have maintained substantial agriculture subsidies for the last 40 years. They traditionally cut deals with urban district representatives, exchanging support for the nutrition programs (for urban areas) for commensurate support of their subsidy regime (for farm-heavy districts). That’s why members of the House Agriculture Committee from both parties have strongly opposed splitting the Farm Bill into a nutrition bill and a farm program bill.

That jig may now be up. House Republican leadership is clearly interested in giving  the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) its own legislation and letting agriculture legislation stand on its own merits. The rifts over food stamps lead many to believe that breaking up the questionable marriage between farm programs and nutrition programs improves the chances that a farm programs bill will pass, and the impulse to pass farm program legislation seems to be driving the divorce.

The question is: why would Republicans want to pass farm legislation, the most wasteful and inequitable part of the existing Farm Bill? And why would they vote for the House Agriculture Committee’s bill, which would make bad policy even worse? Splitting the bill does little to solve its inherent problems.

The answer leads back to the wealthy farmers, insurance companies, and agri-business lobbies that benefit most from farm programs — and their influence in farm-heavy districts. They hope to preserve and expand agricultural entitlements that pay them billions. Reforming the program to make it economically efficient, equitable, and effective seems to have taken a back seat. How else could one explain the following aspects of the House Agriculture Committee’s farm legislation:

• A crop insurance program that costs over $10 billion per year and pays more than 80% of its benefits to the wealthiest 20% of farmers. The government picks up 70% of the cost of the program, and subsidies are not capped for wealthy farmers, thousands of whom receive six-figure-plus premium subsidies every year.

• A Price-Loss Coverage (PLC) program that would lock in record-high prices for farmers. If crop prices fell to historical average levels, the program would cost taxpayers as much as $18 billion annually.

• An international food aid disaster program that wastes one out of every three dollars it spends by requiring that crops be sourced from US producers and shipped by US shippers. That protectionist policy doesn’t help save the lives of starving people in places like Darfur. More food could be delivered more quickly to millions more of the poorest people in the world at a lower cost if food was acquired locally.

• A Soviet-style dairy program that controls the price and supply of dairy products, costing taxpayers $1.3 billion per year.

• A cotton subsidy that violates World Trade Organization rules and forces the US to pay Brazil $147 million annually — just so it can continue to subsidize US cotton producers.

• Sugar policy that relies on import quotas and supply controls to raise sale prices for sugar farmers — since 1980, the 20,000 sugar farmers in the US collectively have gained an average of $1.7 billion a year from this policy which costs US consumers even more, $3 billion per year, in higher food prices.

Undoubtedly, some farm-focused programs are important. Conservation programs provide genuine benefits for society as a whole by reducing air and water pollution and soil erosion. And publicly funded agricultural research programs far exceed their costs to the tax payer by lowering crop prices through technological innovation and dissemination.

But unless the House Agriculture Committee makes serious and major changes to the farm subsidy programs, the question remains: why would any Republican or Democrat legislator vote for the House Agriculture Committee’s bill even if it only includes farm related legislation?