Every five years, the congress introduces and revises the farm bill which aims to facilitate the farmers of America. The Bill or the Agricultural Act of 2018 has been introduced to provided subsidies to farmers and improve their conditions. It has allocated $867 billion for this policy to incentivize the farmers (Aid, 2018).
This Farm Bill of 2018 is of immense benefit to the public and catered to so many areas of farmers. The 2014 Farm bill which issued Farm Ranch and Assistance Network wasn't funded in the time of 2014 so in 2018, it was promoted and adjusted for a few changes. It deals with the mental health and stress of the farmers (Aid, 2018). It is a good initiative to be funded since it deals with the long term sustainment of the farmers’ health, improving the performance of the farmers. There are also farmers' protection programs where they are provided with the crop insurance.
Moreover, the Bill also has allowed the production of Hemp, giving the Hemp farmers an equal share within the programs and incentives as hemp is claimed to have biodegradable properties that can have range of benefits in the production of various goods (Queck-Matzie, 2018).
However, there has been down sides to this policy as well. Government should have given measures like supply management and pricing policy to improve the farming conditions of the farmers instead of allocating tax money on them, which will just benefit the mega farms and not the poor farmers (Aid, 2018). The farm bill has the potential to be exploited by the wealthy farmers in terms of these insurance and crop related subsidies who'll gather their entire family members in becoming more giant than they already are (Aid, 2018).
Moreover, the top 10% sales of the commodities receive 77% of the total subsidies according to USDA which again benefits the already wealthier people who own big lands, rather than the poor farmers (Queck-Matzie, 2018). Also, majority of the land is owned by big landlords who have rented the lands to local poor farmers, again the subsidies goes to the land owners and they are the beneficiaries of the Farm Bill of 2018 (Queck-Matzie, 2018).
The key parties that are responsible for devising the Farm Bill are the Senate Committee of Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, and the House Committee on Agriculture (Coalition, 2019). Each of these Senate and House Committees on Agriculture makes a draft, does amendments and gets the vote within the committee after which it is passed onto the Full Chamber that votes on the bill. A conference committee is formed that combines all the bills by the leaders of the committees which is then voted by the full chamber before sending it to the White house to get the signature of the President (Coalition, 2019).
This Farm Bill of 2018 has created problems for the small scale farmers as it heavily supports the wealthy farmers/land owners making it very hard for the small scale farmer to survive which such harsh policies like price cuts and benefits that the mega farm gets due to the subsidies which rule out the small scale farmer from the picture based on competitiveness. Also, there has been budget deficit of $1.09 trillion (Amadeo, 2019) caused due to certain factors, a lot of programs and policies have been under funded like Medicare (Us, 2019) which required the budget allocation rather than allocating the tax money on farmers, because of which only rich are getting richer. There could have been other policies that would have helped the farmers, making the environment conducive for the small and new farmers to enter and compete within the market like pricing models and other initiatives.
References
Aid, F. (2018, December). What’s in the 2018 Farm Bill? The Good, The Bad and The Offal…. Farm Aid. Retrieved from https://www.farmaid.org/issues/farm-policy/whats-in-the-2018-farm-bill-the-good-the-bad-and-the-offal/
Amadeo, K. (2019, November 24). Current US Federal Budget Deficit. The Balance.
Coalition, N. S. (2019). WHAT IS THE FARM BILL? National Sustainable Agricultural Coalition. Retrieved from https://sustainableagriculture.net/our-work/campaigns/fbcampaign/what-is-the-farm-bill/
Queck-Matzie, T. (2018, December 12). GRASSLEY SEES FARM BILL PROS AND CONS. Successful Farming. Retrieved from https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/grassley-sees-farm-bill-pros-and-cons
Us, I. U. (2019, November 12). Breaking down the US Federal Budget for the Fiscal Year 2019. It's Up To Us.
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