For Immediate Release
April 27, 2002

Contact:   

Mike Casey
202-667-6982

Agri-business As Usual
Farm Bill Conferees Sell Out Reform

EWG Urges House, Senate to Reject
Sweetheart Deal For Big Agriculture

Group To Issue Detailed Assessment Week of Apr. 29

Bipartisanship or cloning?

WASHINGTON, APR 27 — In a stunning capitulation to agribusiness, Senate leaders on Friday dropped a series of commodity and conservation reforms they had previously approved and handed their House counterparts and lobbyists for the nation's biggest farm operations virtually everything on their wish list.

The resulting new farm bill will provide an expensive, unlimited flow of taxpayer support to bankroll the nation's largest cotton, rice and corn plantations as they buy up neighboring struggling family farms. And, a massive flow of new subsidies will be provided to factory farms nationwide.

“This bill sticks taxpayers with the tab for cleaning out the agribusiness outhouse,” said Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group (EWG). “If taxpayers think giant corporate hog farms stink, wait'll they get a whiff of this bill,” he added.

Cook’s EWG published 90 million farm subsidy payment records on a free, searchable web site (www.ewg.org). The resulting outcry from the public and editorials from newspapers of every ideological stripe first drove the Senate to approve significantly tighter payment limits for the biggest agribusinesses in its farm bill. It then triggered a landslide House vote in which 78 members reversed course, supporting the payment limits and to direct the resulting savings to farmland conservation programs.

Those programs pay farmers to not sell land to developers, keep wildlife habitat on their lands and reduce farm run-off to prevent pollution of streams and drinking water supplies. The programs are, for the vast majority of U.S. farmers, the only access to federal farm aid.

Virtually all of the important reform-minded provisions in the Senate-passed farm bill vanished after weeks of negotiations with the House, angering family farm advocates and environmental groups.

Meaningful limits on payments to giant commodity operators are gone. Excessive taxpayer handouts to polluting factory farms were tripled, to $450,000, from the Senate bill. Popular programs to protect streams and wildlife, and those curbing sprawl lost almost $3 billion compared to the Senate bill. Incredibly, Senate negotiators yielded as the House overwhelmingly voted to endorse the Senate-passed reforms.

“The list of lost reforms goes on and on. We haven't seen this many caves since they cancelled the Flintstones,” said Cook. “The agendas of the two Agriculture Committee Chairmen now seem indistinguishable.”

EWG will urge the full House and Senate to reject the sweetheart deal for Big Agriculture when it issues a more detailed assessment of the farm bill the week of April 29.

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