Read the full article in the San Francisco Chronicle Politics Blog.
By Carolyn Lochhead
Leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees are attempting a breathtaking end-run around the democratic process. They are hatching their own farm bill in private and plan by Nov. 1 take it to the new deficit Super Committee to be enacted whole, without votes in their own committees or in Congress.
The farm bill sets U.S. food policy for five years. It is the biggest environmental bill by far that Congress enacts. One quarter of California - 27.6 million acres - is farmland, much of it in the heavily polluted San Joaquin Valley. Agriculture covers 40 percent of the land in the United States. How food is grown on that land has massive consequences for the air, waterways and wildlife. The farm bill also (mis)shapes the American diet.
The Ag committees, populated by Midwest and Southern farm state lawmakers from both parties, want to defend subsidies to the big commodity crops such as corn, wheat, cotton and rice. They know that $5 billion a year in "direct payments" to commodity farmers are vulnerable, so they want to replace these with a new scheme to "insure revenues." The new scheme - variations of which are being written by the commodity groups - would lock in today's record crop prices as a new subsidy while claiming to save money.
Let us pray that the other committees in Congress don't get the same idea. The deficit Super Committee was born last summer as a political manuever to get around Congress's inability to raise the debt ceiling and make hard choices generally. If the Super committee can pass a deficit reduction plan, it will be presented to Congress for an up-or-down vote without amendment. This would allow the Ag committees to get their farm bill enacted into law without so much as a vote. The Super Commitee may be well intended, but its creation has clearly opened a Pandora's Box by overriding the normal committee process.
"It's a profoundly undemocratic process," said Kari Hammerschlag, a senior analyst with Environmental Working Group in Oakland.
California, the nation's largest farm state, locked out for decades from the commodity subsidy system because it grows mainly fruits, nuts and vegetables, is sure to get short-changed by this process.
California food, health and environmental groups such as Roots of Change, Prevention Institute and others have sent a letter, and more than 16,000 Californians signed a letter, urging California's Congressional delegation, Gov. Jerry Brown and state farm and health officials to lobby for changes that would protect current conservation programs, the incorporation of fresh fruits and vegetables into federal food programs and the like.
What Californians really need to do is not lobby within this new "process" but blow it up completely. Congress needs to go back to regular order before the Armed Services Committees figure out they can jam through Pentagon spending the same way.