(1)
7 Ways the House Farm Bill Slams the Middle Class
The Bill Makes the Middle Class, Not the Wealthy, Pay for Deficit Reduction
By Melissa Boteach
Center for American Progress
July 17, 2012
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2012/07/farm_bill_hurts.html

On July 11 the House Agriculture Committee passed its
2012 Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act-
also called the farm bill-legislation that reauthorizes
many of our nation's key agriculture, nutrition, and
conservation programs. Unfortunately, the bill asks
family farmers, the middle class, and other families
struggling to make ends meet to foot the bill for
deficit reduction, while asking nothing of the
wealthiest Americans. On top of more than $16 billion in
cuts to nutrition aid over 10 years for families
struggling against hunger, the bill will cost us jobs
and eviscerate efforts to help family farmers and rural
small businesses save money by using energy more
efficiently.

Here are seven ways the House farm bill slams the middle
class:

1) The bill's cuts to nutrition assistance will cost us
jobs. A Center for American Progress report shows that
every $1 billion cut in the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program costs our economy nearly 14,000 jobs.
With $1.3 billion in cuts in the first year alone, the
bill's cuts to nutrition aid would cost our economy
19,000 jobs in 2014.

2) The bill will increase poverty by kicking more than 2
million struggling Americans off of food assistance. In
2011 the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program kept
more than 4 million Americans out of poverty and
lessened the extent of poverty for millions more. The
average amount of supplemental nutrition assistance is
just $1.50 per person per meal, but this sustenance
keeps many families on the edge from falling into
poverty.

3) The bill's cuts in nutrition aid will undermine long-
term economic growth. Hunger is expensive. In fact, in
2010 hunger cost the U.S. economy more than $167 billion
from lower educational outcomes, lost worker
productivity, increased health care expenses, and other
associated costs. By eliminating 1 billion meals for
struggling families in the first year of nutrition cuts
alone, the House farm bill will likely increase hunger
and hardship and cost our economy billions in the long
term-a consequence that affects all of us.

4) The bill cuts school lunches from poor kids to pay
for an expensive new entitlement for agribusiness. The
House farm bill spends $9.5 billion to create an
expensive new crop insurance program primarily
benefiting large agribusiness while cutting more than
280,000 children off of automatic access to free school
lunches. These same kids would also lose the
supplemental nutrition assistance that feeds them at
home.

5) The bill cuts off pathways to the middle class by
kicking families off of food aid if they accrue minimal
savings to pull themselves out of poverty. The bill
eliminates a provision known as categorical eligibility
that gives states the flexibility to waive stringent
asset tests for families eligible for nutrition
assistance. These savings can allow a family to put away
money for car repairs so they can get to work, for
tuition to train for a better job, or simply to make it
through a rainy day or a family crisis. Rather than
rewarding families for striving to provide a better life
for their kids, requiring asset tests penalizes families
for efforts to pull themselves out of poverty and
creates more administrative paperwork for state
governments.

6) The bill cuts $90 a month from 500,000 households
struggling to make ends meet.Both the House and Senate
versions of the farm bill eliminate a provision known as
heat and eat, which helps households with high utility
bills avoid impossible choices between putting food on
the table or paying their heating or cooling bills.
Eighty-four percent of all supplemental nutrition
assistance goes to a household with a child, senior, or
person with a disability, so these cuts would have a
disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations.

7) The bill deprives family farmers and small businesses
of assistance to help them save money by using energy
more efficiently and to diversify their income via clean
energy investments. The bill would halt mandatory
funding for the Rural Energy for America program, which
invests in the development of advanced biofuels, farmer-
owned wind facilities, and other clean energy programs
(Title IX, Sections 9002-9013). This program has created
or saved 23,000 jobs since its inception and attracts $4
in private investment for every $1 of government help.
These vital rural energy programs have not been funded
without mandatory authority.

In short, the House farm bill will cost us jobs,
undermine long-term economic growth, increase poverty,
and exacerbate child hunger. Congress should reject
these and all cuts to nutrition aid and pass a farm bill
that strengthens America's middle class.

Melissa Boteach is the Director of the Poverty and
Prosperity program at the Center for American Progress.

(2)
How Agribiz Bought the Farm Bill
By Tom Philpott
Mother Jones
July 19, 2012 
http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/07/agribiz-bought-farm-bill

So, how's the farm bill going? Well, the Senate's
version of it "could have been worse," I concluded after
it passed, straining for positive things to write about
it. The House Agriculture Committee's, though, was a
full-on disaster, offering harsh cuts to food aid at a
time of high unemployment, fat handouts to big ag, and
gratuitous gifts to the biotech/pesticide industry.

The bill is now stalled in the House, in danger of being
buried by right-wing backbenchers intent on even deeper
food-aid cuts. If the House doesn't vote on it before
the August recess, the most likely outcome is an
extension of the 2008 bill-and the 2013 Congress will
have to start the farm bill process from scratch. Let's
be blunt: If that scenario plays out, no matter how the
November elections go, we're quite likely to see an
equally or more dismal bill emerge next year.

This is tragic. The farm bill, a once-in-five-years
piece of legislation, lays out federal food and
agriculture policy. At a time of accelerating climate
change and other ecosystem crisis, including
agriculture-related dead zones in two of our most
important fisheries (the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake
Bay) the time has come to reassess our food system.
Meanwhile, a robust sustainable-agriculture has arisen
over the past two decades, developing alternative styles
of farming that are highly productive, less polluting,
and more resilient to climate change. You might think
farm policy would be primed to adjust to these
developments. Instead, our legislative process is
pushing agribusiness as usual.

Why? In its recent report on lobbying leading up the the
2008 farm bill, Food & Water Watch sketches out an
answer: Agribusiness interests have essentially bought
the farm bill legislative process. FWW found that the
2008 bill drew $173.5 million worth of lobbying-topped
only by the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill's $250
million in terms of lobbying frenzy over major
legislation. Even the 2010 healthcare-reform act, which
drew the ardent interest of the pharmaceutical, health-
insurance, and hospital industries, only inspired $120
million in lobbying cash.

And it's not just any lobbyists storming the Hill to
opine about federal farm policy. Like flies swarming the
cesspool of a factory-scale hog confinement, former
government officials proliferate in the halls of
Congress at farm bill time. Here's FWW:

    On the Farm Bill, special interests hired an army of
    well-connected lobbyists to press their case with
    Congress, including 45 former members of Congress,
    at least 461 former congressional and executive
    branch staffers (including 86 that worked for former
    agriculture committee members or the U.S. Department
    of Agriculture) and a host of K Street ?rms.

The two House reps who presided over the making of the
agribiz-friendly 2002 farm bill, former House
Agriculture Committee Chairman Larry Combest (R-Texas)
and ranking committee Democrat Charlie Stenholm (D-
Texas), both cashed in handsomely working the Hill as
lobbyists during the 2008 bill, each drawing fees of
more than $1 million, FWW reports. Stenholm, who serves
as senior policy adviser to the powerhouse lobbying firm
OFW Law, is the "distinguished older gentleman" who
chastised me for daring to criticise the genetically
modified seed industry during my panel discussion at a
Croplife America policy forum in May. Stenholm told me
he prefers to think of himself as an "educator," not a
lobbyist.

Well, as the Food & Water Watch report shows, he
performs his Congressional-educational services on
behalf of the GMO seed/agrichemical giant Syngenta, as
wells as cotton, meat, dairy, banking, energy, and sugar
interests.

And, of course, it's precisely these corporate interests
that fuel the gusher of lobbying cash. Consider that of
the $173.5 million total lobbying expenditures, organic
interests spent just $269,000-an amount nearly offset by
the Fertilizer Institute's $245,000, and dwarfed by
Monsanto's $2.46 million outlay. Altogether, Monsanto
and its peers spent $9.9 million on lobbying; ethanol
and other biofuel interests spent $23 million; commodity
interests including Archer Daniels Midland spent $17
million; industrial meat packers, led by Tyson and JBS,
dropped $5.7 million; and food manufacturers like Kraft
spent $11 million.

Groups representing the general interests of farmers
laid out $1.8 million in lobbying-but $1.2 million of
that total, FWW notes, came from the American Farm
Bureau Federation and its state affiliates. The Farm
Bureau, FWW reports, doesn't really represent farmers at
all. Rather, with its sprawling insurance interests and
investments in companies like ConAgra, Dow Chemical,
DuPont, Tyson,  and Archer Daniels Midland, it
represents the "industrial agriculture status quo," FWW
concludes.

Indeed, the Farm Bureau and its lobbying and political-
donation warchest epitomize the corporate agenda that
dominates ag policy. In a rigorous exposé in The Nation,
the veteran journalist Ian T. Shearn documents how the
Farm Bureau routinely sides with companies like pork
giant Smithfield over family farmers in disputes over
placement of huge, fetid factory-scale hog farms. And it
flexes its political muscle, both through lobbying and
through campaign donations:

    In addition to the American Farm Bureau Federation's
    twenty-two lobbyists, no fewer than 20 of the state
    Farm Bureaus, including Missouri, have registered
    lobbyists in Washington, leading the field of
    agribusiness lobbyists. Over the past decade, the
    nation's ten largest agribusiness interests gave $35
    million to Congressional candidates-led by the Farm
    Bureau, which gave $16 million, or 45 percent of the
    total. Farm Bureau PACS donated another $16 million
    to state candidates, according to election records.

As the 2012 farm bill lurches toward either oblivion or
dismal passage, it's hard to see how we'll ever get
decent farm policy until we figure out how to temper the
influence of the likes of the Farm Bureau and its
corporate allies.

___________________________________________

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