The Post's View

Opinion Want fiscal responsibility? Stop paying wealthy farmers.

By the
|
May 4, 2023 at 7:45 a.m. EDT
(Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post)

Editor’s Note: This editorial is part of a series that looks at the challenges of tackling the growing federal debt and the specific programs that drive it. Read the previous installment on veterans’ benefits.

Get the full experience.Choose your plan

Though major inefficiencies and inequalities persist in how the United States distributes food, its fantastically productive agricultural sector has conquered the problem of supplying it. The most recent data from the Agriculture Department shows that there is enough food available in the United States to meet everyone’s minimum caloric needs almost twice over. Nor is farming an economically precarious pursuit. Net farm income is on course to hit $136.9 billion in 2023, a decrease relative to 2022 but still 26.6 percent above the 20-year average of $108.1 billion, according to USDA.

In other words, there’s no need for the United States to maintain its expensive agricultural safety net, whose origins lie in the long-ago Great Depression — at least not in its current form. Yet Congress is once again gearing up to reauthorize the system, which expires on Sept.30, through the quinquennial legislative exercise known as the Farm Bill.

The wider debate over federal debt should encompass this mélange of regulations and subsidies — from “price loss coverage” to “loan deficiency payments” — whose details are intelligible only to the relative handful of rural lawmakers, staff and lobbyists who control the legislative process. One of the most pernicious indirect consequences of the Senate’s bias in favor of small farm states has been to foster interest-group capture of agriculture policy.