Farm Bill under scrutiny

Mary Minette of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America describes an aspect of the farm bill to Roxanne Barillas of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops at a workshop sponsored by the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. Photo: K. McNeely/CWS

February 28, 2007

Church World Service and other faith-based advocates discussed Farm Bill reform at a meeting of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference.

Several members of a new Religious Working Group on the Farm Bill, including Church World Service, talked about their efforts to join together in coalition to reform the Bill, an expensive, complex funding program that is legislated by Congress every five to six years.

The conference pulled together people of faith from urban and rural settings to examine the upcoming bill and advocacy to promote justice at home and abroad.

Most citizens fail to recognize the Farm Bill’s vital significance to both rural and urban communities. These federal policies have great relevance to hunger and poverty problems in the United States and overseas.

The Farm Bill lays out a five year blueprint for U.S. food and farm laws and programs. Though the bill covers many aspects of food policy in the U.S., the section that deals with commodity subsidies tends to draw the most attention.

Subsidies were originally put in place to stabilize farmers’ incomes and protect them from market fluctuations. But they have been identified as a factor in overproduction and “dumping”, the selling of food being sold in resource poor countries at below the cost of production. (Read about farming in Mali).

Developing countries with high poverty rates tend to have the highest concentration of their population involved in agricultural production. In most cases governments have cut subsidies and extension programs for these rural farmers following loan conditions or policy proscriptions by multilateral lending institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

When negotiating with the U.S. on the U.S.-Peru, U.S.-Colombia and other free trade agreements, these resource poor countries are being asked to eliminate tariffs and quotas that are the only protections their farmers have. Meanwhile, the U.S. does little to reduce its own subsidies. This double standard is a justice concern for all people of faith.

In the fall of 2006 Church World Service launched the Sow Justice campaign. The campaign recognizes that God demands good stewardship of resources and farming practices that ensure care for the most vulnerable—often those living in resource-poor countries around the world. According to the CWS resource Sowing Justice for Family Farmers Everywhere,“ reform is necessary to restore right relationships, preserve responsible communities, shrink economic inequalities, and allow for all of creation to flourish in its diversity—to restore God’s gracious economy.”

Church World Service’s Sow Justice campaign recognizes that Farm Bill reform should include measures on:

• Commodity reform: to reduce funding for commodity subsidies that distort trade.

• Evenhandedness: to eliminate loopholes and accounting games that allow some people to reap huge payments from taxpayers.

• Conservation: to increase funding for conservation and encourage better stewardship.

• Diversification: to shift from a system that emphasizes overproduction of a few program crops to one that encourages production of a variety of food crops.

• Equity: to spread the benefits of economic growth to new groups and constituencies, especially disadvantaged and minority farmers who have been left out by the current programs.

• Global Leadership: to set our farm policies in a direction that will ensure resource-poor farmers everywhere a fair price for their crops—one that allows them to make a dignified living. This could also improve international cooperation with other countries that think current U.S. farm subsidies are unfair to their farmers.

• Rural development: to shift misused subsidy funding to programs that support sustainable agriculture, rural development and nutrition programs.