Abstract
RHETORICALLY, THE 1996 FARM BILL—known as “Freedom to Farm”— was supposed to signal the end of the subsidy era and a return to free-market agriculture not seen since the early days of the New Deal. It was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress in a time of strong crop prices and tight federal budgets and on the heels of a World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement in which developed countries committed to eliminating their agricultural subsidies. Congress claimed that Freedom to Farm would wean US agriculture off federal support over the following seven-year period. Instead, it triggered more than a decade of the largest agribusiness payouts in history and is the main reason politicians and citizens alike cringe when they hear the words farm subsidies
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Notes
- 1.
Thomas Fogarty, “Freedom to Farm? Not Likely,” USA Today, January 2, 2002, https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/covers/2002-01-03-bcovthu.htm.
- 2.
Daryll Ray and Harwood Schaffer, “The 1996 ‘Freedom to Farm’ Farm Bill,” MidAmerica Farmer Grower 35, no. 3 (2014).
- 3.
Scott Marlow, “The Non-Wonk Guide to Understanding Federal Commodity Payments” (Pittsboro, NC: Rural Advancement Foundation International–USA, 2005), 3.
- 4.
Marlow, “The Non-Wonk Guide.”
- 5.
US Government Accountability Office, “Agricultural Conservation: USDA Needs to Better Ensure Protection of Highly Erodible Cropland and Wetlands,” Report GAO-03-418, 2003.
- 6.
Dan Morgan, “The Farm Bill and Beyond,” Economic Policy Paper Series (Washington, DC: German Marshall Fund of the United States, January 2010), 13.
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© 2019 Daniel Imhoff
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Imhoff, D., Badaracco, C. (2019). Crop Subsidies. In: The Farm Bill. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-975-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-975-3_9
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