On July 30. 2018, Humeyra Pamuk writes on Rueters:
More than half of the Trump administration’s $8.4 billion in trade aid payments to U.S. farmers through April was received by the top 10% of recipients, the country’s biggest and most successful farmers, a study by an advocacy group showed on Tuesday.FILE PHOTO: A field of ripe wheat ready for harvesting is seen in Corn, Oklahoma, U.S., June 12, 2019. REUTERS/Nick Oxford/File Photo
Highlighting an uneven distribution of the bailout, which was designed to help offset effects of the U.S.-China trade war, the Environmental Working Group said the top 1% of aid recipients received an average of more than $180,000 while the bottom 80% were paid less than $5,000 in aid.
The EWG, a Washington-based non-profit, said it obtained data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through Freedom of Information Act requests for its research, the results of which could not be independently verified by Reuters.
The Trump administration last year began rolling out federal aid for farmers to compensate for lower farm good prices and lost sales after Washington’s trade dispute with China wiped out a key export market for U.S. agricultural goods.
The first round of aid, announced in 2018, was up to $12 billion. The second round, unveiled last week, involves up to $16 billion dollars and $14.5 billion of that is direct payments.
U.S. farmers, a key constituency of President Donald Trump, have been among the hardest hit in the year-long trade war between the world’s two largest economies. Shipments of soybeans, the most valuable U.S. farm export, to top buyer China sank to a 16-year low in 2018.
“Farm bailout payments designed to offset the impacts of President Trump’s trade war have overwhelmingly flowed to the largest and most successful farmers,” EWG said in a statement.
It said the first round of payments had been linked to crop production, favoring the biggest producers of certain crops. The second round, rolled out last week, would further favor big farms because it was designed to pay per acre, EWG said.
“The bigger the farm, the bigger the government check,” it said. A USDA spokeswoman said aid payments were made based on a producer’s individual production. “The more acres they farm and bushels per acre they produce – the more assistance they receive,” she said in emailed comments.
The department has made changes to its new farm aid and said it would pay farmers according to geographic location rather than by crop. A Reuters analysis of the payment rates posted online showed farmers in the cotton-growing Mississippi Delta states stand to be the greatest beneficiaries of the program.
The new round also increased the maximum amount of aid per individual or legal entity to $500,000 from $125,000 in the package last year.
U.S.-China trade talks broke down in May and were only revived in a meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping last month.
Negotiations to end the trade war restarted this week, but expectations for the two-day meeting are low.
Gary Reber Comments:
“Farmers across the nation also have retired or sold their farms because of the financial strains, changing the face of Midwestern towns and concentrating the business in fewer hands.”
Of course, the problem is large corporate faming is geared to growing food, not for Americans, but for world markets, with Communist China being one of the countries that were targeted for sales.
Over the years since 1862, wealthy capital asset owners have purchased small farms and accumulated hundreds of millions of acres to dominate portions of the American farming sector. Those farms that are truly family owned typically sell their product to nearby markets or across states or to the large corporate conglomerates. Individual farms range in size from 230 acres to 2,100 acres. While most farms are not incorporated and are small acre-sized, about 5 percent are classified as corporate farms. These include family corporations with 10 or fewer stock owners (4.51 percent) and non-family farm corporations (0.55 percent).
With their backbreaking labor, farmers settled the expanding West through the 1862 Homestead Act. Farmers, riding the wave of manifest destiny, one major contributors to the building of the United States. Today, they continue to feed it.
No longer can someone pick up a pitchfork or guide a horse and plow and become a farmer. According to reports, farmland can cost an average of $4,000 per acre in the United States, and most farms have roughly 1,100 acres. Some of the biggest crops, such as corn and alfalfa, aren’t even grown to feed people. Thanks to globalization, food grown in the Midwest might end up feeding someone half a world away.
We should be looking to focus on the American market and retaining American ownership of our farm lands, and not allow foreign buyers to eliminate American farmer ownership and own and operate American farms themselves, as well as the livestock barns and slaughterhouses. We should be branded crazy if we allow this to transpire.
On a larger scale, we can the idea behind the 1862 Homestead Act to focus on universally creating ownership stakes for EVERY child, woman, and man in not land, but in the non-human factor of production––physical capital (productive land; structures; infrastructure; tools; machines; robotics; computer processing and apps; artificial intelligence, certain intangibles that have the characteristics of property, such as patents and trade or firm names the like which are owned by people individually or in association with others).
The Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.CESJ.org) of which I am a board member, is calling for a Capital Homestead Act (CHA) (www.capitalhomestead.org), which takes its lead from the Homestead Act of 1862. The Homestead Act offered the landless white citizens of America part-ownership of the country by giving them 160 acres of frontier land, free, if they produced on it income for themselves and their families for a period of five years. Of course, the finite free land divided up fast and not EVERY citizen became a landowner at a time when owning land was the most valued capital asset. Also it required the aspiring landowners to labor and work the land to make it productive.
In Lincoln’s America of 154 years ago, the problem confronting the vast majority of the citizens of our nation was that most people owned no land that they could work to sustain their livelihood. Today, the major problem for the vast majority of the people of our nation and of our world, for that matter, is that 99 percent of the people own no wealth-creating, income-producing capital (or a viable share) in a high-tech, capital-intensive economy. The Capital Homestead Act would make it possible for every American to become a viable owner of productive capital, without taking from the tiny elite who now own our corporations. The CHA is primarily a tax-sheltered vehicle for the democratization of capital credit through local banks. It would enable every child, woman, and man to accumulate wealth and receive dividend incomes from newly issued shares in new viable and growing corporations, without being taxed on the accumulations.
In addition to serving as a source of capital credit for corporate workers, the Act provides for Capital Homestead Accounts. CHAs would provide an ownership-building account for individuals who do not work for profit-making enterprises (or in place of), such as school teachers, civil servants, military personnel, police, and health workers, and for individuals who have no remunerative employment, such as the disabled, the unemployed homemakers and children.
Support the enactment of the proposed Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act and Economic Empowerment Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/. And The Capital Homestead Act brochure, pdf print version at http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/C-CHAflyer_1018101.pdf and Capital Homestead Accounts (CHAs) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/capital-homestead-accounts-chas/.
