As for the 78 percent of Americans who say that making nutritious and healthy foods more affordable and more accessible should be a top priority in the next farm bill, they’d still go unheard. The way things were going, Congress could have called 10,000 witnesses in 1,000 hearings and heard nothing but recycled calls for more commodity subsidies and less regulation. What they got instead were recycled industrial agriculture talking points and padding from Ag Committee press releases None of the hearings cited by committee leaders tried to really address our badly broken food and farm system, a discussion that the taxpayers who bankroll the system deserve to hear. As we enter 2012 and the process returns to the “usual order” of reauthorizing the Farm Bill every five years, the question is not how many hearings are held – but who gets to testify and what information is collected. Senator Stabenow also indicated at the Farm Journal Forum that the secret farm bill work would be the foundation for the 2012 farm bill. Congress is, after all, paid to do just that.
#Movealong citizen nothing to see here full
By our count, between early 2010, when the current farm bill programs took full effect, and August of this year there were as many as 66 hearings on those issues.)īut counting hearings to assess whether Congress did its due diligence prior to writing the secret farm bill is largely a red herring. (Strangely, they didn’t give themselves enough credit. They said they had held numerous hearings – anywhere from 14 to 23 – on the farm bill and related issues. Their work was quickly branded the “secret farm bill.” That this label stung the Ag Committee leaders was evident in their strenuous attempt to push back. They set out to write a bill that would protect the giveaways that mostly enrich already profitable mega-farms and pushed to incorporate their draft in the deficit-reduction bill of the now-failed Super Committee, where the bill could not have been amended or even openly discussed. It was at that point that the die-hard defenders of the status quo who lead the House and Senate Ag Committees had a brainstorm. This is a different tack than she and the other Agriculture Committee leaders in Congress took just last month when it became clear that the current system of lavish and wasteful agricultural subsidies was at last headed for defeat. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) announced at the Farm Journal Forum today (Dec 6) that work on the 2012 farm bill will start in earnest in January. With deliberations on the 2012 farm bill due to begin in January, EWG looks at how the industrial agriculture lobby dominates the hearing process, leaving little room for good food reformers.
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