Historically, farm bill politics relied on an urban-rural logroll in which farm state lawmakers voted for food stamps in exchange for urban votes on agricultural subsidies. This year’s debate shows how much this has changed. Republican efforts to cut nutrition programs, including passage of an amendment adding strict work requirements as a condition of eligibility, all but assured Democratic opposition. When ultra-conservative Republicans split ranks because they felt these cuts did not go far enough, they effectively killed the bill. …
Splitting off farm subsidies from nutrition programs would be enormously consequential. In political terms, it would formally tear apart the urban-rural coalition that has been in place since the 1960s. In policy terms it would expose SNAP funding to deep cuts so long as Republicans hold a majority in the House. However, breaking the coalition would also expose farm subsidies to cuts as rural lawmakers could no longer lean on urban members for support. Interestingly, neither side wants to see less money going to its constituents yet this may be what happens as polarized policymaking makes cross-partisan coalitions less stable.
From a fascinating post last week by Johns Hopkins political scientist Adam Sheingate over at The Monkey Cage.
Adam is also the author of the 2003 book The Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State, in which he looked at agricultural protection from a comparative perspective and concluded that agricultural lobbies are not as powerful as one commonly hears.
On Plagiarism
On May 24, I published a post titled “Can Urban Agriculture Help with Food Security?,” in which I discussed the conclusions of a new working paper I had discovered through RepEc’s mailing list for new working papers in agricultural economics.
Last week Alberto Zezza, with whom I had corresponded about other things in the past, wrote to me to let me know that the paper I had linked to on May 24 appeared to have plagiarized one of his own published articles. Here is the abstract of Alberto and his coauthor’s article, which was published in Food Policy in 2010: