Author: Elizabeth Becker
Publication: The New York Times
Date: May 14, 2001
By any measure, Lanny Bezner is
a successful family farmer. His eldest son, John, rides herd over his cattle,
spread out on pastureland from here to nearby New Mexico. A younger son,
Brian, looks after the farm's heavily irrigated cornfields, with help from
the husband of Mr. Bezner's daughter, Virginia. As a Texas patriarch, Mr.
Bezner rigorously sticks to the principle that economy of scale is the
only way to survive in modern farming. The bigger the farm, the better
likelihood of turning a profit, he says.
By buying adjacent fields, he has
expanded his cropland from its original 700 acres to more than 8,000. In
five years he has doubled his grazing land by leasing 90,000 acres of pasture.
He owns a fleet of tractors and heavy farm equipment; he fills their tanks
with fuel from his own gas pumps. He dries and stores his harvest in his
own imposing grain elevators, which hold more than a million bushels of
corn.
Surveying the farm that he carved
out in the Panhandle landscape of dry mesquite and sagebrush, Mr. Bezner
says the key to his family's prosperity is federal farm subsidies.
"We're successful primarily because
of government help," said Mr. Bezner, 59, an entomologist who grew up on
a farm outside Amarillo.
Although Mr. Bezner hesitated to
discuss the size of those subsidies (and refused to divulge how much he
makes without federal help, or what his expenses are), government documents
show that in the last four years of the 1990's, he received $1.38 million
in direct federal payments.
Most remarkably, Mr. Bezner and
the other big farmers here in Hartley County and across the country received
those record-breaking payments in an era when farm subsidies were slated
for extinction.
Under the Freedom to Farm Act of
1996, swept up in the language of the Republican revolution under Speaker
Newt Gingrich, farmers who planted row crops - corn, wheat, soybeans, rice
or cotton - were freed from government production controls. In exchange
for being able to plant what they wanted, they were told, they would have
their subsidies gradually phased out.
While farmers embraced their new
freedom to decide what to plant, they balked at accepting the rigors of
the free market. When prices for their crops held stagnant and their costs
rose, farmers lobbied Congress for "emergency" payments.
Their friends in Congress relented.
Instead of diminishing, the subsidies have nearly tripled with steep emergency
payments that reached $22 billion last year, according to Keith Collins,
the top economist at the Agriculture Department.
Supporters of farm subsidies, which
were enacted in the Depression, argue that they are needed to save the
family farm. But government documents indicate that the prime beneficiaries
hardly fit the image of small, hardscrabble farmers. Because eligibility
is based on acreage planted with subsidized crops in the past, the farmers
who have the biggest spreads benefit the most, according to the Environmental
Working Group, a nonprofit advocacy organization that obtained government
records of farm subsidies through the Freedom of Information Act.
"The data shows that government
subsidies are tilting the playing field in favor of the largest farms,"
said Clark Williams-Derry, the senior analyst at the Environmental Working
Group who created a national database of subsidies.
Mr. Bezner, who saw his direct federal
payments balloon from $164,621 in 1996 to $741,839 in 1999, is one of the
elite 10 percent of American farmers who receive 61 percent of the billions
of dollars the program distributes. The subsidies have been a chief source
of capital for large operators to expand their holdings, often by buying
out their smaller neighbors.
And unlike other federal entitlement
programs, farm subsidies have no requirements of income, assets or debts.
Friends in High Places
As Congress considers reauthorizing
the Freedom to Farm Act, lawmakers have already made one fundamental decision:
they will keep the subsidies. The phaseouts are a thing of the past.
The cost, and the fact that the
money goes mostly to a select few, will be at the crux of the debate over
how to reshape subsidies.
"The cost of this program is astonishing,"
Mr. Collins said. "Any person engaged in small business in America would
be amazed looking at this. Their jaws would drop at the money farmers receive."
Mr. Bezner makes no apologies for
accepting the money. To his mind, government subsidies help the American
consumer by making sure grocery stores are stocked with inexpensive food.
"That government money is keeping
cheap cereal on the shelves in New York City," he said.
And no one expects farmers to lose
their subsidies - not with the friends they have in Congress.
The top leaders of both parties
represent farm states that rely on subsidies. In the Senate, the majority
leader is from Mississippi and the minority leader from South Dakota. In
the House, the speaker is from Illinois and the minority leader from Missouri.
The relevant committees are headed by representatives from farm states;
the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee is Representative Larry
Combest, a Republican who represents Mr. Bezner's district in the northern
plains of Texas.
"Look at the Nasdaq: those companies
are going out of business and we don't open up the Treasury to them," Mr.
Collins said. "But Congress chose not to let farmers bear that kind of
pain."
Like their counterparts in Hartley
County, large farmers around the country have complained to Congress that
Freedom to Farm is not working because their crops are selling at the same
low prices their grandfathers' crops fetched 40 years ago.
When lawmakers passed the act in
1996, they approved generous subsidies for the first two years in order
to give farmers a cushion to prepare for their independence. But when the
world market pushed prices down, farmers asked for emergency payments.
In 1998, Congress approved additional
money, adding 50 percent to the core subsidy payments. In 1999 and 2000,
the lawmakers doubled the core payments. This month, with the strong backing
of the White House, Congress added $5.5 billion to next year's budget blueprint
to cover potential emergencies.
