Tech | November 03, 2011 | 12 comments

Will "a secret farm bill" be passed this week?

source: http://www.grist.org/factory-farms/2011-10-31-will-a-secret-farm-bill-be-passed-this-week

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JanforGore
Last week, we wrote about the likelihood that the $300 billion 2012 Farm Bill would take shape weeks before 2012 even begins, in the form of a dashed-off bill swept into the larger "super committee"-driven deficit-cutting process. As this week starts, that troubling prognosis remains.

In fact, last week, several congressional aides told agriculture trade publication Agweek that lawmakers planned to "work through the weekend to try to complete a Farm Bill proposal for the super committee in charge of deficit reduction by November 1." But so far, nothing decisive has been announced.

This might explain why the food and farming advocacy site Food Democracy Now sent out an email this morning with the subject line "24 hours to stop the Secret Farm Bill." The site asked subscribers to call a short list of senators and congressmen and tell them to say "‘No' to the Secret Farm Bill," because "rushing this vital piece of legislation behind closed doors is unfair and undemocratic."

Sustainable food advocates have been struggling to adjust to this new reality. As the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) described it last week:

No hearings, no amendments, no debate. Under this scenario, we may have very little idea about what is in the Farm Bill until after it has passed ... It's hard to overstate how messed up this is. We now have an environment where highly paid lobbyists thrive and citizen's voices, along with real reforms, evaporate.

Oxfam American chimed in with a list of reasons Occupy Wall Street supporters aren't likely to appreciate this rushed Farm Bill:

1. It was negotiated to satisfy high powered industry lobbies that pay lots of money to influence the Ag Committee.

2. It's a giveaway to big industrial farms at the expense of family farmers.

3. It promotes unhealthy, unsustainable farming practices at the expense of sustainable farming.

4. It targets conservation and nutrition programs for cuts disproportionately.

The bill's details remain unclear, but we know it will involve $23 billion in cuts. One Republican senator from Iowa went on record last week saying he believed the committee would cut $15 billion from farm subsidies and $4 billion each from conservation and nutrition. Another House conservative told the press that the cuts would "reduce farm subsidies about 20 percent and cut conservation spending about 10 percent. Nutrition programs, including food stamps, would be cut about 1 percent."

Advocates for sustainable and local food movements have rushed out two bills of their own, to be included in the larger Farm Bill process. The Local and Regional Food Bill would bolster support for family farms, and "expand new farming opportunities and rural jobs, and invest in the local agriculture economy." The Beginning Farmer Bill would help new farmers get access to capital (the lack of which is a well-known roadblock for beginning farmers) using microloans, matched savings accounts, and similar strategies.

Whether these additions have a chance of passing, or are simply symbolic, remains to be seen. Meanwhile, California food, farming, conservation, and environmental groups have been lobbying hard to have some say in the proposed Farm Bill. But the state -- whose agricultural industry is said to produce more than 400 different crops, employ 800,000 people and generate annual revenues of $37.5 billion -- will most likely continue to be left out of the discussion. One reason is that California farms don't produce the bulk of those commodity crops -- like corn, soy, and wheat -- that farm bills tend to concentrate on.

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12 comments // Will "a secret farm bill" be passed this week?

  • letsliveinpeace
  • Anonmaly
    • +2
      Anonmaly  

    • Now taking donations to head to that school of urban farming run by Will Allen...... Think a few more should do the same..

      Industrial food production especially with all the GM influence could turn into a global catastrophe....

    • 7 months ago
  • artemis6
    • +2
      artemis6  

    • So , it begins . This is the real war weapon this which they wish to destroy the people , by stealing our voice wealth and dignity . With this , they wish to dominate OUR future .

    • 7 months ago
  • PressCore
    • +2
      PressCore  

    • " Money may be the husk of things, but it will never be the kernel "
      " It may bring you food, but never the peace of growing it for yourself,
      or the appetite to consume it, and be one with it. Money may buy you
      medicine, but it can never guarantee you health. It will procure for you
      ready aquaintences, but never true friends.,. Servants, but not loyalty.
      Days of amusement, even fleeting joy at times.., but never Peace or
      true happiness & contentment. " Heinrich Ibsen

      " Happy are those who find understanding & wisdom. For her income
      is better than Silver or Gold, more precious than jewels. Few things
      one can desire can compare with her. Long life in her right hand,
      true honor, heavenly riches in her left hand. Her ways are the ways
      of pleasantness, as all her paths lead to sacred Peace. She is the
      tree of life for all those who hold to her, as those holding her fast
      are called happy " Proverbs 3 ; 13-18

      " It is common for those to have courage when standing with the many "
      " It is much more rare & immortal to have true courage standing alone "

      We shall overcome.

    • 7 months ago
  • coolplanet
  • JanforGore
  • PressCore
    • +2
      PressCore  

    • http://Current.com

      As corn and soy are GMO targeted grains, I wouldn't be surprised
      to smell the stench of Monsanto's overworked arm pits pulling the
      super dupers' puppet stings behind the scenes in this planned con
      job. That the super dupers carry on as if public laws were somehow
      legitimately classified information from the public these laws directly
      affect is, per se, a mirror reflection of the Corporate M.I.C. tactics.
      I've blogged every U Tube, other article posted here on Current.com
      over the past 41 months pertaining to American farming for research
      purposes. I recall one H.R.Rep proposed one monstrosity simply since
      his wife works for Monsanto provingh Monsanto's in bed with Congress.
      Pinochiobama's appointed a Monsanto exec as his Agriculture Sec. So
      I'm sure Monsanto's line to the Oval office is on speed dial too. Not
      surpising, Corporations have made honest Government their Show Biz
      farce. The movie 48 hours likely has wrinkles by now. Time is money.

      ( Ron Paul has responded to Brad Meltzer's Decoded team's inquiry
      on why the Treasury has never allowed his proposed audit of the Ft.
      Knox Gold Depository since 1974: The Government seeks to act in
      secrecy because they believe their role is parents acting on behalf
      of the public as if they were children who can't know what's good for
      them.) It's the attitude of the national security state vs democracy.

      Though it's obvious the USA's system of education has produced
      too many abysmaly insipid fools..., Obvious Corporate TV promotes
      the disease of passivity-athema to any Democratic Republic...The
      deluded idea that Big Business knows what's best for the Gummint,
      and thus it must somehow follow that the Government then knows
      what's best for all us po chilluns is so lame it's tragic. I diitaly signed
      Change.org's online petition yesterday to protest this UnAmerican
      Activity on behalf of the OWS movement. I'm the grandson of an
      Italian American farmer from Palermo, Sicily who gave me my first
      job in life tending our family organic crops... it's Giovani's birthday
      this month...Both he himself, and our NY Western hero Theodore
      Roosevelt would want me to. Unlike the super dupers, our family
      knows money is the poorest way to measure true wealth. Therefore,
      we won't walk around smiling while wearing invisible FOR SALE signs
      on our chests. We wouldn't piss on the Wall St banksters if they were
      on fire. Leo Tolstoy: " Money is the new & improved system of Slavery,
      because it removes the last requirement that the slave owner must
      have some kind of human contact with it's captive enslaved "

    • 7 months ago
  • JanforGore
    • +3
      JanforGore  
    • PressCore:

      When man allowed green paper to become more important than the blue oceans, skies and green forests is the day he lost the meaning of life. And with this particular bill we have a chance to move this country forward by working on a food policy that not only promotes health but ecological and economic stability in those traditions you described... only, it sits in the hands of those who are more accountable in their bubbles to fossil fuel, chemical and big ag companies than to the very people who provide for us and those who respect the intrinsic value of this planet and its bounty. And that definitely needs to change.

    • 7 months ago
  • JanforGore
    • +3
      JanforGore  
    • Image

    • http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/11/farm-bill-supercommittee

      After Citiziens United, we need to disband this "super committee."

      Excerpt:
      "On the surface, given the austerity fever plaguing Washington, this distribution of cuts might seem to make sense: The commodity programs take a big cut, conservation takes a smaller one, and anti-hunger take a relatively minuscule one.

      But in reality, the commodity cuts won't change the incentives that push farmers to plant millions of acres of farmland with just a handful of crops: corn, soy, cotton, and wheat. That's because the plan appears to be to replace the current system of direct payments—which pay commodity farmers $5 billion a year based on their acreage historically devoted to subsidy crops—with one based on government-funded revenue insurance that holds farmers' incomes steady when prices drop.

      Like the old system, the new insurance scheme would apply only to farmers who grow those subsidized commodity crops. The new setup would be cheaper than direct payments—projected to cost $3.5 billion per year versus $5 billion—but it continues to ensure that corn and soy will continue to blanket millions of acres: agribusiness as usual, in other words. Indeed, the National Corn Growers Association—the agribiz-linked voice of the nation's industrial-scale corn farms—has vigorously endorsed the switch.

      While the commodity cuts won't affect the industrial-agriculture juggernaut, the cuts to conservation programs could have real ecological impact. And paring back food stamps at a time when a record 45 million Americans rely on them seems unconscionable.

      Moreover, a whole slew of small farm bill programs designed to help farmers transition to organic, communities roll out new farmers markets, AND new farmers with start-up costs, could see draconian cuts. These programs, the result of years of lobbying work from groups like the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the Community Food Security Coalition, have been grouped together by USDA deputy secretary Kathleen Merrigan under the banner of Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food. Ferd Hoefner, policy director at NSAC and a veteran of farm bill fights dating to the '70s, told me that such programs could lose as much as half of their funding under the current process.

      All of that aside, the most egregious thing about the backroom farm bill being slapped together is that it completely shuts out grassroots participation in crafting national food and farm policy. The public farm bill fervor that rose up in 2007-08 has slammed up against a brick wall enclosing secret congressional hearings.

      Now, it's true the supercommittee's efforts to cobble together a debt deal could fail. If that happens, what becomes of the backroom farm bill now being put together? I put that question to Hoefner. "Anyone's guess," he said. But the deal being made now will likely be the "starting point" for negotiations going forward, he added. And that, I think, is bad news for those of us who would like to see significant food policy reform".

    • 7 months ago
  • JanforGore
    • +3
      JanforGore  
    • Image

    • http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/kill_the_secretfarmbill/

      You can still make your voice heard about this.

      Notice that the connection between climate change and truly sustainable agriculture was not even a blip on the screen regarding this bill. Nor how handling of agricultural losses due to effects of climate change (particularly the floods and droughts we are seeing) will factor into insurance mechanisms, prices and continued reliance on monoculture.

      But you can bet Monsanto's and Cargill's fingerprints are all over it as well as the purveyors of the poisons sprayed on our food.

    • 7 months ago
  • artemis6
  • PressCore
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