Mexican Corn Farmers Hurt by US Constitution

Hello all, I just wanted to introduce myself before I slapped down my first post here. I'm Chris, a good friend of Sebi's who will be contributing to his little project here on LifeBeyondtheWall. I am a Poli-Sci major at the University of Maryland, College Park, looking to contribute some relevant thoughts and observations about American politics and US-Latin American relations. In the interest of full disclosure, I am an avid supporter of and volunteer for Senator Obama for the presidency, and I will be commenting both in support of and critiquing his and the other candidates' positions and actions on various issues.

In response to Sebi's previous post about NAFTA, I would like to highlight the absurd nature of some of our political arrangements here in the US that bare significant consequences for Mexican workers via trade policy. I am an avid supporter of free trade when it is done right; here is an anecdote from a 2006 Washington Post Article describing what can happen when things go...wrong.

Even though Donald R. Matthews put his sprawling new residence in the heart of rice country, he is no farmer. He is a 67-year-old asphalt contractor who wanted to build a dream house for his wife of 40 years.

Yet under a federal agriculture program approved by Congress, his 18-acre suburban lot receives about $1,300 in annual "direct payments," because years ago the land was used to grow rice.

Matthews is not alone. Nationwide, the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all, according to an analysis of government records by The Washington Post.

Some of them collect hundreds of thousands of dollars without planting a seed. Mary Anna Hudson, 87, from the River Oaks neighborhood in Houston, has received $191,000 over the past decade. For Houston surgeon Jimmy Frank Howell, the total was $490,709.

The ridiculousness of this policy goes without saying; even the people receiving the free cash for doing nada don't understand the logic behind it. And this arrangement is only a small chunk of the billions of dollars in actual farm subsidies the US doles out to its farmers each year, which have rapidly undermined the quality of life for millions of rural Mexicans. The institution primarily responsible for the maintenance of the patently unfair subsidies currently enjoyed by American farmers is the United States Senate. Here's why:

Not only do individual members of the Senate wield tremendous power to block legislation until their particular spending provision is included in the bill (such as a billion dollars for corn farmers in Iowa), but Senators from small farming states also enjoy other, more subtle advantages. Take former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota for instance. Daschle, along with other members from sparsely populated farming states, was free to aggressively pursue positions of influence within the Senate because he simply had fewer constituents to deal with back home. More free time meant, for Daschle, more time to make friends in Washington, which eventually lead to his attaining the top rank among Democrats in the Senate. And when you are at the top of your party, your particular spending bill is far more likely to be ushered through the Senate without a peep of opposition.

Unfortunately, the bargain that was struck in 1787 empowering small states with equal representation in the Senate has serious ramifications over two centuries later, and Mexican farmers are on the losing side of that deal at the moment.