Over the next year and a half, farmers, government officials, and industry and trade groups will begin work on the next U.S. farm bill. For over 70 years, the U.S. has had a number of farm policy programs that have tried to offer support and a safetynet for American farmers and the industries that support them. For its first 150 years, U.S. farm policy was geared towards expansion and production. However, as industrial growth came to the United States at the turn of the 20th century, farm groups began to politicize in attempts to make sure that the farm segment of the population shared in the nations growing wealth. Higher farm prices during the World War I years were followed by lower prices in the 1920s as exports declined when European agriculture returned to its pre-war production levels. As prices for U.S. farm products dropped rapidly and production increased due to better farming methods, the farmers and farm groups began to look to their government for assistance in stabilizing farm pricesand debt. With die election of Franklin Roosevelt as president in 1932, and with the U.S. and the world in the midst of the Great Depression, new policies for agriculture were coming, and in 1933, the first Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was established. The AAA was intended to maintain a balance between production and consumption, through reduced plantings and production controls. The AAA was the beginning of U.S. farm policy that tied eligibility for price support programs to acreage and production controls that lasted until 1996. Funding for the first AAA was to come from a tax levied on processors of agricultural products and the production features of the AAA. In 1936 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the taxing of processors was unconstitutional.
展开▼
