New USDA Data Set Corrects Farm Family Payment Misinformation

WASHINGTON, June 9, 2006 — Data released yesterday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will help set straight the record on farm payments, but payment data disclosures should protect individual privacy rights, the USA Rice Producers’ Group said today.

“Especially given identity theft concerns, American students or senior citizens would not want their names splashed in a newspaper because they received school loans, grants or social security benefits, and our farm families should have the same reasonable expectation of privacy,” USA Rice Producers’ Group Chairman Paul T. Combs said.

“Nonetheless, the tracking of farm payment amounts will help conclusively prove that farm critics have been resorting to distortions and half-truths when the facts do not suit them.”

Yesterday’s release of payment information by USDA discloses only the persons receiving farm payments as required under section 1614 of the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 (the Farm Bill), which mandates that payments to farmers be tracked directly to a person, rather than to a corporate structure, to ensure farmers are in compliance with limitations on farm payments. A second release of information expected in August will detail amounts received by farmers participating in the Farm Bill.

“The data USDA released yesterday shows that American farm families choose to organize their farming operations in the same way and for the same reasons businesses on Main Street and American families choose to structure their operations a particular way,” Combs said. “Family size, tax rules, personal liability, and estate planning and farm bill participation rules help guide the farmer’s decision. This is a huge blow to the critics of U.S. farm policy who have tried to paint something sinister happening.”

Combs explained that an egregious example of the misinformation campaign waged by critics of U.S. farm policy has been the implication that cooperatives receive millions of dollars in a single year and keep that payment as a single entity. However, “the critics fail to disclose that cooperatives are farmer-owned entities often comprised of thousands of farmer-members to whom this amount is distributed,” Combs said.

The aim of farm policy critics — an odd alliance of political extremists on the far right and left — is to bring down a policy that has yielded Americans the safest, most abundant, and most affordable food supply in the world and that costs about one-half of one percent of the total federal budget,” Combs said. “Judging by history and the global events we read and hear in the news every day, ignoring the food security of our country is foolish and arrogant. As ironic as it sounds, we are fortunate in this country that the only real casualty so far from the ongoing assault on U.S. farm policy has been the distortion of the truth.”

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USA Rice Federation is the national advocate for all segments of the rice industry, conducting activities to influence government programs, developing and initiating programs to increase worldwide demand for U.S. rice, and providing other services to increase profitability for all industry segments

Contacts:

Reece Langley, (703) 236-1471, rlangley@usarice.com

David Coia, (703) 236-2300, dcoia@usarice.com