Dear Representatives Kind, Flake, and Blumenauer,

On behalf of more than two million Americans for Prosperity activists in all 50 states, I applaud you for introducing a bill (H.R. 5143) that would stop the federal government from paying $147.3 million to the Brazilian Cotton Institute every year. Your bill would encourage the House and Senate Agriculture Committees to bring U.S. agricultural policies into compliance with the World Trade Organization, which is a positive step toward reforming U.S. agricultural policy.

Like many other agricultural industries, the U.S. cotton industry is heavily subsidized. The federal government pays cotton farmers around $3 billion each year, typically in the form of direct payments and crop insurance premium assistance. Unfortunately for American taxpayers, these lavish handouts aren’t limited to cotton farmers here in the U.S.—the federal government uses our taxpayer dollars to subsidize cotton farmers in Brazil as well.

Paying off cotton producers is not an anomaly in U.S. agricultural policy; it highlights the federal government’s bad habit of picking winners and losers. Indeed, the Farm Bill, a legislative effort to reauthorize various USDA programs every five year, is a grab bag of hand-outs to big agri-business and special interests. The last farm bill from 2008, for example, included $170 million in grants for the salmon industry and $93 million in tax breaks for horse breeders.

As debate over the next Farm Bill heats up on Capitol Hill this summer, we need to start thinking of ways to cut wasteful subsidies. The United States needs a better agricultural policy than writing big checks to foreign producers and paying farmers to not farm. The federal government is wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars through this arrangement, and it’s getting in the way of free trade with other countries. American taxpayers deserve an agricultural policy that puts their interests first.

Americans for Prosperity is proud to support H.R. 5143. I urge your colleagues to support its passage, and I look forward to working with you in the future.

Sincerely,

Adam A. Berkland
Federal Affairs Manager
Americans for Prosperity

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