http://www.dallasnews.com/business/stories/467376_subsidies_10bu.html A tenth of farmers got two-thirds of 2000 subsidies

09/10/2001

Associated Press

Almost two-thirds of the $27 billion in federal farm subsidies doled out last year went to just 10 percent of America's farm owners, including multimillion-dollar corporations and government agencies, a review of Agriculture Department records by The Associated Press shows.

Rules that base subsidy payments on farm acreage, rather than financial need, mean that taxpayer money flowed to people like media mogul Ted Turner, pro basketball star Scottie Pippen and an heir to the Rockefeller fortune. They also mean some of the wealthiest members of Congress received aid from farm programs they voted for.

At least 20 Fortune 500 companies and more than 1,200 universities and government farms, including state prisons, received checks from federal programs touted by politicians as a way to prop up needy farmers. Subsidies also went to real estate developers and absentee landowners in big cities from Chicago to New York.

Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat and chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, called such examples an "embarrassment, a black eye that can only undermine public and taxpayer support for the programs."

The American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation's largest farm group, supports the rules, passed by Congress since 1996. But many individual farmers and other critics question a system that gives the country's biggest farmland owners the fattest checks.

"There have to be limits," said Mike Korth, who received about $73,000 in payments last year to help keep his Nebraska corn farm afloat. "Why are we giving millions of dollars to millionaires?"

Government aid made up almost half of total farm income nationwide last year, most of it parceled out through programs aimed at making sure farmers don't go under when the price they get for crops is not enough to pay their bills. But recipients don't have to be cash-strapped farmers, or even farmers at all. The subsidies flow to anyone with a stake in farmland and the crops that land produces.

The AP analysis of more than 22 million checks sent out by the Agriculture Department in fiscal 2000 shows that 63 percent of the money went to the top 10 percent of recipients, including many that don't fit the image of the struggling family farmer.

That's how the heirs of billionaire John R. Simplot, a retired tycoon worth $4.7 billion by Forbes magazine's last tally, received $167,000 in aid through the family's Idaho farming empire. A trust in Mr. Simplot's name got an additional $92,000.

Though J.R. Simplot Co. of Boise recorded $2.7 billion in sales last year, not all the Simplot farms do well, family spokesman Fred Zerza said.

"Each of these farm operations is a separate entity that has to stand on its own, and farming has been a tough business lately," he said.

In the last three years, with prices for corn, rice and other crops tumbling to near-record lows, Congress passed a series of bailouts, sending billions of dollars in extra aid to rescue farmers from mounting debt, foreclosure and bankruptcy. The result? Farm subsidies that politicians predicted would decline under the so-called Freedom to Farm bill of 1996 instead exploded.

Of the 1.6 million farm aid recipients last year, the average recipient got about $16,000. About 57,500 recipients got more than $100,000, and at least 154 got more than $1 million. Because recipients can receive payments under several different names, it is likely there are many more who passed the million-dollar mark.

-- Anonymous, September 10, 2001

Answers

Rules that base subsidy payments on farm acreage, rather than financial need, mean that taxpayer money flowed to people like media mogul Ted Turner, pro basketball star Scottie Pippen and an heir to the Rockefeller fortune. They also mean some of the wealthiest members of Congress received aid from farm programs they voted for.

At least 20 Fortune 500 companies and more than 1,200 universities and government farms, including state prisons, received checks from federal programs touted by politicians as a way to prop up needy farmers. Subsidies also went to real estate developers and absentee landowners in big cities from Chicago to New York.

-- Anonymous, September 10, 2001

Back link to a major cause of these "programs".

-- Anonymous, September 10, 2001