Riceland remains atop subsidy list
Posted on Wednesday, April 16, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Business/222958/
Stuttgart-based Riceland Foods Inc. once again tops the national list of farm-subsidy recipients, according to an updated online database released Monday afternoon by a Washington-based environmental research and advocacy group.
The latest tabulation by the Environmental Working Group — of the U. S. Department of Agriculture subsidy payments made during calendar year 2006, available at http: // farm. ewg. org / farm — comes as a House-Senate conference committee struggles to meet a Friday deadline for a new farm bill.
The advocacy group acknowledges that Riceland, which received $ 7. 7 million in subsidy payments during 2006, serves only as an intermediary for payments that are passed on to thousands of individual farmers who are members of the rice-milling cooperative.
The USDA has yet to provide the group with data that enabled it last year to track payments to individuals and other final beneficiaries, said Don Carr, a spokesman for the advocacy group.
Section 1614 of the 2002 Farm Bill mandated that the federal government track payments through intermediate entities — such as partnerships, corporations and cooperatives — all the way to the ultimate beneficiaries of farm programs. The Environmental Working Group posted the first such data in June, attributing 2003 through 2005 “program year” payments to the final beneficiaries.
“Program year” refers to the period during which USDA makes payments to the producers of about two dozen so-called program crops, including rice, cotton and soybeans.
“We would obviously have loved to make it a continuation of the ‘1614’ data, but it’s in the old vein,” Carr said.
The Environmental Working Group expects to receive an updated Section 1614 database, which it has requested. Carr said the group doesn’t know why it hasn’t been received, though he suspects it’s a matter of USDA’s workload. Efforts to contact the USDA about that were unsuccessful.
Lynne Finnerty, editor of FBNews, a publication of the American Farm Bureau Federation, notes that the $ 13. 4 billion the USDA spent in 2006 on federal farm subsidies is less than half the $ 29 billion that the Federal Reserve recently provided to shore up investment bank Bear Stearns.
Nonetheless, a March 27 article in The Wall Street Journal noted that, even as farm income has soared, farmers have beaten back efforts to shrink the government safety net, while elsewhere the newspaper asked if support to U. S. housing and credit markets had been sufficient, Finnerty wrote in a recent commentary.
“I just thought it was interesting how, on the same page of the same newspaper on the same day, you had this one question about ‘is this enough ?’ and the other one saying ‘it’s too much, ’” she said.
The farm bill plays a key role in U. S. food security by helping to keep farmers in production, Finnerty said.
The Environmental Working Group posted its first farm-subsidy database on the Web in November 2001, during formulation of the 2002 farm bill, as part of the group’s campaign to shift commodityprogram funding into incentivesbased conservation programs. The new data take the 12-year subsidy total tracked online by the group to more than $ 177 billion.
Current farm bill negotiations regarding payment-limit changes “have definitely been influenced” by the group’s farm subsidy databases, said Eric Wailes, an agricultural economist at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
“I see the Europeans are now even going to be reporting payments received by their farmers, as sort of a copycat deal,” Wailes said.
The group’s farm-subsidy database has played a pivotal role in the policy debates surrounding U. S. agricultural policy, said Sallie James, a trade-policy analyst with the Washington-based Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
“I’m lobbying for [Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group ] to get a public service medal,” James said. “I can’t think of anything that’s been done in the public policy arena in the last 20 years that has had as much of an impact as this seemingly simple Freedom of Information request.”
Highlights from Arkansas’ 2006 farm-subsidy database include the following: Five of the 65 beneficiaries nationwide that received $ 1 million or more in subsidy payments during 2006 were in Arkansas. The top 10 percent of Arkansas’ subsidy beneficiaries received 66 percent of the state’s federal farm payments. Arkansas’ 2006 subsidy receipts for rice at $ 218 million, and for cotton, $ 166. 2 million, accounted for the majority of the state’s $ 457. 5 million in payments. In addition to rice and cotton subsidies, Arkansas beneficiaries received at least $ 10 million from each of the following federal farm programs in 2006: wheat subsidies, $ 19. 8 million; soybean subsidies, $ 18. 8 million; and conservation reserve program payments, $ 13. 6 million.