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Pulling back the curtains on wage-theft enforcement in MN; Trump's latest attack is on RFK, Jr; NM LGBTQ+ equality group endorses 2024 'Rock Star' candidates; Michigan's youth justice reforms: Expanded diversion, no fees.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge will be challenging and expensive. An Alabama Democrat flips a state legislature seat and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman dies at 82.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Digging In on the Farm Bill

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Tuesday, July 17, 2007   

The House Agriculture Committee gets down to business today on a new, five-year farm bill. And, members, including Chairman Collin Peterson of Minnesota, are being asked, by a coalition of three dozen farm, rural, labor and consumer groups, to find common ground on one of its most difficult issues: subsidies. Coalition spokesman, Dennis Olson, with the Minnesota-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy says there's a lot at stake.

"What we're proposing is a middle ground on this volatile issue that is now escalating, between those who want to get rid of subsidies altogether, and those who want to keep the system as it is."

He points out that taxpayers currently pay $20 billion a year in subsidies with the current policy favoring big, corporate food operations.

"The big industrial animal factories, the big hog factories, chicken factories who can buy the corn and the soybeans at below the cost of production to feed their animals. This would require those big animal factories to pay a fair price to farmers rather than taxpayers having to pay a subsidy to make up the difference."

He believes it's time to move towards a system driven more by supply and demand: one that focuses on producers, rather than corporations. Olson notes the farm bill is one of the most important issues before Congress, because it affects agriculture, the rural economy, environment, food prices and trade.

Olson feels the current policy doesn't favor farmers.

"This policy has meant that we have moved livestock off diversified farms that used to have independent feeders in the Midwest, into large, industrial-scale animal factories that are subsidized by these below-cost feed-grains of corn and soybeans. Our proposal would require those big companies, like Tyson and Cargill, to pay the cost of production in the marketplace, eliminate the need for government subsidies, and let the farmers get their price from the marketplace, instead of the taxpayer."

The farm bill is HR 2419. More information is available at www.nffc.net.



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