Big farmers collected an additional $519 million in trade-war payments in 2019 because of the high payment limits written into the so-called Market Facilitation Program by the Trump administration, said a congressional report on Monday. Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, senior Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, said the administration was headed for the same mistakes — unequal treatment of crops and a bias toward large operators at the expense of family farms — in forthcoming coronavirus aid to agriculture.
“The administration needs to stop playing favorites,” said Stabenow during a teleconference. Stabenow and Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, also on the Agriculture Committee, requested the report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. “It would just be more of the same.”
According to the GAO, about 10,000 farming operations received additional payments last year, compared to the 2018 version of MFP, because the USDA doubled the maximum payment per person or entity to $500,000. By comparison, the limit is $125,000 per farmer for traditional crop subsidies.
“USDA distributed approximately $529 million in additional MFP payments for 2019 compared to 2018 because of the increased payment limits,” said the GAO.
The additional payments were distributed in the largest numbers in corn, soybean and wheat territory in the Midwest and Plains and in rice country along the lower Mississippi River and Texas coast, in cotton-growing regions of the Texas panhandle and in Georgia, where cotton and peanuts are grown.
Nearly $33 billion in cash has been paid by the government to producers in the past three years to mitigate the impact of the China-U.S. trade war and the coronavirus pandemic. The 2018 iteration of MFP disbursed $8.6 billion in direct payments to farmers and ranchers. The 2019 version sent $14.4 billion in cash to producers. The Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, created this year, paid $9.9 billion to 621,919 farmers as of Monday. The deadline to apply was last Friday so some additional outlays are possible.
“The program (MFP) sets a bad precedent for farm policy,” said president Gary Wertish of the Minnesota Farmers Union. Family farms do not benefit from high payment limits, but they allow big farmers to collect more government money so they can out-bid smaller rivals for land and equipment, he said. “[T]his type of dollar spending is just not sustainable.”