>

The anti-democratic “Super Committee” is about to take a whack at the Farm Bill. Quietly, this is about to be the first big assault to come out of last summer’s bipartisan deficit terrorist kabuki.

The farm bill is loaded with corporate welfare for big farms, has many small programs nominally dedicated to helping small farms, and contains critical conservation and nutrition programs.

Although there’s been big talk about cutting back on corporate welfare, by far the largest chunk of it (crop insurance) was implicitly declared untouchable from the beginning. Instead, the talk has focused on cutting back on direct payments, countercyclical payments, and the ever-popular “closing loopholes”.

From the point of view of most of the food movement, support for the 2002 and especially the 2008 farm bills was dedicated to the notion that it’s better to support a farm bill with many small helps for small farms even though it remained predominantly a Big Ag welfare trough.

The so-called “mandatory” funding (it doesn’t actually mean mandatory, yet many movement advocates insist on parroting this Orwellism) for these crumbs was never fully funded in practice, and much of what did exist was gutted early in 2011, even prior to the deficit charade.

So prior to the advent of the anti-democratic Super Committee, the reformist gravy-train-and-crumbs game plan was already failing. Now we’re about to see the farm bill, something normally wrangled over at great length in the public eye, subject to the Bush-Obama model of legislative “efficiency”.

Here’s how things work under Obama’s budget Star Chamber. The Agriculture Committee sends a letter to the Super Committee proposing its own cuts. If the SC accepts these, they go back to the full Congress for an up-or-down vote, no silly democratic debate. If the letter is never sent, $15 billion in cuts automatically go into effect. These could not touch the Conservation Reserve Program or food stamps.

As we reported earlier, the Agriculture Committee leadership is proposing a net reduction of $23 billion over the next ten years from the farm bill. According to an article by David Rogers at Politico.com, the structure discussed by the leadership includes at $14 to $15 billion reduction to commodity program payments, a $6.5 billion reduction to conservation programs, and a $4 to $5 billion reduction in nutrition programs including food stamps. Those cuts would translate to a 20+, 10, and less than one percent reduction for commodities, conservation, and nutrition, respectively.

This is worse than the automatic version would have been, since the cuts for corporate ag are just a flesh wound while those for small farms and conservation look to be devastating. As the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition puts it

This proposal would wipe out over 40 percent of the funding increases for conservation and environmental initiatives achieved in the 2002 and 2008 food and farm bills, setting the clock back and “un-greening” the farm bill. Moreover, it is unclear what the proposal would do to the fair and healthy farm and food system programs won in 2008 with your help, but in need of being renewed in the new farm bill. It could potentially wipe out all of those gains as well.

This, like every other action of government, is directly counter to the will of the people. A recent survey found very different priorities, if democracy could function

69 percent said reducing the use of chemicals that contribute to water pollution should be a top priority of agriculture policy. 60 percent said farmers should be required to meet environmental standards such as protecting water quality or soil health as a condition of receiving subsidy payments and subsidized crop insurance. That number jumped to 65 percent in the six biggest ethanol-producing states (IA, NE, IL, MN, SD, IN). 57 percent did not agree with cutting funding for farm conservation programs, saying that these programs save money by preventing pollution. 52 percent said subsidies for crops such as corn and soybeans should top the list of programs to be cut, and 49 percent named crop insurance as the next target. Only 31 percent ranked conservation programs as top targets for cuts and just 23 percent wanted to cut food aid for low income Americans. 38 percent said protecting soil and farmland to ensure future food security should be the top priority of conservation programs, while 34 percent put protecting water quality at the top.

I mentioned above that the reformist gravy-train-and-crumbs game plan was already failing even prior to the advent of the anti-democratic Super Committee. It seems that we’re looking at yet another of the unanimous refutations of reformism.Yet its advocates continue to dream. I’d love to see them turn out to be right, but I fear that not only will it again be proven wrong, very soon, but once again we’ll see them refuse to learn from this proof.

NSAC’s call to action contains this ironic line:

Please act today for a chance you have only once every 5 years to reform our food and farming system and protect our natural resources.

The point of food sovereignty is to reform our food and farming system and protect our natural resources every day, ourselves, through our direct action on the ground. The point of democracy, as is being demonstrated by Occupy Wall Street, is to exercise democracy every day. The point of humanity is to exercise humanity every day. It’s the enemies of all democracy and humanity who want to reduce our vision of these to the wretched charade of voting every few years, or in this case of commenting on a bill every five years. The spirit of democracy demands we Occupy the Land and farm it. Latin America’s Landless Workers’ Movement has been doing inspirational work for years now. If only these Occupations, often permanent, were as well known.

We can only own what we farm, and we must farm what we own. When shall we the landless farmers and workers of America begin to take back our land and farm it?