AP: California's rice, cotton groups aim to fight Bush subsidy cuts

SACRAMENTO (AP) - California's cotton and rice farmers, who receive more than $500 million a year in federal farm subsidies, are preparing for a fight over President Bush's proposed subsidy cuts.

The president proposed a $587 million budget cut in farm subsidies nationwide. That would most affect the state's farmers of cotton and rice, which have a combined acreage of about 1.2 million acres throughout California.

Bush proposed a 5 percent reduction in support payments, a new $250,000 ceiling on payments to individual farmers and an end to loopholes that allow some farmers to claim multiple owners of their farm to get more.

Conservatives, environmentalists and small farmers call the subsidies corporate welfare for the nation's largest growers. But officials with California's cotton and rice industries said Tuesday the subsidies are necessary to guarantee profits while keeping prices low.

California rice and cotton growers received about three-fourths of the state's $757 million in federal crop subsidies in 2003, according to the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group that maintains a computer database of U.S. farm subsidies. Both crops, while second-tier players in the state's $27 billion agricultural economy, are heavily exported.

Subsidies have "kicked in when prices are low and times are tough, but at the same token the benefits are terminated or lowered when prices are good," said Gene Lundquist, vice president and corporate secretary of Calcot, Ltd., a Bakersfield-based cotton cooperative with 1,100 member farmers in California and Arizona.

Scott Rogers, a fourth-generation farmer who grows 450 acres of cotton in Tulare County, said he's not a welfare case. Instead, the subsidies give him a little more breathing room financially.

"The profit margins are pretty slim right now, and any amount that's cut is going to affect us somewhat," Rogers said. "It's not going to put us out of business, but we'll take a hit on it."

While critics point to the subsidies paid to huge corporate farms, such as $6.6 million received by the J.G. Boswell Co., of Kings County, between 1995 and 2003, Rogers said he gets about $40,000 to $50,000 a year. Boswell is the nation's largest cotton grower.

As Lundquist, Rogers and their counterparts in California's rice industry find themselves on the defensive over subsidies, their state and national organizations are gearing up Washington lobbying campaigns to soften the blow. Congress traditionally has proved itself unable to make major cuts in the nation's farm support payments, which reached $16.4 billion in 2003.

"The president issued his budget and we look at it as being a framework for discussion of possible budget cuts," said Bill Huffman, a spokesman for the Sacramento-based Farmers Rice Cooperative. "That argument will be made before Congress."

Already, the California Rice Commission has retained a Washington lobbying firm to make its case against such reductions for the next federal farm bill, which is due in 2007. The Memphis-based National Cotton Council and USA Rice Federation in Virginia and congressional backers in Southern states are also preparing for a fight in Congress over the subsidy reductions.

The Environmental Working Group analysis showed that 17 percent of federal rice subsidies go to California, while about 11 percent of cotton subsidies are paid to California farmers.

"If budget cuts are a reality - and they may well be - ag would do its part," said Tim Johnson, president and chief executive officer of the Sacramento-based California Rice Commission. "But we would seek to have those cuts be equitable."

California grows about 600,000 acres of cotton, largely in the San Joaquin Valley, and exports nearly all of it to Asia, industry officials said. The state's rice acreage, mostly in the Sacramento Valley, stands at about 595,000 acres this year, second nationally to Arkansas. Forty percent is exported, while the rest is consumed in the United States as table food and a chief ingredient in beer.

I don't disagree with you and I grew up in a town in Fresno County where I could walk to cotton fields (and did to hunt pheasant). Long and short of it, Bernie Sisk (DemocRAT of Fresno [deceased] and 20 year chairman of the House Ag Committee) cut a deal with several of his wealthy donors. He got to go on record as creating the Central Valley Project to help family farmers in the western San Joaquin Valley develop large acreages of what would otherwise be near desert (good for a winter crop of barley and that is about all). For his wealthy donors (who included the Harris family [of Harris Ranch Beef] he weaseled a way around the 640 acre water limits. I know this because my family's lawyer helped craft many of the contracts which allowed the wealthy owners of the area to get around the "carefully written" reclamation law.

And yes you are exactly correct that the subsidies are wrong. The guys who get them are still VERY well connected and the fight to get rid of them will not be easy. I think it best to kill them all at once so that their ability to bribe their way out of the termination is reduced. If we bring them down easy they are just as likely to return and/or increase.

>>The market is telling these farmers that their way of life is no longer profitable, so they should find something else to do -- just like people who made buggywhips, or 8-track tapes, or ...<<

The market also has been telling AmTrac, the Post Office, public schools, museums, libraries, NASA, etc, that the people who work in these institutions should find something else to do but Americans keep them going with subsidies. Every American business is subsidized in some fashion either directly or indirectly, e.g., tax benefits or laws to protect them. For me, I would rather subsidize a cotton farm than the auto industry, but that's just me.

Muleteam1

>>While critics point to the subsidies paid to huge corporate farms, such as $6.6 million received by the J.G. Boswell Co., of Kings County, between 1995 and 2003...

I notice the $4 million to the Jones family didn't make the cut.

America has a very strong agriculture industry, partially because of enlightened gov't policy. By abandoning price supports, we are doing the will of liberals, as cheap Chinest Communist imports destroy American jobs.

So the question is this: Do you want your money supporting American businessmen or Red Communists? I don't know about you boys, but I am not anxious for the USA to become a servile economic colony of China.

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