"How Pigs Saved Our Bacon" ... and How Taxpayers Picked Up the Tab

Leigh Pomeroy

Daniel Gross in NEWSWEEK (March 17, 2008) promotes the strength of the U.S. export market, thanks in part to our farming community. In "How Pigs Saved Our Bacon," he writes:

Jim Robbins's 3,000-acre family farm in Peotone, Ill., may not seem like a vital cog in the global economy. And yet Robbins, a fourth-generation corn and soybean farmer, exports 90 percent of his crops. Each year they either roll on trains to the Pacific Northwest or float on barges down the Illinois River, the first leg of their journey to Asia. "The containers that are bringing everything from China and Taiwan, we're shipping them back with corn, soybeans and soybean meal," he says.

What Gross neglects to mention is that Mr. Robbins's success is due in a large part to generous federal subsidies to corn and soybean farmers. In Mr. Robbins's case those subsidies totaled $197,214 for 2003-2005, an average of $65,738 per year, according to the Environmental Working Group's Farm Subsidy Database.

Clearly, $65,738 of annual government subsidies is a lot of money by most Americans' estimates. After all, the median family income in the U.S. in 2006 was $48,201, about 73 percent of what Mr. Robbins received in government payments.

So the lesson here is a little more complex than what Mr. Gross leads us to believe: The U.S. government's commitment to farm subsidies has had a lot to do with Mr. Robbins's success.

Please! Do not interpret this as a critique of Mr. Robbins's taking advantage of a federal government windfall. Mr. Robbins, who undoubtedly works hard to farm his 3,000 acres, is simply playing by the rules laid down over seven decades of convoluted farm policy. What the government is offering, he is accepting. And who can blame him for that?

If blame be laid it should be elsewhere:

• First, on the politicians who have devised such a complex and increasingly ill-advised and incomprehensible system.
• Second, on the self-proclaimed free marketeers who promote international free trade, when in fact the international market for many goods is highly impacted by government interference, such as farm subsidies.
• Third, on journalists such as Daniel Gross and publications such as NEWSWEEK which fail to reveal the entire story.

Farm subsidies in the U.S. were established in the 1930s to help small family farms struggling to raise a diversity of crops and usually a complement of farm animals. In those days, farming was done with more sweat than mechanization, with more hands-on working of the land than the blanket application of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides.

It is ironic — indeed more than that: it is sad — that the vast sums of taxpayer-funded farm subsidies today go to large agricultural enterprises raising a mono- or duo-culture of genetically altered plants, the success of which is dependent upon giant chemical manufacturers.

Meanwhile, small organic family farmers — the true descendants of the American farmers of the 1930s — struggle to make ends meet without much of a nod or a notice from the federal government, and certainly without its help.

Perhaps someday change will come. But it won't be easy, especially when there are those who are gleaning — all legally — millions of dollars from the current system. As long as politicians continue to receive campaign contributions from those benefiting from the government dole, it appears that change won't come soon.