Durbin doesn't cotton to farm bailouts

Senator charges Trump administration is ‘picking winners and losers,’ with biggest handouts going to Southern cotton farmers

Sen. Dick Durbin charges that the Trump administration’s farm bailout payments are going unfairly to Southern farmers who suffered little harm in the president’s trade wars. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)

By Ted Cox

Illinois’s senior U.S. senator charges that the Trump administration’s farm bailout payments are primarily going to Southern cotton farmers, to the detriment of soybean growers who’ve borne the brunt of market damage in the president’s trade wars.

As the U.S. Department of Agriculture prepared to make the latest round of bailout payments, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin issued a statement Monday charging that the handouts were going unfairly to Southern farmers who suffered little harm in the trade war with China.

“Illinois soybean farmers have been badly hurt by the president’s nearly two-year trade war with China,” Durbin said. “Worse yet, when you look at trade aid payments per acre, the top five states are in the South, with Georgia ranked No. 1. Cotton was barely touched by the Trump-China trade war and soybeans were clobbered. Is the secretary of agriculture playing it straight?”

That question was not rhetorical, as Durbin joined 16 other U.S. senators last week in sending a letter to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue. Charging that President Trump’s “chaotic trade agenda has irreparably harmed farmers,” it accused the USDA of “picking winners and losers between regions and crops” in distributing the bailouts and “helping wealthy farmers and foreign companies instead of small farms.” It also accused the Trump administration of having “no long-term investment or plan for rebuilding markets” disrupted by the trade war.

“Illinois soybean farmers have been badly hurt by the president’s nearly two-year trade war with China.”

Sen. Dick Durbin (One Illinois/Ted Cox)

Trump spoke last year at U.S. Steel’s Granite City Works and, while touting how steel tariffs had revived the plant, said he was well aware that China had targeted U.S. farmers in assessing retaliatory tariffs against agriculture imports. As the trade war waged on with no end in sight, he allotted $12 billion in bailout payments to farmers last year and another $16 billion this year. The $28 billion total more than doubled the bailout paid to U.S. automakers a decade ago in the midst of the Great Recession.

Critics charged this summer that the handouts went unfairly to the largest farms and not those that needed help the most. Durbin specified this week that handouts under the so-called Market Facilitation Program ranged from $15 an acre to $150, with the average payment in Illinois at $69 an acre. (Platt County had the highest average, at $87 an acre, Jo Daviess County the lowest at $50.) At the same time, he added, “cotton counties in Georgia average $75 per acre; in Arizona, $79 per acre; in Mississippi, $87 per acre; and in Alabama, $94 per acre. Payments in more than 35 Alabama and Mississippi counties far exceed the top Illinois payment, with some cotton growers receiving $150 per acre, double the Illinois average.”

According to Durbin, about 16,000 cotton farms on 12 million acres suffered a two-year market loss of $54 million, or just a 6 percent drop in trade with China. By contrast, more than 300,000 soybean farms over roughly 80 million acres (including more than 36,000 farms in Illinois, the nation’s top soybean grower) suffered a two-year market loss of $9 billion, a 75 percent drop in Chinese trade.

Durbin and the letter to Perdue both cited a newly released report from the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, which stated that the Trump administration’s farm-bailout policy “replaces income from markets with government payments, creates vast inequities, and does not address the actual trade damage to farmers who have been hit the hardest. While farmers in the Midwest and northern Plains have been affected the most, Southern farmers have received the highest payment rates. Looking at the first round of 2019 MFP payments per acre, the five top states are in the South.”

Charging “clear regional disparities,” the Senate report found that the top five states for highest average farm bailout per acre in the first round of handouts this year were Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas, followed by Illinois in sixth at just over $30 an acre. It said the trade damage was concentrated in the North, Midwest, and West, but that bailout payments “overcompensate certain crops,” especially cotton over soybeans.