Thank you again to everyone in the TPM community for letting me join you this week. I will be regularly checking into the comments section, but rather than responding to each comment individually I will continue the conversation up in the blog. I look forward to hearing back from you.

Thank you congressman. The new issue of Mother Earth News covers this topic too for those who wish further study material.

Many times these issues need to be distilled into sound bytes in order to promote good alternatives.
I'm thinking on how to do that. Supporting local farmers and promoting small community farms is vital to preserving a healthy food supply. The trend towards mega-farms and large corporation agriculture is a direct result of poor farm policy and is harming America and Americans. A farm bill should never equal corporate welfare for ConAgra and ArcherDaniels, etc.

Good luck!

Congressman: Thanks for the article and the links. Devon is right, this is extremely important. Our current farm policies are an invitation to disaster and we are risking the future for our children and grandchildren.

Hopefully in this new farm bill there will be some benefits for small farmers - especially those that specialize in a wide variety of heirloom crops and for those that sell locally. Three questions from me:
1] Can you tell us what the funding will be for these little guys?
2] Also, what will be the funding for farmer's markets??
3] How will food stamps be steered to more healthy choices???

mike

PS - Good to se a son of the great Northwest leading this issue.

I love having Blumenauer as my Congressman. I am saved from so many MoveOn and other organizational alerts because Blumenauer will almost always do the right thing.

Now if only he would run for the Senate. Earl, I want to call you Senator, not Mayor.

Welcome! I'm looking forward to hearing more.

It's funny -- despite being a big city dweller, I actually feel I am more in touch with farmers than most people I know that live out in the burbs. We have a bunch of fantastic greenmarkets here (NYC's Union Square is where I shop).

Food with dirt still on it is a beautiful thing. (Unless, of course, that's how it is when you're eating it. Then, not so good.) 

"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani

"In many areas of the country the pressures of sprawl are forcing farmers off of their land. We deserve a food and farm policy that gives farmers the tools they need to protect their land – and our heritage – from development pressures."

You've got a nice list of policies there but the trouble is unless you manage to enact all of them, you wind up hurting owners of small farms even more. I say "owners of small farms" rather than farmers because it's become impossible for many small farmers to farm their own land. They can't afford to. So what's the alternative? You can cash rent and make a minimal amount on the huge capital investment you've got in the land, even in a small farm, or you can sell the land and get as much money for the new career you need because your farm doesn't provide you the income you need to live a middle class life.

When you prevent the owner of a small farm from selling to developers, you let his farm get stolen by corporate farmers who may well wind up using their corporate power to get the land rezoned anyway so they can make the profit selling the farm to developers.

You run into similar issues with environmental and other regulations. The small farmer who lives with his family on the farm is usually very interested in the preservation of his environment, but if you add even greater costs to his operation which doesn't have the scale to spread the costs, you again wind up just driving the guy off the farm.

All too often the small farmer gets few of the benefits of the farm program but suffers all the burden of the regulations.

Anything you can do to reign in the ethanol boondoggle will be greatly appreciated. Whoever had the bright idea of diverting essential food crops to fuel production should be transported from town to town in stocks and pelted with rotten vegetables.

What makes you think a city slicker from Portland knows us eastern Oregonians are fooling the urbanites? :-)

I grew up in eastern Oregon, my wife in Portland. Though we have been gone a very long time, you always think of your origins as home unless you are a Clinton. :-) Love to hear from Oregon.

I am in absolute agreement with the poster but much of the wrongheaded thinking about ethanol revolves around production as a subsidy for farmers even when talking about cellulosic ethanol.

Congressman Blumenauer makes an excellent point about farm programs being largely a support for large corporate farms while doing nothing for small farmers. City folk do know something after all.

Best, Terry

Congressman Blumenauer,

Thanks for the great post. I want to ask you about how this farm bill will affect our trade priorities, specifically with respect to the Doha round of the WTO. The last farm bill was a slap in the face to the rest of the world and further signaled how the Bush Administration insists on unilateral policies, even when they are highly counter-productive. As anyone who follows this issue knows, this bill is one of the last opportunities to put the moribund Doha round back on track. Can you explain to us how you plan on getting us back to the bargaining table, so that we can help the 900 million poor farmers in third world countries? Thanks again for your time here.

CountZero - The best thing we can do for poor farmers in third world countries is to let them raise food for their countrymen. Food imports do not come from poor farmers. They are raised plantation style and the importers make American agribusiness look like small fry.

Chilean apples, pears, cherries, and grapes in January are not for me. On the other hand I like a cup of coffee and an occasional banana as much as anyone, maybe more - and I support fair-trade coffee beans.

How would you structure our trade priorities to ensure poor foreign farmers are given a fair shake without hurting poor American farmers. Someone(?) said "beware of the law of unintended consequences".

mike

re no.4:

We deserve a sufficiently funded and staffed FDA to monitor the immoral (because they add dangerous and even poisonous ingredients for fraudulent profit) and dangerous crap-food we are importing from China.

*Especially if the farmers could buy back from Cuba other crops to the amount they've sold.

I only have one small disagreement with my representative (who does a really good job in so many ways).

Dennis Olson of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy has studied sugar commodity policy for many years. He concludes that the current US program, while not perfect, is far better than the programs for other commodities, particularly corn.

A short paper he did two years ago in the context of CAFTA summarizes these issues:

http://www.iatp.org/iatp/library/admin/uploadedfiles/CAFTA-NAFTA_Do_Not_Be_Fooled_Again.pdf

Sugar is subject to a trade quota system, not a direct subsidy or tariff approach. This provides for a relatively stable market. While US food producers and consumers pay somewhat more for sugar than the world price, this avoids the price and supply volatility and the downward pressure on farmgate prices, working conditions and soil and water quality and conservation that plague the industry elsewhere. (The issues with Florida and Louisiana sugar cane and the environment are more complex, and in significant contrast to sugarbeet growing areas.)

The US sugar industry is actually two separate industries: sugar cane primarily grown in Florida and Louisiana, and sugarbeets grown in the northern tier of states, especially the Red River Valley in Minnesota and North Dakota, where it is a major industry and supports a vast network of family farms and processing coops.

I would note that Oregon itself has a small (and vulnerable) sugarbeet area over on the east side (going across into Idaho). It has been hurt by changes in the market as the quota system has somewhat been bypassed.

And Oregon is also supplier of 95% of the rootstock for sugarbeets in the entire country, from a small area in between Corvallis and Salem where this is a specialty.

Sugarbeets actually supply somewhat more than half of the total US market -- all of it and most sugar cane goes to food processing rather than to table sugar.

Certainly there are bad aspects to the sugar industry, especially sugar cane, which has engulfed the Everglades and has hundreds of years of legacy for brutality to workers. That has ebbed but their political influence has not.

All the same, the US sugar support-quota system, which is something of an anachronism, actually accomplishes worthwhile goals, one of the very few ag programs that actually succeeds.

I urge Rep. Blumenauer, my longtime friend and esteemed member of Congress, to reconsider your position on sugar. This supposedly archaic system actually has important lessons about how to turn American farm policy back to where it should be focused: on good quality and fair and affordable prices for consumers, on a workable product for farmers and processors, and trimming down the overblown role of the agribusiness intermediaries to something approximating their real value added rather than the pressure they can apply on the political system, most especially in the Farm Bill.

-- Fred

Thank you to Rep. Blumeneauer for tackling this difficult yet critical subject.

I also commend you sponsoring the Local Food and Farm Act, a very good bill, but still a bandaid on what needs to be done to fix a broken food system.

My question is, what about the farmer?? You claim that only a few commodities receive high profits. this is misleading. even many grain farmers receiving subsidies barely are surviving. And shouldn't the policy instead be that ALL farmers deserve a fair price for their hard work?

The central and core problem that has plagued agriculture is the persistence of low prices that has driven off so many family farmers. Subsidies are the sympton of a rotton economic system, not the cause of. THose low prices are a direct result of corporate consolidation. Farmers lack truly free, fair and competitive markets because of the concentration in the industry by the likes of Cargill, ADM (grain) and Smithfield, Tyson, Cargill, etc (Livestock). The REAL beneficiaries of the subsidies are corporate agribusiness, which gets access to cheap corn, grain, etc, which thus fuel factory farms.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3190/whose_subsidy_is_it_anyway/

Unless a policy addresses giving fair prices to farmers and addressing corporate agribusiness consolidation, you will not solve the problems that are causing so much health (obesity), ecological (factory farms poisoning landscapes), and economic (dying rural communities) damage.

There is also a central contradiction here:

"Americans have a right to local supplies of fresh food: Too many Americans do not have the option of buying affordable, locally-grown fresh food. We deserve a food and farm policy that includes programs that deliver healthy food to all communities, regardless of location, class, or economic standing."

And yet you are an ardent supporter of "free trade agreements" which have flooded our country with cheap imports, so that local food systems are destroyed and made unviable. there is no way we can compete with cheap tomatoes and so forth from Mexico. the US is now close to running a net trade DEFICIT in agriculture, something that we have never seen since World Wwar II.

http://blumenauer.house.gov/Issues/Issue.aspx?IssueID=87&SubIssueID=90

Not only does our country get flooded with imports (much of dubious quality with the China scandal), but our cheap and subsidized commodites are also dumped on the rest of the world and impoverish their farmers. And the answer to third world farmers is NOT more free trade, the same myth given to our farmers for decades now. It is a FAIR PRICE for ALL farmers, regardless if they are Americans or Africans. Supporting free trade agreements and yet more localized food systems is a total contradiction.

A coalition of international farmers has pioneered the concept of Food Sovereignty, which ensures that our food policy is not held hostage to trade agreements written by multinationals.

I urge folks to check out this vibrant citizens movement that is reclaiming our system from the Monsantos and ConAgras of the world.

http://www.globalfarmer.org/Content/default.asp

Now what are the solutions that Family farmers would like to see? it'd be nice to see us in the conversation as opposed to just urban progressives, who while well-intentioned, do nothing to address the causes of a broken system?

We need to revert to the price stabilization system we had under the the New Deal and through the 70s, before it became eroded under NIxon and thoroughly smashed by the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act. these involve three pillars 1. a price floor for commodities so that farmers get a fair price. COntrary to myth, farmers do NOT want subsidies. they want a FAIR PRICE from the marketplace. We want ConAgra and Tyson to pay for our goods, not the taxpayer. Previously, this was done through a nonrecourse loan. 2. food security reserves to manage oversupply 3. conservation programs to set aside land and prevent overproduction.

Subsidies do NOT lead to overproduction. Farmers will always produce as much as they can whether prices are high or low. The disaster of the 1996 Freedom to Farm act should have proved this beyond doubt. We need a fair price for farmers in a similar way that a minimum wage supplies a fair wage to workers. And we need to break agribusiness' strangehold over this global system.

Please look at the National Family Farm Coalition's Food From Family Farms Act to see a real progressive policy that would help our food sovereignty and start respecting our eath.

Yes. If you are so concerned about obesity and healthy foods, why would you WANT to destroy the sugar program so kids can eat more cheap junk food? this makes no sense.

The sugar program is one of the last remaining supply management programs we have. And it works becuase it 1. provides a fair price to sugar growers 2. provides great, good paying, unionized jobs at many processing plants, many in places where there is little industry or jobs left 3. crucially, our sugar program DOES NOT DUMP on the world markets. we only produce what we can consume, unlike the EU which does dump into Third world markets.

critics complain this raises the cost of sugar for US Consumers. last time i checked at the grocery store, sugar was pretty cheap, as was a Snickers bar. by paying a fair price to sugar growers, sugar gets a fair price from the MARKET PLACE (i.e. Hershey, Mars, Nestle, Pepsi pay...) NOT from taxpayers, ie so it is a "no-cost program." even if we lift the quotas on sugar, does anyone REALLY think sugar costs or candy bar costs will go down? or will Nestle and Hershey just instead rake in more profits? There is little connection between a commodity price at the farm gate vs the final retail price due to the corporate consolidation.

Also, many developing countries realize that access to markets w/o a fair price does NOTHING for them. so they support our sugar program because the ones who get market access are being paid a premium. if you completely deregulated the sugar market, developing countries (particular Carribean, AFrican, Pacific) would be destroyed because Brazil will take ALL market share, and they basically do it through the use of slave labor on their gigantic sugar plantations. The EU recently ended their special sugar access program for the ACP countries and this has been quite devastating to their economies. they do not want to see the same happen here in the US. I hope politicians such as Rep. Blumeneauer reconsider their stances.

The best thing would be to get agriculture out of the WTO if we want to be able to sustain our planet and feed everyone. More WTO = corporate globalization and a food supply in the hands of Monsanto and Cargill and ADM.

Dear Congressman,

I think you set out a sensible set of principles. And I am in complete agreement on what you say about the folly of the government heavily subsidizing corn-based ethanol. For further evidence of the size and effects of those subsidies, you might be interested in the in-depth report on the subject we published last October: "Biofuels--At What Cost?: Government Support for Ethanol and Biodiesel in the United States".

I disagree with some of the contributions by other commentators, however. One states:

Those are the people you ask for ideas on the farm bill. The people with dirt on their hands rather than their hands on a keyboard.

If this person is talking only about regulations at the farm level, I might agree. But Farm Bills are, above all, about money. And it is the remaining 98% of people with their hands on a keyboard (or on a firehose, or piece of chalk, or shovel, or wrench) who finance the bulk of those Farm Bills with their taxes -- or, in the case of the sugar policy, through higher prices -- not the 2% who make a living from farming.

In 2007, the federal government is expected to spend around $12.4 billion a year on farm programmes of various merit, and another $4 billion or more on subsidies for ethanol and biodiesel. Doesn't the opinion of those whose money is being spent in the name of farming matter also?

It strikes me strange to use an organization's data against the organization's purpose:

EWG supports broad-based reform of federal farm policy by expanding farmland conservation programs to increase assistance especially to the bottom 90% of farm subsidy recipients as well as those completely left out of the current system.

The point of all the tables needs to be seen in the context of the numbers of farms/farmers in the counties.  Iowa, a state with which I have some familiarity, is a  case in point.

30 percent of all farmers and ranchers do not collect government subsidy payments in Iowa, according to USDA.
• Among subsidy recipients, ten percent collected 55 percent of all subsidies amounting to $8.18 billion over 11 years.
• Recipients in the top 10% averaged $36,530 in annual payments between 1995 and 2005. The bottom 80 percent of the recipients saw only $1,981 on average per year

Iowa ranks #2 in farm subsidies, so this distribution can probably be taken as fairly typical.  What the Environmental Working Group advocates is more farmland conservation, not less, and a far more equitable distribution of farm payments.  The program as it stands echoes the tax cuts of the Bush Administration...the vast majority went to the richest citizens.  The "family farms"--the bottom 80 %, receive approximately 5% of what the more affluent farms received.

But I find the idea of "sink or swim" much more disturbing than the way you used the figures of the Environmental Working Group.  If one were to apply this philosophy across the boards, one would have the worst form of social Darwinism possible.  Most of the government programs in which I believe are explicitly designed not to let anyone sink:  unemployment insurance, social security, Medicaid, aid to dependent children--the list goes on, the legacy of the New Deal and and all its elaborations sit at the center of the heart of the modern Democratic Party. 

None of us is self-made, and Horatio Alger created a mythology, not reality.  We're in this culture together...farmers and city folk alike.  I don't begrudge them necessary government assistance, and I expect them not to begrudge the same to me, should I or my family need it.

I should correct that last sentence.  My family avails itself of it now.  I have a 99 year old parent with Alzheimer's disease in a Nursing Home.  Medicaid now picks up the lion's share of the expenses.  Thank you, fellow Americans, for your generosity.

aMike