”The Administration’s ruling abandons the President’s campaign pledge to close the payment limitation loophole that enables mega-farms to receive several times the limit by claiming uninvolved investors as active farmers,” said Chuck Hassebrook, Executive Director of the Center for Rural Affairs.     
 
USDA will publish the final regulation to implement farm payment limits and the “actively engaged in farming” rules that determine who is eligible for subsidies in tomorrow’s Federal Register.  The rule is available on the Federal Register’s Public Inspection List today.
 
“This proposed rule is particularly troubling because targeting farm programs payments to family size farms was the centerpiece of the rural policy statement that then candidate Obama released in Iowa in the run-up to the state’s Presidential Caucuses,” Hassebrook added.
 
Obama’s Rural Policy Statement reads as follows:
 
Obama will ensure farm programs are strong and targeted to support family farmers.
 
The lack of effective payment limitations has resulted in federal farm programs financing farm consolidation and the elimination of many mid-size family farms.   Obama agrees with Senators Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley that we should implement a $250,000 payment limitation.  And Obama will ensure those payments go to farmers who need them – not millionaire farmers who rely on American taxpayers to protect their multimillion dollar profits.
 
Obama will take immediate action to close loopholes by proposing regulations to limit payments to active farmers who work the land, plus landlords who rent to active farmers.  Both the Government Accountability Office and the Payment Limitation Commission have called for closing this loophole.  Every president since Ronald Reagan has had the authority to close this loophole without additional action by Congress, but has failed to act.
 
According to Hassebrook, the new regulation is a direct contradiction of Obama’s campaign pledge as well as the recommendation of the U.S. Government Accountability Office and the USDA Payment Limitation Commission.  Moreover, USDA notes that seventy-three percent of the 5,060 comments filed after publication of the proposed regulation stated that the payment eligibility rules need to be made more restrictive, particularly in the area of the requirement of “active personal management.”  However, the rule does virtually nothing to heed those comments.
 
“Like other Administrations before, when push comes to shove, something is always more important to the White House politically than the fate of family farming, and they trade away subsidy reform in a heartbeat.  Once again, principle and sound public policy have been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency,” said Ferd Hoefner of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
 
“In his farm and rural campaign platform, candidate Obama noted that ‘Every president since Ronald Reagan has had the authority to close this loophole without additional action by Congress, but has failed to act.’ Sadly, we can now add one more President’s name to that wall of shame,” Hoefner continued.
 
According to Hassbrook, the USDA regulation does fix one small, but important, problem resulting from the previously proposed farm payment limitation rules.
 
“To give credit where due, USDA made one important change to prevent payment limitation rules from hurting small farmers who receive payment much smaller than the limit,” added Hassebrook.  A rule adopted in 2008 had cut payments to small family farm corporations with family stockholders who did not farm.  “Under the new rule, small family farm corporations will no longer lose payments as long as half the stock is held by active farmers and the combined payments to all stockholders is under the limit,” Hassebrook explained.