Corporate Farming's Best Friend

That is the strategic beauty of the farm bill. While it is written in the Agriculture Committees -- where the 30 farm districts that receive two-thirds of the subsidies are well represented -- the bill wins support from the overwhelmingly urban and suburban Congress by virtue of its nutrition section, which authorizes the food stamp program.

With growing housing costs and stagnant wages, the ranks of the needy are expanding. The Agriculture Department says that more than 35 million people struggle to feed themselves. And current benefits are meager. Hunger activists have been championing improvements in the food stamp program since the last farm bill passed, in 2002. Lawmakers have taken up the cause in the Congressional Food Stamp Challenge, in which they make a spectacle of attempting to survive for a week on the standard allotment: $3 a day. So when the House Agriculture Committee needed to broaden support for its farm bill this year, it sought to improve the food stamp program. Lawmakers added $4 billion for food stamps, and the House approved the measure in July.

Who would vote against a bill that helps 25 million people with emergency food aid every year and the 4 million who rely on food pantries and soup kitchens every week?

That is the quandary. There will be no deep reforms of farm policy as long as the welfare of the poor is tied to the welfare of corporate farmers. But hunger activists fear that the food stamp entitlement might disappear outside of the farm bill.

The Republicans tried something like that in the 1990s with their "Contract With America," proposing that food stamps be made part of state-run nutrition grants. But Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, then in the House and representing all of those wheat and corn farmers, convinced his fellow, mostly nonrural, Republicans to keep the food stamp program in the farm bill, which he called the "ultimate" safety net for the poor -- and, it turned out, for the farm program itself.

The prime example of this balance between the rural rich and the urban poor is this year's savior of the food stamp program: Rep. Charles Rangel. The New York Democrat came up with the extra $4 billion for food stamps not by cutting into farmers' subsidies but by proposing a new tax provision on foreign corporations.

With its warehouse emptying quickly, the Food Bank of New York thanked Rangel and, along with food banks nationwide, urged anyone who cares about the poor to lobby for passage of the 2007 farm bill -- a case of the poor helping the rich.

Elizabeth Becker, a journalist, is a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund and a member of the board of Oxfam America, both of which support farm reform. She is writing a book on American farming.