How to keep 'em down on the farm

FOR THE FIFTH SUMMER in six years, I'm driving across the country. Aside from the country's immense beauty, the decency of its people and the relative difficulty of finding a good cup of coffee near the interstate, one of the things you start to appreciate when you've seen a lot of the United States is how sparsely populated it is, particularly in the middle. It seems the welfare recipients need a lot of room.

I'm referring, of course, to American farmers. Or, more precisely, American farm owners, a.k.a. Welfare Kings.

There are few issues for which the political consensus is so distant from both common sense and expert opinion. Right-wing economists, left-wing environmentalists and almost anybody in-between who doesn't receive a check from the Department of Agriculture or depend on a political donation from said recipients understand that Americans are spending billions to prop up the last of the horse-and-buggy industries.

At this nation's founding, nearly nine out of 10 workers were employed in agriculture. By 1900 that fell to fewer than four in 10. Today, fewer than one in every 100 workers is in agriculture, and less than 1% of gross domestic product is attributable to agriculture. Yet this country spends billions upon billions of dollars subsidizing a system that makes almost everyone in the world worse off.

Our system is so complicated -- i.e. rigged -- that it's almost impossible to know how much agricultural subsidies cost U.S. taxpayers. But we know from the Washington Post's recent reporting that since 2000 the U.S. government paid out $1.3 billion to "farmers" who don't farm. They were simply "compensated" for owning land previously used for farming. A Houston surgeon received nearly $500,000 to alleviate his hardship. Cash payments have cost $172 billion over the last decade, and $25 billion in 2005 alone, nearly 50% more than what was paid to families receiving welfare.

But those sorts of numbers barely tell the story of our appallingly immoral agricultural corporatism. Subsidies combined with trade barriers (another term for subsidy) prop up the price of food for consumers at home and hurt farmers abroad. This is repugnant because agriculture is a keystone industry for developing nations and a luxury for developed ones. This keeps Third World nations impoverished, economically dependent and politically unstable. Our farm subsidies alone -- forget trade barriers -- cost developing countries $24 billion every year, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis. Letting poor nations prosper would be worth a lot more than the equivalent amount in foreign aid. But Big Agriculture likes foreign aid because it allows for the dumping of wheat and other crops on the world market, which perpetuates the cycle of dependency.