Sorghum for national security? [Why don't we subsidize the food we actually eat]

WASHINGTON – The Senate had a chance last week to repudiate – albeit tepidly – the Bush administration’s shameless use of taxpayers’ money to buy electoral votes in the 2004 election. It didn’t.

Instead, 53 senators voted to continue the welfare system that sends billions of dollars each year to some farmers. Lifetime limits and requirements to work 30 hours a week for pay seemed fair when Congress decided that paying women to stay home and raise their children cheated taxpayers. That same logic, however, does not apply to agribusiness.

There is nothing fair about the farm subsidy system in this country. Forget for a moment that there are world trade implications for a country that underwrites an economic sector. Instead, accept the most common arguments in support of farm subsidies: Subsidies ensure national security (Americans won’t starve if adequate food is produced domestically) and stability (fat and happy people don’t launch revolutions).

Imagine a dinner plate filled with the things we pay to grow: A pile of macaroni moistened with soy or canola oil, a cob or two of corn, a plop of oatmeal sweetened with sugar, a mound of rice and a garnish of sunflower seeds. Your appetizer was a choice of a fistful of honey-roasted peanuts or some hummus made of chickpeas. You washed it down with a glass of milk or a bottle of beer and topped it off with a post-prandial puff on a Marlboro. Your napkin was a cotton-wool-mohair mixture, and somewhere in the meal was sorghum, which I’m not entirely sure how you’d eat.

Your supper of subsidized foodstuffs – the crops Congress has determined to be essential to national security – included no tomatoes or salad fixin’s, no peaches or grapes.

In short, the American agri-welfare system is available only to certain farmers who grow certain crops. All others: Kwitcherbitchin.

If it’s in the national security interest to underwrite the production of farm products, it ought to be in the national interest to subsidize potatoes, chickens, OJ and even maple syrup – in short, things Americans eat. Instead, we paid $31 billion in the past three years to farmers – mostly giant operations – who grow certain things but not others.

This whole system was supposed to end. In 1996, led by Republicans, Congress passed a six-year bill that began to wean farmers off their welfare system. The 2002 bill was supposed to finish the process. Instead, the Republican Congress and the Republican White House flipped.

Members of Congress were concerned about their re-election prospects later in 2002. The Bush administration was looking to 2004 and adding up the electoral votes of Iowa. Those 16 electoral votes that President Bush got to give him another four years in the Oval Office cost us $31 billion so far, with three more years of subsidies.

Based on everything the Bush administration was supposed to embrace, the end of agri-welfare should have been a slam dunk. Instead, Bush weighed the continuation of an indefensible system against possible re-election defeat. Iowa vs. the rest of us. He didn’t veto the bill.

A “reform” in the 2002 bill was a cap on the amount a farmer could receive in subsidy payments: $180,000 a year, $360,000 for a married couple. It’s a sham limit, as the superb work of the Environmental Working Group ( www.ewg.org) shows. Funneling Agriculture Department records of all farm payments into a giant database, EWG lays out who gets how much.

The shocking bottom line: In the past decade, 72 percent of the $143.8 billion in agriculture welfare went to the top 10 percent of recipients. Not all is for crop subsidies; there are payments to conservation programs and weather disasters rolled into that figure. But even when crop subsidies alone are examined, it’s clear that small farms – the family farms people say are so important to preserve – are not the major beneficiaries.

Last week the Senate was asked to lower that $360,000 ceiling a tiny bit to $250,000 per couple. No dice. Indiana’s senators voted the right way, but they were in the minority. Some who opposed the change said there’ll be time enough to have that debate when the next farm bill is written in 2007, a few months before the 2008 presidential and congressional primaries.

It is true that sorghum porridge is used in Africa. But as Beagle8U points out in post 20, much of the sorghum is used here in the US as animal feed. It is also an important feedstock for ethanol production.

There are many places in the US that are not suitable for corn production due to limited rainfall and poor soil fertility. In these areas (lower great plains and southeastern US, sorghum and pearl millet are superior grains, and have the added advantage of reducing aflatoxins and fumonisins - which are natural carcinogens produced by fungi commonly found in corn.

Problem with some subsidies is that they promote overproduction of some crops (such as corn) to the detriment of other more sustainable crops, such as pearl millet.

Concerning the required cooking time, much of the sorghum and pearl millet in Africa are processed from raw grain at home. Here in the US we have the advantage of food processors that make our lives extremely convenent by doing this "behind the scenes" for us. Overall processing time is not reduced, its just that we don't do it at home.

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