Readers Digest, and Commodity Payments
February 19, 2007
“You Sow, they Reap: Why are your tax dollars lining the pockets of wealthy farm owners?” This was the title to an article I recently read in Readers Digest.
I was given a subscription to the Digest as a Christmas gift. It looks a little odd stacked up next to my other magazines (Harpers, and the occasional sojourners and new yorker), but I have been reading fairly regulary. I have learned a lot about diet, cancer research, identity theft and other things I don’t normally read about, but it was a treat to find this article about farm subsidies to corporate farmers…an issue I have been hearing quite a bit about from organizations fighting poverty, but we call them “commodity payments” rather than subsidies.
Bread for the World has chosen the farm bill (the bill containing titles dealing with commodity payments) as the focus for this years offering of letters. Churches and students are being mobilized to write congress about this bill because commodity payments as well as other titles in the farm bill effect rural communities at home and abroad.
Family farms are often not eligible for commodity payments and struggle to compete with corporate farms that are, and many family farms are forced to mono-crop certian crops soley because they recieve payments to do so, and otherwise their farming is not secure. This hurts the land, takes the creativity and ingenuity out of farming, and binds them to one commodity because it is secured by payments.
Internationally our commodity payments make competition very difficult. Becasue of payments from the government US grown commodities can be sold at an artificially low price on the world market. This price is often below the cost of production for certian commodities. This puts rural local farmers out of business as they cannot compete with such artifically low prices.
Readers Digest criticized commodity payments solely because it is unjust to taxpayers. Why should our tax money go into the hands of wealthy land owners who live in Beverley Hills just because they have a strong lobby and own corn fields?
I thought it was so interesting that we are all wanting the same end, but for different reasons. Give the article a read, and also check out www.bread.org as well as www.maketradefair.com for more information on the farm bill.
-jason
Posted by filetaj on February 19, 2007 12:33 PM
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