For the better part of 40 years, the federal agriculture budget has attracted an unusual coalition of politicians and lobbyists. Lawmakers from farm states supported the food stamp program to boost consumer demand for groceries, urban politicians supported farm subsidies as a quid pro quo, and together they ensured generous federal spending on food and nutrition.
That alliance, however, is fracturing this year under the pressure of meeting austere congressional budget targets for the Agriculture Department. In a particularly unseemly move, a group of commodity lobbyists have bailed out of the coalition and urged Congress to spare farm subsidies and shift the budget cuts onto nutrition programs, a step that would place the burden of deficit reduction on the nation's neediest families.
That would be unfair and unwise. President Bush has proposed a more fair allocation of the cuts, and lawmakers should stick to his blueprint as they negotiate the big agriculture spending bill that has to be completed in September. Four Minnesota members of Congress -- Sens. Norm Coleman and Mark Dayton and Reps. Gil Gutknecht and Collin Peterson -- serve on the Senate and House agriculture committees and could send crucial messages as negotiations heat up in the next week or two.
In antipoverty programs, farm lobbyists have insinuated that the food stamp program is plagued by fraud and abuse. That's nonsense. The food stamp program is big; it spent $28 billion last year and served 24 million people. But the latest Agriculture Department report shows that the program's error rate has fallen to the lowest level in history: less than 6 percent. Moreover, about a third of the errors are underpayments to eligible families, not overpayments. The typical food stamps family gets $1 per meal per person, which hardly sounds like government waste.
Some farm lobbyists also argue that nutrition programs should bear cuts in proportion to their share of the agriculture budget, or something in the range of 50 percent. In this case, proportionality is not fair; food stamps took a disproportionate share of the budget cuts that Agriculture faced in the 1990s, including $28 billion over several years as part of the landmark 1996 welfare bill. The result: The number of families on food stamps is actually lower today than it was in 1995, even though the number of families in poverty is higher.
In a statement this week Coleman observed that the last major farm bill passed because of support from a strong coalition of farmers, nutrition advocates and conservationists, and argued that "it is important that we keep this coalition together." That's good politics and fair policy. Both chambers should honor the principle.Minneapolis Star Tribune
