Students protest Farm Bill

University students hosted a protest on Thursday in Frist Campus Center against congressional re-approval of an agricultural bill that would grant another round of subsidies to some of the nation’s biggest farms. Throughout the day, roughly 15 volunteers handed out information sheets and pins protesting the bill’s passage. The group also gathered almost 200 student signatures for a petition to be sent to Congress.

Willliam Herlands ’12 and Colleen McCullough ’12, the event’s organizers, also orchestrated a set of protests at nine other college campuses across the country, the majority of which also took place on Tuesday.

“The idea is that we can garner grassroots, national, broad-based support across the political and social spectrum in order to start making some movement on the bill,” Herlands said.

The current version of the farm bill, the $288 billion Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, is up for renewal in 2012. Passed by Congress over President Bush’s veto, it is the most recent in a series of farm bills dating back to 1973, with a new one passed approximately every five years.

While the 2012 bill contains a large number of propositions, Herlands and McCullough both said they object specifically to its subsidies, which would give up to $30 billion per year to large farms.

“It disproportionately helps them to the detriment of small and medium sized farms, as opposed to what it purports to do, which is proportionately helping everyone,” Herlands said.

McCullough added that cutting spending is crucial given the country’s current financial situation and that the bill represents opportunity to do so.

“Right now, with the budget crisis ... this is prime time to be looking to cutting these expenditures,” she said.

Protesters also said that the subsidies are currently harming small farmers in the developing world, because the artificially low food prices in the United States make it difficult for foreign farmers to export their goods into the country.

“There’s decisive evidence that shows how farmers in poorer countries are unable to compete with large domestic agricultural producers because of the U.S. farm bill,” Benjamin Cogan ’12, one of the volunteers at the protest, said.

Gaya Morris ’14, a protester involved in The Garden Project at Forbes College, which aims to educate community members about the American food system, echoed Cogan’s sentiments. “It perpetuates poverty in the developing world because it prevents smaller farms from succeeding,” Morris explained.

McCullough noted that the bill also adversely affects American health by promoting crops such as corn, wheat, rice and soybeans, which ultimately increase production of unhealthy corn syrups and oils. These products, she said, are “foods that aren’t healthy and that are contributing to obesity and diabetes in America.”

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McCullough and Herlands, whose efforts were cosponsored by a variety of campus groups ranging from the College Republicans to Greening Princeton, emphasized that the issue was a bipartisan one and that any solution had to include both sides of the aisle and all regions of the county.

The event organizers both said they hoped the protest would raise awareness of the issue on campus that would translate into action in the voting booth while also sparking a serious political discussion.

“What we want Congress to do is to look at these subsidies, reevaluate them in a serious manner, which hasn’t been done in the past 30 years, and once that conversation happens, that in itself will be a victory,” Herlands said.