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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Trade ministers from over 100 nations along with thousands of negotiators gather in Hong Kong this week under the auspices of the World Trade Organization for a round of talks that was intended to boost the economic interests of the developing world by reshaping global trading rules.
Courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, a few hundred California farms in Fresno and Kings counties annually get enough water to supply every household in Los Angeles, at pennies on the dollar of the price paid by urban water users.
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.
