Explainer: What is the farm bill, and where the hell is it?

Photo by Scott Goodwill on Unsplash

A $30 Billion Stalemate

Every once in a while, I like to share a civics lesson that I hope won’t make your eyes glaze over. Today, I would like to shed some light on something that gets surprisingly little coverage relative to its magnitude – currently proposed at approximately $1.5 trillion over five years – and its ability to touch every corner of American society: the farm bill. Stick with me because what’s at stake is yet another transfer of wealth from the poorest to corporations.

Each farm bill is an omnibus bill, meaning that while one bill gets signed into law, it contains several pieces of related legislation. In this case, the bill will address forestry and conservation, food assistance programs, agriculture research and development, and rural development, among other things. 

It is easy to lose track of the farm bill for a couple of reasons. First, unlike, say, defense spending, farm bills get passed every five years at the earliest, and sometimes an additional year of authorization will get tacked on as happened last year with the 2018 farm bill and seems to be likely to repeat this year. Second, most of the bill’s details get worked out in the relatively inglorious, but nevertheless impactful, House and Senate agriculture committees. (Incidentally, one helpful, albeit depressing, metric for gauging the power of a committee to inform your advocacy is the number of staffers-turned-lobbyists or lobbyists-turned-staffers a given committee boasts. Open Secrets has a list.)

Historically, the farm bill has had two major functions. The first is to protect producers of staple crops by providing minimum prices in the event that commodity prices dip below a certain level. The federal government makes up the difference between its reference price and the market rate. That seems reasonable in principle, but the way that program was redesigned under the Reagan Administration is heavily biased toward large scale industrial farms that produce on only 244 million of the eligible 879 million acres. 

Since 1973, the second, and now largest, function of the farm bill has been to fund the nation’s major nutrition programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) chief among them. Congress is in a stalemate and pitting those two features of the bill against one another. 

The 2018 farm bill permitted the president to adjust benefits given to SNAP participants. In October of 2021, President Biden used this authority to increase benefits by approximately 40 cents per meal, per person – the largest one-time increase in the program's history. Republicans want to remove this authority, which would cut SNAP payouts to recipients by $30 billion over the next decade. They want to reallocate these funds to the reference price payouts. 

Scope & Impact of SNAP

Democrats must not give an inch on the proposed cuts to SNAP. If you have a member of congress on either the House or Senate agriculture committees, it is worth dropping them a line to express that. The economic situation in which the American working class finds itself is already untenable. Housing is unaffordable for half of renters, one in eight households do not have enough food, and in 2022, that number included seven million seniors. We are at an inflection point, and human need is acute. 

In addition to being cruel, cuts to SNAP are short-sighted. SNAP stimulates the broader economy. Every public dollar invested in the program generates between $1.50 and $1.80 in local economic activity. It keeps cash circulating throughout the economy, which is even more important during an economic downturn. Those funds flow upstream to employers and employees involved in the cultivation, distribution, transportation, and retail sale of food, and in turn, move within their respective communities. 

In 2019, the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service conducted a study examining the economic impact of a hypothetical $1 billion in additional funding. Researchers found that in a slowing economy, that $1 billion would add $1.54 billion to the national economy. Those positive economic effects begin almost immediately because SNAP recipients use the benefits quickly upon receipt. 

Let’s be clear about what these data mean. Capitalism is a consumption-based economic model. Consequently, a downturn means people consume less because of lack of resources or lack of confidence that secure conditions will endure. The economic stimulus that comes from programs like SNAP, then, benefits us all. That shared benefit contradicts any notion that the lives of those of us who are doing okay are not bound up with the outcomes that the poorest experience. 

This conversation illuminates the more fundamental problem; namely, that the goods produced in our economy are not directed toward human and ecological flourishing. This much is spelled out in law: social safety net programs like SNAP are categorized as “non-defense discretionary spending,” the roughly $900 billion of annual federal spending that lawmakers have a say on. Rather than being permanently aligned with human need, our country leaves up to political debate the question of whether and to what extent people should starve.

In solidarity,

Dwayne