The Environmental Working Group looked at the data and found that 23 members of the 112th Congress or their families signed up to get farm subsidy payments. Six are Democrats, and the rest are Republicans.
As I wrote last week, the problem isn't subsidies per se. It's how they're distributed, who they go to, and who they benefit. The truth is, most subsidies benefit, more and more, big farmers who don't need them and the companies that process our food, because the raw materials they buy are cheaper. EWG brings this point home.
This would be a good place to point out that just five crops – corn, cotton, rice wheat and soybeans – account for 90 percent of all farm subsidies. Sixty-two percent of American farmers do not receive any direct payments from the federal farm subsidy system, and that group includes most livestock producers and fruit and vegetable growers.
While livestock producers and fruit and vegetable growers don't receive subsidies directly, the weird ways we subsidize grains do distort their markets and affect their livelihoods as well. But the point of the EWG's study is that we're not going to see a fundamental shift in our farm policy any time soon, because of who benefits. It's not just that the few powerful farmers make it to Congress, but also the rest of them have powerful friends as well. And whether these subsidies are helping rural Americans at all, or America in general, is left unaddressed.
