Tell Your Rep to Oppose the FARRM Bill

Our nation is facing its fourth straight year of $1 trillion-plus budget deficits, and the national debt is nearing $16 trillion. At the same time, farm income is at an all-time high of $98 billion, or twice as much as it was in 2001, and commodity prices reached record levels from 2005-2010. Nonetheless, the House Agriculture Committee has crafted legislation that would cost 60 percent more than the 2008 Farm Bill.

The FARRM Bill completely fails to modernize decades-old federal programs for commodities like dairy, sugar and peanuts. The sugar program alone costs Americans $1.9 billion annually in higher prices at the grocery counter and has wiped out at least 75,000 jobs in industries such as candy, cereal, and baked goods manufacturing. The price supports, marketing controls, and import quotas that keep the price of sugar in the U.S. at roughly double the price on the world market cost taxpayers $1.2 billion each year.

The FARRM Bill continues to fund the Rural Utilities Service Broadband Access Program, which was intended to help bring Internet broadband service to underserved rural communities. However, RUS loans have a documented track record of profligacy, including a loan to a company providing broadband access to affluent suburban communities near Houston, Texas.

The FARRM Bill also keeps intact the Market Access Program (MAP), one of the federal government’s most blatant examples of corporate welfare. MAP provides $200 million annually in overseas advertising support for successful private-sector companies, such as Butterball, Tyson Foods, Monsanto and Sunkist Growers. In 2011, MAP paid for a reality show in India called “Let’s Design” to promote U.S. cotton.

Speaking of cotton, the World Trade Organization has ruled that the U.S. cotton program violates international trade rules, and the U.S. agreed to pay $145 million to Brazilian cotton farmers to settle the case. Yet rather than reforming the cotton program, the FARRM Bill keeps taxpayers forking over that $145 million every year!

And if all of this isn’t bad enough, despite claims that federal agricultural programs provide a safety net for small- and medium-sized family farms, the overwhelming majority of beneficiaries of federal agricultural programs are large, wealthy agribusinesses, not family farmers.