In Geneva, global trade negotiations aimed at boosting the prospects of the poorest nations are deadlocked, largely because status quo agribusiness interests in the U.S. and Europe are fighting efforts to trim farm subsidies and lower trade-constricting agricultural tariffs.

“Whether you’re outraged by misplaced spending priorities in Washington or affronted by missed opportunities in world trade talks, one thing is clear: Farm subsidy policy is too important to leave to the subsidized,” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group (EWG). “It’s time for politicians here and in Europe to embrace reform.”

To help rekindle reform efforts at home and abroad, EWG today released the latest edition of its Farm Subsidy Database (http://www.ewg.org/). The update incorporates $12.5 billion in payments made in calendar year 2004 to more than 1.4 million subsidy recipients, each of whom is listed on the Web site (A Decade of Dependency: U.S. Farm Subsidies, 1995-2004, Nov. 1, 2005).

The EWG database has been searched over 36 million times since the last update in November 2004.

Some highlights from the new update:

• A Few Congressional Districts Dominate Subsidies. A series of new EWG analyses finds that U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) farm subsidy payments are not only highly concentrated among the largest recipients, they are also highly concentrated geographically – and politically. Just 22 of the nation’s 435 congressional districts (5 percent) collected more than half of all subsidies over the past decade – some $69 billion. Another 25 congressional districts absorbed an additional 20 percent of total USDA subsidy dollars, meaning that just 47 districts, about 10 percent of the House of Representatives, accounted for more than 70 percent of the subsidy dollars over the past 10 years – in excess of $96 billion.
  
  
• Big Farms, Very Big Bucks. American taxpayers spent a staggering $143.8 billion on farm subsidies over the past 10 years, more than $104 billion of which (72 percent) went to the top 10 percent of recipients – some 312,000 large farming operations, cooperatives, partnerships and corporations that collected, on average, more than $33,000 every year. In lieu of imposing a limit on taxpayer subsides to the very largest, government-dependent agribusinesses, defenders of the status quo are prepared yet again to slash conservation funds and food assistance programs for the poor. On October 28, 2005, for instance, the House Agriculture Committee approved a budget reconciliation measure that would drop 300,000 people, most of them in working-poor families, from the Food Stamp Program, while rejecting President Bush’s proposal to “limit” farm subsidy payments to $250,000 per person annually.
  
  
• Lychee Nuts? Under a little-noticed provision of the Trade Act of 2002, USDA's Foreign Agriculture Service has begun to provide trade adjustment assistance subsidies to agricultural commodity producers in the United States who demonstrate that they have lost revenue to competing imports. Data obtained by EWG under a Freedom of Information Act request shows that in calendar year 2004, payments under this program totaled $11.5 million to producers of five commodities (salmon, catfish, shrimp, blueberries and lychee nuts). Three states accounted for 83 percent of the payments: Texas, Alaska and Washington.

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