Posted on 06/20/2007 7:14:57 AM PDT by 3AngelaD
U.S. Farm Subsidies Favor Big Over Small, White Over Black
SHELBY, Miss. -- From 2001 to 2005, the federal government spent nearly $1.2 billion in agricultural subsidies to boost farmers' incomes and invigorate local economies in this poverty-stricken region of the Mississippi Delta.
Most residents are black, but less than 5 percent of the money went to black farmers. They own relatively little land, and so they generally do not qualify for the payments. Ninety-five percent of the money went to large, commercial farms, virtually all of which have white owners.
In Bolivar County, where Shelby is located, farmers received a total of $200 million in crop subsidies over the five-year period, while just $11 million in Rural Development grants from the Agriculture Department went to majority-black Delta towns...
The farm bill that Congress is now crafting is a complex mosaic of competing goals, including income support for farmers, conservation incentives and the preservation of rural communities by spurring economic growth. Farm subsidies are meant to tide growers over when prices fall or when disasters strike. The Rural Development grants, on the other hand, are supposed to help small, struggling communities such as Shelby. Yet in the Delta, farm subsidies are massive, while Rural Development money is relatively scanty. From 2001 to 2005, the Agriculture Department awarded $1.18 billion in subsidies but just $54.8 million in Rural Development grants for housing, new businesses, water systems and other projects, a Washington Post investigation found.
"The policy choice that Congress has made is so stark," said Charles W. Fluharty, director of the Rural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri at Columbia. "You see the effects in lots of poor rural communities. But the tragedy is exacerbated in the minority communities."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Interesting you should post that.
Someone gave me a brochure from the group Oxfam America. A liberal group, that’s true.
But they did make a compelling argument for getting rid of crop subsidies.
So does Walter Williams.
Can anyone from there explain why this area is call the Delta? Is it triangle shaped?
Crop subsidies are a holdover from the flipping Depression, for pete’s sake. Are we still experiencing a depression so deep we need to keep this voracious dinosaur? There are both conservative and liberal arguments for getting rid of them, or at least restructuring them so that they actually do some good. Ditto milk price supports. If you are a masochist, and want to give yourself a headache, read about milk price supports. Another headache, sugar, which is even worse because it costs literally billions to prop up one prominent Cuban family in Florida.
It is a river delta draining into the Gulf of Mexico.
Here’s a link that will explain what the Mississippi Delta is all about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_delta
10 years ago, I travelled thru the Delta for a week. I took the backroads and saw a lot on interesting things. I hope to go back again sometime.
The following is a link to just who gets subsidies
http://www.ewg.org/farm/region.php?fips=00000
Leave it up to my Senator (Lugar) to preside over this....he has done and said so many dumb things, it is time for him to go.
Don’t be mad, a good number of black residents of the delta get their “subsidies” the first of every month. Interesting how those stipends are overlooked in this article.
The truth is, even most smaller farmers in MS are white. You can’t make some people be engineers to balance some color chart and you can’t make them be farmers either.
But it’s quite a way from the mouth of the river. That’s why i’m curious about the origin of the name.
Thanks. Ok it’s lense shaped and not technically a river delta. So where does the name come from?
Yes, it is shaped like a delta. Narrow at the top(around 100 miles north of Memphis, Tn and broad at the gulf of Mexico. The land is made up of the Mississippi River flood plain, once spreading miles from the river, but now contained by levees built and maintained by the Corp of Engineers. Parts of Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana are contained in the delta.
I botched the explanation. The delta is still the Mississippi River flood plane, but the river itself is contained behind the levees.
And all of that corps of engineers work insured that insufficient silt would make to to the Gulf of Mexico, meaning Lousiana’s coastline has gotten wrecked, meaning New Orleans was a sitting duck for a hurricane with a lot of the protective swamps gone.
We really need to tell people “if you live in a flood plain, prepare to get wet sometimes.”
Your only response to this story is to sneer about “blacks on welfare”? Mississippi is 35 percent black and of those, 6.8 percent of blacks in the state are on welfare. The average family gets less than $150 a month. I am no advocate of welfare, but it seems to me like your premises are a little off, and you entirely avoid the argument that farm subsidies shouldn’t go to large, profitable corporate enterprises.
I began my life in 1937 on the banks of that great river, at the westernmost tip of Kentucky where it joins Tennessee. The river still flooded in a lot of places then, but work was already underway to change the river when I was born.
One of the great results of the New Madrid fault earthquake of 1811 was breaching the banks of the river that created Reelfoot Lake in north west Tennessee. It is always changing at the hands of nature as well as the Corp of engineers.
Thank you. I kind of thought it was something like that.
I am against subsidies to rich farmers and absentee landlords. That said, I am also against subsidizing small, unprofitable enterprises, too. I am especially against payments based on skin color, though this author seems to be wanting payments to the local governments, not the people.
True.
The disaster of Katrina was a combination of the following:
1. A bad place to put a city.
2. Mismanagement of the Mississiippi River. More swampland south of New Orleans would have helped.
3. An incompetent city government that had no provisions for such an event.
4. A population that included many welfare recipients who didn't know how to take care of themselves.
But I risk hijacking this thread. Anyway, let us agree that an event can have multiple causes.
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