Word: cotton
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...happens to catch Scottie Pippen, Chevron, Ted Turner and 1,324 recipients in bucolic New York City, that's a small price to pay. "The system isn't perfect, but politics is the art of the possible, and the system works," says agribusiness lobbyist Charlie Stenholm, a cotton farmer and former Texas Congressman who was once the committee's top Democrat...
...world without subsidies and that dependence on foreign protein would be even worse than our dependence on foreign oil. "The subsidies help keep us in business, so we can play in the dirt and you don't have to grow your own food," says Ben Boyd, a Georgia cotton farmer who's active in the Farm Bureau. "It's not like we're all living in plantations like Tara, wearing fancy white suits like Colonel Sanders...
...decades, this largesse was fairly uncontroversial. Georgians didn't like the sugar program, and Minnesotans rolled their eyes about cotton subsidies, but everyone made sure everyone else got theirs. In the 1970s, the House and Senate agriculture committees cleverly tacked food stamps onto farm bills to solidify the support of urban legislators. But when Republicans seized Congress in 1994, promising a revolutionary age of fiscal conservatism and free-market capitalism, they vowed to gut command-and-coddle farm policies that they compared to Soviet communism. They wanted the government to treat agriculture like any other business, and they said they...
Another unintended consequence: we don't make West African cotton farmers poor, but our subsidies encourage overproduction that slightly reduces world cotton prices, making millions of them slightly poorer. An Oxfam study found that eliminating our subsidies could boost their average income as much as 5.7%, enough to feed two of their kids for a year. We spent $3.3 billion on cotton subsidies in 2005, more than half of Mali's gross domestic product. "We're not judging you--if we could subsidize our farmers, we'd do it!" says Abdoulaye Diop, Mali's ambassador...
This is a legal and geopolitical issue as well as a moral one. Brazil has successfully challenged our cotton subsidies in the World Trade Organization (WTO), and a recent congressional report admitted "all major U.S. program crops are potentially vulnerable to WTO challenges." When U.S. officials urge the world to embrace free markets and free trade, the inevitable response is, What about your farm programs? "Our credibility is zero," says economist Daniel Sumner, a former Assistant Agriculture Secretary who runs the University of California's Agricultural Issues Center. "Every other country thinks of us as a liar and a crook...