EWG’s renowned farm subsidy database reveals that taxpayer support goes mostly to large, profitable operations, not to sustainable family farms that truly need the help. We’re working to change a badly broken system.
Subsidies
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Some of America's richest agribusinesses are double dipping from U.S. taxpayers' pockets at a rate of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, according to an EWG investigation of federal crop and water subsidies to California's Central Valley Project.
What if the United States does not comply with the WTO's broad rulings and fails to reform its multi-billion dollar cotton subsidy programs to Brazil's satisfaction? What retaliatory trade measures could Brazil possibly adopt that would force an economic giant like the United States to change a politically entrenched farm subsidy system?
The federal government has promised Central Valley agribusinesses that it will increase the amount of taxpayer-subsidized irrigation water by 44 percent over the next 25 years, well beyond what the state's infrastructure can reliably supply, according to Bureau of Reclamation documents obtained by EWG.
The Bush administration is paying some of the biggest and richest agribusinesses in America $17 million for cutbacks in their taxpayer-subsidized water supply. But an EWG investigation found that these same California agribusinesses — including the world's biggest cotton producer and the largest farm in America — already get hundreds of millions of tax dollars from other federal farm subsidy programs.
A new investigation by the Environmental Working Group and the National Black Farmers Association reveals that the U.S. Department of Agriculture withheld nearly three out of every four dollars in a $2.3 billion landmark civil rights settlement with black farmers.
