Rep. Tim Huelskamp of the Kansas First District — where many Kansas farmers live — is one of the reasons Congress didn’t pass a farm bill before it went on vacation last month. Rep. Huelskamp wants to cut the food stamp allocation of about $72 billion by $33 billion — nearly in half. That’s about twice the reduction the Senate had already approved.
While Huelskamp belongs to the radical right fringe in Congress, he is not alone in his desire to cut back the cost of the five-year farm bill, which will reach nearly a trillion dollars when it finally becomes law.
It is his decision to attack the food stamp allocation, which will draw wide-ranging opposition, primarily from non-farm legislators.
Food stamps and the school lunch programs are in the farm bill for strategical reasons. Farm state legislators long ago saw the wisdom of paying for those two programs through the ag budget: they are important to every community in every state in the nation. They also are an important part of our nation’s way of giving basic assistance to low-income families. There are about 47 million on the food stamp rolls. Every school district has a subsidized lunch program.
Cutting food stamps in half would take food off the tables of millions of men, women and children unless the program were funded in some other way. Putting the food assistance programs in the farm bill made the spending seem essential to members of Congress who know nothing about agriculture and don’t identify with farmers.
This is not to say the farm bill can’t be cut or shouldn’t be. Farm commodity prices are high. Farmers can make a good living in today’s economy. Perhaps the vastly improved world market for grain, poultry and beef will continue and subsidies will no longer be necessary. And a good case can be made for ending subsidies to the ethanol industry.
But it will always be good business for government to subsidize crop insurance to provide a safety net when drought and other natural disasters strike. It is in the long- term interest of every national economy, including ours, to subsidize conservation measures and build dams to curb floods and store water against drought.
No one can argue against the value of continuing the research at our universities that has made it possible for so few farmers to feed so many such nutritious food here and around the world.
That said, the farm bill can be reduced by billions by trimming back the benefits that now go to huge farm operations or to absentee land owners and by making certain payments are reduced when high commodity prices make them illogical.
Those are the kinds of reforms the Huelskamps in Congress should be pursuing.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
