Surprise! Trump Funnels Vast Majority Of $8 Billion In Farmer Bailouts To Wealthy, White Men

Markets weren’t particularly enamored with Donald Trump’s latest attacks on China, which found the US president railing about broken promises and boasting of America’s economic prowess in a series of irritated Tuesday tweets.

After the initial barrage, he followed up with more.

“China has lost 5 million jobs and two million manufacturing jobs due to the Trump Tariffs”, he said, apparently paraphrasing Fox News’s assessment of his trade policies. “Trump’s got China back on its heels, and the United States is doing great”, he continued, referring to himself in the third person, as he’s wont to do.

Read more: Trump Furious With China For Not ‘Following Through’ On Farm Promise They Never Made

The president’s frustration stems at least in part from what the White House says is foot-dragging by China on alleged promises Xi made to purchase large quantities of US farm products.

As noted in the linked post above, it’s never been entirely clear what promises (if any) the Chinese delegation actually made in Osaka late last month. Anything they did agree to was likely contingent upon some kind of reciprocation from the US, and although the Trump administration has repeatedly indicated that the Huawei ban will be relaxed, there are no other discernible signs of progress.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to insist that the farmers are “happy” due to his bailout programs (plural). Here, for instance, is what the president told reporters on Friday:

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“And the farmers are happy because I gave them $16 billion out of the tariffs and had tremendous – you know, much more than that left over”, Trump stammered.

That raises the following obvious question: How are the farm bailouts actually going?

Well, fortunately, the Environmental Working Group has analyzed some $8.4 billion in payments thanks to records obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

You’ll never guess what they found.

“Farm bailout payments designed to offset the impacts of President’s Trump’s trade war have overwhelmingly flowed to the largest and most successful farmers”, EWG said Tuesday, in a press release documenting their findings. Here are some rather disconcerting highlights:

• The top one-tenth of recipients received 54 percent of all MFP payments.
• Eighty-two farmers have so far received more than $500,000 in MFP payments.
• One farm, DeLine Farm Partnership, of Charleston, Mo., has so far received $2.8 million in MFP payments.
• The top 1 percent of MFP recipients received, on average, $183,331. The bottom 80 percent received, on average, less than $5,000.
• Thousands of residents of the nation’s largest cities received MFP payments.
• MFP payments continue to leave out minority farmers.

Got that? The top 1% of participating farmers have enjoyed an average of $183,331, while the bottom 80% got less than $5,000. In other words, this sounds a lot like the distribution of benefits from Trump’s tax cuts.

Note that MFP payments are assessed to “leave out minority farmers”. As it turns out, that’s an understatement.

According to a July 24 article penned by Nathan Rosenberg, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, and Bryce Wilson Stucki, an independent researcher and journalist focusing on food and agriculture, “the MFP has almost exclusively benefitted white men and their families, who appear to be disproportionately upper middle-class or wealthy”.

Rosenberg breaks things down further.

“Similar to other USDA subsidies, the MFP has overwhelmingly favored white and male producers”, he writes, adding that 99 percent of bailout funds have gone to white operators. Here’s more:

As of today, USDA has distributed more than $8.5 billion to farm operations through the MFP. Of the approximately $8 billion distributed to operations whose owners’ race could be identified, 99.5 percent went to white business owners. Of the more than $6.8 billion distributed to operations in which the owners’ gender could be identified, more than 91 percent went to male business owners. “White farm operators” here includes white Hispanics, but they only account for about 0.1 percent of the total. In other words, non-Hispanic white operators received 99.4 percent of all MFP payments.

Taken together, the above suggests that Trump’s farmer bailouts have almost exclusively benefited big farms, wealthy landowners and white men.

Who’s surprised?

“These payments further entrench already drastic inequalities in agriculture, along racial, ethnic, gender, and class lines”, Rosenberg writes.

And it’s about to get worse. “Changes to the second round of MFP payments, announced last week by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue, will further favor the largest farmers by linking payments to the number of acres, not the number of bushels or bales produced”, EWG went on to say on Tuesday. “The bigger the farm, the bigger the government check”, the environmental organization chided.

But wait, there’s more.

If your farm is set up as a corporation, you can funnel payments to people who don’t even work on farms as long as those individuals can be plausibly tied to operations. “When Market Facilitation Program payments continue to overwhelmingly flow to an elite group of the largest farms, wealthy landowners and city residents with no real connection to the day-to-day operations on the land, it’s clear the program is deeply flawed and not delivering aid to those farmers in desperate need”, Donald Carr, a senior adviser to EWG said.

We could go on, but do we really need to?

Read the history of Trump’s trade war and America’s farmers