Environmental Working Group expands farm-subsidy database

As the new five-year Farm Bill is being debated and much more than usual attention is focused on government programs for agriculture, a major critic of such programs, the Environmental Working Group, has posted an expanded database that it says "provides nearly full disclosure of federal farm subsidy beneficiaries for the first time."

Reporters who used the database to do stories about the top beneficiaries in their counties, regions or states need to check it again, because "just about every one of those rankings has changed, particularly in rice and cotton country," EWG President Ken Cook says. Click here for the new rankings.

The database "includes 350,000 new individuals who have never had a specific dollar amount attributed to them -- until now," Cook says. "For the first time, using new USDA data, we identify individuals whose subsidy benefits 'pass through' one or more plantation-scale farm business that produces vast quantities or subsidized rice, cotton, or other crops." People listed in the system for the first time "received $9.8 billion in crop subsidy benefits alone between 2003 and 2005," EWG says on its MulchBlog.

Cook says the data confirm what EWG calls "the inequitable distribution of farm program payments, in which the top 10 percent of beneficiaries get 66 percent of the payments in Title 1 of the Farm Bill, while the bottom 80 percent got only 16 percent of such payments, averaging $4,508 over years. "EWG’s database shows that family farmers are getting peanuts from today’s subsidy system, while corporate agriculture is living high on the hog," Taxpayers for Common Sense, a spending-watchdog group, said in a press release.

"The original EWG database, released more than five years ago, had a significant impact on the 2002 farm bill debate," reports Brownfield's Peter Shinn. "It provided documentary evidence that the bulk of commodity payments went to a relatively small minority of ag producers, and helped Senate supporters of payment limits successfully attach a more stringent payment limits provision in their version of the 2002 Farm Bill. Lawmakers ultimately stripped that provision in conference. But the expanded version of the EWG database is expected to have a similarly bracing effect on efforts to tighten payment limits in the 2007 Farm Bill." (Read more)

The Nebraska-based Center for Rural Affairs says the new database "can and should be used to examine how large, aggressively expanding operations utilize loopholes in current law to evade statutory limits. Those loopholes allow such operations to obtain the unlimited payments that they use to bid up land costs and, in the process, drive their smaller neighbors out of business."