Cotton subsidies, among the most lucrative of federal farm payments, have glutted the cotton market by encouraging farmers to grow the crop even when it is unprofitable.
ELMAT: It would make an Europena blush!! Lula is helping the US turn into a more efficient country. Can he go and try the US presidency?
That lowers world market prices for everyone, from the impoverished farmers of Mali who pick their crops by hand to this multimillion
Yes, San Francisco is in the land of cotton subsidies
Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Sunday, September 23, 2007
At last count, the largest California recipient of federal farm subsidies is the city's Constance Bowles Peabody, 88, a wealthy heiress of pioneer California cattle baron Henry Miller.
Peabody and her now-deceased brother George "Corky" Bowles, collected $2.4 million in cotton subsidies from 2003 to 2005, according to federal data compiled by the Environmental Working Group, which opposes the subsidies.
Actually, so does Philip Bowles, her son, who has run the family's farm operation for more than a quarter-century.
Asked why he should get subsidies, Bowles replied, "Why should anybody?"
A former Yale drama student who once made television commercials, Bowles operates the family's 13,000-acre cotton, alfalfa and tomato farm in Los Banos, where the city fathers erected a statue of his great-great-grandfather in the town plaza.
"The money that we do get from the government I look at as a form of liquidated damages," Bowles said as he drove through his fields, certain that the quality of his cotton and the efficiency of his farm would, if put to the test, obliterate his competitors in the Mississippi Delta and Texas.
And if not, he said, "I'll have to figure out how to grow it better or grow something else."
Cotton subsidies, among the most lucrative of federal farm payments, have glutted the cotton market by encouraging farmers to grow the crop even when it is unprofitable. That lowers world market prices for everyone, from the impoverished farmers of Mali who pick their crops by hand to this multimillion-dollar operation in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley.
Bowles, a lean, serious man who shops at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market and speaks knowledgeably of literature and applied science, sees farming as a calling. He runs his farm - splitting time in San Francisco and Los Banos - as a business.
"If (farmers) didn't get the subsidy, they wouldn't grow it," he said. "And if they didn't grow it, that means they're not competing with us. Maybe we wouldn't grow it, but it seems to me like that's my problem. It's not your problem. You work hard for your paycheck every week. Why the hell should you give part of it to me?"
Bowles also gets "direct payments" for simply having grown a subsidized crop in the past. These were designed to wean farmers off support through a gradual phaseout. That never happened.
"They still mail us a check every year for $40,000 - for something. I have no idea what it is," Bowles said.
Bowles is proud of California's strict environmental regulations, his ability to provide health and pension benefits to his workers, and the efforts California growers have made to brand long-staple pima cotton - which inexplicably receives little aid, as opposed to upland cotton that does - under the Supima trademark.
Bowles said he takes the federal subsidy payments because his competitors get them. He said taking the money is not a crime, and he is no more inclined to send it back than people who get income tax refunds.
Still, he said, "What the hell kind of a welfare program gives money to people who have $200,000 in income? Why should it even be $5,000? People are trying to make a living as poets and musicians and they don't get payments from the government."
E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com. |
