Full Story At kcstar.com, down low on home page ---
Web site listing farm subsidies fuels debate, angers farmers
By ERIC PALMER
The Kansas City Star
Amid $72 billion in crop subsidies doled out over five years, Sam Creed's $67,404 looks like a single kernel of corn in a grain bin filled to brimming.
In just Atchison County, Mo., where most of Creed's farming is done, 285 farmers raked in more in crop subsidies than Creed. The top recipient in the county got more than $475,000 from 1996 to 2000.
Still, when Creed found his payments posted on an Internet site that could be probed by his neighbors, friends and the local newspaper, the figures loomed large. It was as if someone had posted them on a billboard in his front yard.
"I do not like it. How many people on Social Security would like to have their payments up on the screen?" said Creed, a corn and soybean farmer in northwest Missouri. "All that site has done is hurt the farmer."
Creed's government payouts recently were posted on a Web site listing all subsidy payments made to American farmers from 1996 through 2000.
Certainly, anomalies in farm subsidy programs have been reported in the media before. But the use of a Web site to detail all payments for public review has riled farmers -- and altered the rhetoric of the farm debate.
Farm bill debate usually evokes platitudes about helping the hallowed family farmer feed the world. This time, fights in the Senate have focused on "millionaire farmers" and how unchecked subsidies are fattening profits for the country's largest farms.
"Too many farm organizations have simply come in and viewed the farm bill as an ATM machine, and they haven't reviewed the policy," Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas said in the debate.
Roberts was one of the authors of the current farm bill, the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act. It was supposed to wean farmers off of subsidies over seven years in return for releasing ---
Sometimes too much information is no good!
Want to join? Register here. Already signed up? Click here to login!