The Farm Bill Comes Due

The ball is now in the Senate's court. It'll be another five years before we have this chance again and frankly, the version of the bill that came out of the House was so disappointingly reminiscent of every Farm Bill that had gone before it one would wonder what year this was. Th subsidies to the mega Ag corporations for life sucking commodity crops were still there, the money and policy to promote GMOs here in the States and overseas were there and increased, the insurance penalties foe organic growers were still there. True there was a piddling $15 million increase for organic R&D. But on the whole it was the same damn thing. Now is the time to put some heavy pressure on your Senators, especially if they sit on the Ag Cmmtte and let's get some changes made. *Minimum* of $50Million for Organic research;Required labeling of GMO ingredients on food labels and menus;Elimination of the organic penalty in crop insurance;Much tighter regulation of GMOs in the open and liability for contamination directly to the seed company(no more liberty link rice or starlink corn incidents);More complete and transparent testing of GMOs before approval.These are just some of the talking points you can bring up w/ your Senators.
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original-firedoglake

The Farm Bill Comes Due

By: Kirk James Murphy, M.D.

Why do we have to pay so much more for healthy food (fruits, veggies, whole grains, and safe dairy/poultry/fish/meat) when junk food is so cheap?

Why do we have of go out of our way - and pay extra - for fresh food without added chemicals?

At the ice cream shop, they charge extra for fudge sauce.

You don’t have to pay extra to get your two scoops of french vanilla “fudge-free”.

Why do you have to pay more to get two gallons of milk “hormone free” or “pesticide free”?

Because - of course - the Beltway says so.

To clean up our plates, our Federal pols would have to do some belt-tightening: they’d have to step away from the gravy train of bribes contributions from Cargill, ADM, BigPesticide, and BigAg.

Yeah, right.

Since they’ll never do that, we’ll have to drag ‘em away by their hind trotters.

Messy business - but worth the fight.

Here’s why. The most enduring Federal investment in our farmland, food security, and farm families is known as ta-da The Farm Bill - TFB to its pals.

The Farm Bill touches all aspects of our lives: what we eat, where we live, and how long we live.

In the days and weeks to come, I’ll be exploring TFB’s massive impact on our lives and what we can do about it. We’ll look at how this one bill - and the hundreds of billions it sluices into corporate agriculture - weaves a powerful spell over the Air, Fire, Water, and Earth in all of our lives.

And we’ll learn how to break the spell and invoke protection for our families, pets, fields, rivers, and skies.

But before that piece of magic, we have some preparation.

We’ll start with an overview of TFB.

Ever since 1933, we the taxpayers have been paying farmers to take care of America’s lands - and America’s food security - while they took care of their own families.

A good idea - then and now.

In the 1930’s one in four Americans lived on farms. Today only one in 70 does. . .and only around one-tenth of them live on full-time commercial farms.

Yet almost half the Continental US is comprised of farmland.

And all of every American is comprised of someone who must eat - or perish.

Nearly three-quarters of a century after FDR’s first Farm Bill, we Americans have compelling reasons to invest in our food security and our nation’s lands.

And we have even more compelling reasons to stop pissing away Farm Bill Federal dollars - our Federal dollars - as subsidies to:

Cargill

the price-fixing cartel known as Archer Daniels Midland,

the vertically integrated tumor producers known as BigPesticide/Ag Pharma,

the factory hog farms dumping pig shit in our drinking water and rivers,

and a host of other tapeworms on the body politic which have crept up the orifice of the Money Party and infested the body of the Farm Bill over the last few decades.

Hey - I’m all for aid to seniors. Social Security just isn’t enough for many seniors.

But this is over the top:

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complete article here