Washington, D.C. – Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today released Making the Grade: CAGW’s Report Card on Farm Bill “Reform” Proposals.  The report covers crop subsidies, the most significant part of the Farm Bill, and analyzes the proposed reforms. 

“CAGW’s Report Card gives taxpayers some user-friendly benchmarks judge the various proposals currently being debated to reform the nation’s archaic farm subsidy system,” said CAGW President Tom Schatz.  “We hope that it will help them avoid being sold a pig in a poke as Congress goes about rewriting the Farm Bill.”

CAGW rates current law, the Bush Administration proposal; the Citigroup “buyout” plan; the Cato Institute “buyout” proposal, the American Farm Bureau Federation and National Corn Growers Association “revenue insurance” plans; and the FARM-21 risk management account proposal.  Grading is based on fairness, relief to taxpayers and consumers, rural development, international trade, and benefits to developing nations’ farmers.

Agriculture subsidies go disproportionately to the wealthiest farmers, with virtually no benefit to those farmers most in need of help.  They have proven to be very costly to both taxpayers and consumers and have undermined the rural economy, stood in the way of expanding international trade and hurt the world’s poorest farmers.

Farm bill authorization expires on September 30, 2007.  House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) plans to consider the farm bill in the full committee in July.  The Senate Agriculture Committee is holding hearings and committee mark-up will follow completion of the bill in the House.

“The nation’s agriculture policies have been a monstrous financial burden to taxpayers for decades.  Congress failed miserably to terminate the bloated subsidy programs in 2002, which provides perverse incentives, repudiates basic free-market principles, and is one of most egregious examples of corporate welfare in our history.  In fact, today’s Washington Post documents the fact that in the Mississippi Delta, more than $1.2 billion in farm subsidies was doled out between 2001 and 2005 and most of that money benefited large, commercial agricultural enterprises at the expense of small family farmers, the very people that subsidy supporters always hold up as their poster children,” concluded Schatz.

The report, written by John Frydenlund, Center for International Food and Agriculture Policy for CAGW, is available at www.cagw.org.

Citizens Against Government Waste is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, mismanagement and abuse in government.