Critics of farm subsidies lower sights on reforms

WASHINGTON — For the many critics of farm subsidies, including both President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, this seemed like the ideal year for Congress to tackle the federal payments long criticized for enriching big farm interests, violating trade agreements and neglecting small family farms.

Many crop prices are at or near record highs. Consternation over the country's dependence on foreign oil has sent demand for corn-based ethanol soaring. European wheat fields have been battered by too much rain. And market analysts are projecting continued boom years for American farmers into the foreseeable future.

But as the latest farm bill heads to the House floor on Thursday, farm-state lawmakers seem likely to prevail in keeping the old subsidies largely in place, drawing a veto threat from the White House on Wednesday.

Faced with fierce opposition from members of the House Agriculture Committee, Pelosi and other Democratic leaders lowered their sights on reforms and are now backing the committee's farm bill, in part to protect rural freshmen lawmakers who may be vulnerable in the 2008 elections.

Instead, Pelosi helped to secure more modest changes, pushing the committee to provide $1.8 billion in new aid for fruit and vegetable growers, generating support from those farmers and deflating some of the opposition by lawmakers seeking reforms. At the same time, Pelosi pronounced the bill a "good first step to reform" by ending subsidies for the richest farmers — those earning more than $1 million a year — and closing a loophole that let some farmers exceed subsidy limits by owning partnerships in multiple farms.

"This bill represents reform," said Rep. Collin C. Peterson, D-Minn., chairman of the Agriculture Committee. "We have made changes that nobody thought that we could ever do."

A group of dissident lawmakers led by Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., and Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., is still pushing a plan to sharply curtail the subsidies.

But they have been largely outmuscled by the Agriculture Committee, whose 46 members make up slightly more than 10 percent of districts in the House yet took home more than 40 percent of all farm subsidies between 2003 and 2005, according to a database compiled by the Environmental Working Group, which opposes the subsidies.

Critics in Congress include fiscal conservatives who deride the payments as wasteful government spending and liberals who call them corporate welfare for agribusiness. All say the measure will simply perpetuate the overly generous subsidy system, at a point when American farmers are well-positioned to weather changes.