Not For Ag Eyes Only: 5 Lessons from the Secret Farm Bill Fight
Posted by Heather White in Kernel Watch, Lobbyists, Subsidies, Super Congress on December 1, 2011 | 11 responses
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The secret farm bill thankfully is dead for the time being. Here’s 5 lessons to keep in mind for the 2012 farm bill debate.

Americans now face the holiday season with rising food prices and troubled economic waters roiled by Congressional gridlock. Nearly 90 percent of Americans disapprove of Congress, according to Gallup polling, and 2011 is on track to be Congress’s worst year ever for Gallup public approval ratings. Given this backdrop, you’d think the Congressional agriculture committees would have understood that writing a secret farm bill tailor-made for their friendly agri-lobbyists and tacking it on to the super committee recommendations would only add to the toxic atmosphere permeating Washington. Since they didn’t, here are 5 lessons to be re-learned before the 2012 farm bill debate.

1. Secrecy makes for bad politics, bad PR and bad policy. Call us old-fashioned, but at EWG we believe that new legislation needs to happen in the open, with full hearings and a mark-up in committee, and with debate and amendments on the House and Senate floors. This is especially true for legislation that covers food and farm policy affecting all Americans and that spends nearly $400 billion of taxpayer money. It wasn’t until after the super committee negotiations collapsed that the parade of defenders of status quo farm policy emerged, claiming a secret farm bill was a bad idea. These profiles in courage didn’t utter a peep of opposition during the profoundly undemocratic process. The man at the front of this pack is none other than Senate ag committee ranking Republican Pat Roberts of Kansas.

The secret farm bill was roundly thumped in the media, especially from editorial pages from Corn country to California.

One-thing food reformers have learned (and the industrial ag lobby seems to have forgotten see point 2) is that strong coalitions make a big difference. EWG joined Oxfam, Defenders of Wildlife, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and Americans for Tax Reform in opposition to the drafting of a farm bill through the Super Committee for fiscal, environmental, food security, and transparency issues. EWG either alone or with our coalition partners met with many congressional offices, including leadership from both parties and nearly every member of the Super Committee.

EWG also urged our dedicated supporters to get involved. They generated nearly 30,000 emails to members of the Super Committee and Republican and Democratic leadership to ensure that a secret farm bill wasn’t attached to the super committee proposal.

Representatives Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Ron Kind (D-Wisc) held a briefing about EWG’s analysis of the revenue income guarantee proposal. Ironically this was the first congressional briefing for media on the secret farm bill. Congressman Kind and 26 of his colleagues also officially demanded an open and transparent process. And Rep. Earl Bluemenauer (D-Ore.) was an early critic of the covert ag committee process.

Also, our fearless friends at Food Democracy Now stepped into the fray and, according to their Tweets shut down the switchboard to the Ag Committee leadership offices. They are now offering a $500 shopping card to anyone who can produce a copy of the final version of the ag committee deal. EWG followed their action with a thirty-second spot on CNN and Des Moines’ television, encouraging taxpayers to join the fight against the secret farm bill.

2. Subsidy lobby in disarray. Any hope for serious reform in the secret farm bill was lost in the unseemly competition among the subsidy lobby to divide up the spoils from finally eliminating the utterly discredited direct payments. The result was a subsidy buffet designed to satisfy the demands of agribusiness lobbyists for corn, cotton, soybeans, wheat and rice growers that ate up most of the savings from ending direct payments.

One of the prime subsidy buffet offerings was an entirely new entitlement designed to guarantee agricultural business income. Marketed as a safety net, in reality the so-called “shallow lossâ€