Action Alert from Church World Service

After nearly 30 hours of markup spanning three days, the House Agriculture Committee reported out their version of the farm bill with a voice vote last week. It is expected to be voted on Thursday, July 26.

The Agriculture Committee’s version of the farm bill does little to help struggling farm and rural families in the United States, or hungry people here and around the world. It leaves largely untouched our current commodity programs, which concentrate payments in the hands of a few. The committee’s farm bill would also do nothing to change policies that make it more difficult for farmers in poor countries to sell their crops and feed their families.

Action Needed
Visit the CWS Speak Out website to email Rep. Earl Blumenauer, and ask for a new farm bill that will:

• Enable farmers to earn a fair price from the market through changes in farm policy that set a floor price for commodities at a farmer's cost of production, establish a reserve program, and fully fund effective conservation programs;
• Strengthen antitrust enforcement to reverse current trends towards the concentration of agricultural markets and further industrialization of our food system;
• Support programs for schools and other public institutions to increase purchasing of healthy, local food directly from family farmers and cooperatives at a price that is fair to both.

Background:

The Farm Bill is a law renewed about every five years governing food and agriculture policy in the United States including federal farm support, food stamps, agricultural trade, marketing, conservation and rural development. In 1933, as part of the New Deal program, President Franklin D. Roosevelt first implemented the agricultural policies that helped much of rural America recover from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Since then, the U.S. Congress has reformulated the Farm Bill in several ways. The current Farm Bill was enacted in 2002, with 10 different areas or “titles,” ranging from commodities and conservation to research and food safety.

The farm bill was initially designed to be a safety net to help farmers when they faced poor crop production, or low prices. The current farm bill does not live up to this original purpose. Church World Service is calling for reform of the current U.S. Farm Bill to help alleviate the suffering experienced by small holder farmers in the U.S. and around the world who bear the negative impacts of fluctuating crop prices brought on by an export-oriented agriculture system increasingly dominated by global food corporations.

Market deregulation has facilitated growing market concentration in the agriculture and food industries encouraging costly and unsustainable overproduction and dumping of strategic agricultural commodities onto world markets at prices substantially below the cost of production. This practice, in turn, has resulted in sustained downward pressure on world commodity prices, threatening farmers and farmworkers around the world.

The dumping of agricultural commodities undercuts the ability of small holder farmers in developing countries to sell their goods at fair prices in their own domestic markets. In many of these countries, more than fifty percent of the population makes its living from agriculture. Without border controls like quotas and tariffs, developing countries would have nothing in place to shield their farmers from utter destruction; but these mechanisms are also threatened as developing countries face demands to dismantle their remaining quotas and tariffs in the name of increasing “market access.”

In the United States, subsidies kick in to stabilize some U.S. farmer’s income when prices are low. Still family farmers are finding it difficult to survive and commodity overproduction is creating widespread environmental damage. While major agribusiness corporations reap profits, farmers are denied a fair price for their crops and taxpayers are forced to foot the bill.