Corruption & Pork - Agricultural subsidy recipients
Posted in Political on 05/18/2007 06:33 pm by admin
Gregor Rothfuss mentions on his blog that he has used a new feature of Google maps to map the Top 10 USDA farm subsidy recipients in the US
He provides links in the map images to the Environmental Working Group’s Database http://www.ewg.org/farm/ that gathered the data from the USDA.
The EWG writes about their history including:
March, 1995: EWG produces our first report from the database, City Slickers, which traces hundreds of millions of dollars of farm subsidy payments to recipients in America’s biggest cities and wealthiest zip codes - like 90210 - most of whom had no real day to day involvement with the farms that qualified for the aid. The report makes front-page news nationwide.
My thought:
- People work for a living and earn income.
- Goverments take part of the money people earn in the form of taxes.
- Through American infatuation with the ideal of the ‘family farm’, agri-business maintains a lucrative hand-out payoff system with the federal government, and working people must give their $$ to agri-business.
Really interesting stuff!
05/19/2007 at 10:41 pm
i wish EWG and farmsubsidy.org would do more to visualize their datasets. i found it striking that both in the US and the UK, the top amounts go to corporations that are often not even rural. i have tried to approach the EWG, but landed in their “thanks for your email, it is important to us” queue. too bad.
05/20/2007 at 10:29 am
Yes - Too bad for all of us! EWG probably does not understand what you are doing, or the implications of it.
As I was told in undergraduate economics ‘Americans support farm subsidies because of the ideal of the “family farm”- small struggling family trying to make ends meet - ‘ - despite any actual facts to the contrary. When federal subsidies are not enough, Americans have had fund-raisers (Farm-Aid, anyone?) to try and save the ideal.
The irony now is that the truth is finally coming out of what impact these subsidies are having on the global economy — they are driving actual poor farmers in other countries -Central America and Africa - out of business and making them dependent on American imports (example: Mexico was importing American corn due to Mexican farmers being driven out of business because they could not compete with American subsidized agri-products; now there are riots in Mexico due to corn prices being so high because now the American political wind is to use corn for ethanol production and even subsidized American corn is pricey).
The whole issue is very frustrating to me. Feel free to correct any mis-statements made here.
Thanks for writing!