Trade bailout mostly bypassed smaller farmers; the biggest farms collected millions by exploiting loophole - Entrepreneur Generations

As the federal government prepares to distribute $19 billion to farmers hurt by the coronavirus pandemic, CBS News looked back at the past two years of trade bailouts to see where that $28 billion went and whether it helped. "As it turns out, most of it bypassed the country's traditional small and medium-sized farms that were battered by the loss of their export market and which are now being hit with severe losses from the coronavirus pandemic," Lesley Stahl reports for 60 Minutes.

So far, one-third of the Market Facilitation Program aid has gone to about 4 percent of farms. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said the largest farms got the most payments because they're the biggest producers, Stahl reports. But that's not exactly true, according to data collected by the Environmental Working Group, a green advocacy nonprofit. The largest farms were only meant to be eligible for $250,000 per person or farm, but many large farms collected millions of dollars by taking advantage of lax Congressional oversight, using eligibility loopholes that allow anyone with a financial interest in the farm to collect trade aid, even if that person is an an urban farm investor or a farmer's relative living in a city.

Ken Cook, president of EWG, told Stahl: "If you're a very large farm operation and you're eligible for these payments, the most important tool as a farmer is not what's in your machine shed. It's the lawyer you hire to set up a paper farm that's designed to absorb as much federal money, as much Trump payment, as possible."
Doug Sombke and Bob Kuylen, two South Dakota farmers who oversee farmers unions in the Dakotas, told Stahl that MFP aid helped them survive the past two years, but "didn't come close to covering most of their members' losses or their own." Meanwhile, "with restaurants and schools closed across the country, their markets are shrinking. It's adding to already rising debt and farm bankruptcies aggravated by the trade war with China."

Sombke told Stahl that his farm lost between $125,000 and $200,000 a year for the last three years. When Stahl asked Sombke if the two rounds of bailout money helped, he said: "Well, it made the banker happy. It didn't do anything for me."

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2W5gb3v Trade bailout mostly bypassed smaller farmers; the biggest farms collected millions by exploiting loophole - Entrepreneur Generations

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