Reduce farm subsidies.

Byline: The Register-Guard

At a time when many Americans are struggling to deal with hurricanes, drought and soaring fuel costs, congressional leaders are trying to cut food and conservation programs for the poor.

That makes about as much sense as approving more tax cuts favoring top-bracket Americans while the costs of rebuilding the shattered Gulf Coast and the never-ending war in Iraq are dramatically increasing an already daunting federal deficit.

In fact, the two moves are related. Republicans in Congress have proposed reducing food programs by $574 million and conservation programs by $1 billion as part of a strategy to reconcile tax cuts and spending plans.

It gets worse: There's plenty of room to make all of the $3 billion in cuts targeted for the Agriculture Department from a bloated crop subsidy program that is skewed to benefit corporate agriculture at the expense of small farmers. But farm lobbyists are pushing to shift more than half the cuts to food stamp and conservation programs, arguing that they're riddled with fraud and abuse.

A reality check is in order: The food stamp program, which spent $28 billion last year and served 24 million low-income Americans, has an error rate of less than 6 percent, the lowest level in its history. A third of those errors represent underpayments to eligible families.

As federal programs go, the food stamp program is a lean, clean machine. That's due in large part to $28 billion in cuts that were made as part of landmark welfare reforms of the mid-1990s. Fewer families are on food stamps today than 10 years ago, and the typical recipient family receives a grand total of $1 per meal per person.

If lawmakers are sniffing out government waste, they should head straight for the farm subsidy program, which doles out more than $15 billion a year in agribusiness welfare. The wealthiest 10 percent of farms collect two-thirds of subsidy dollars, while the lowest-income 80 percent receive one-sixth. As far as fraud and abuse go, it's hard to top the farm subsidy program. Oversight is glaringly inadequate, and overpayments of tens of thousands of dollars hardly raise an eyebrow.

To his credit, President Bush has called for a more equitable distribution of agriculture cuts and has proposed that no more than 7 percent of agricultural cuts come from food stamps. He requested a hefty 5 percent reduction in payments to farmers, as well as a long-overdue cap on payments collected by large farm operations. Such cuts would not only spare poverty programs, they might also enhance U.S. standing in global trade talks. Developing nations routinely insist that the United States reduce subsidies in exchange for access to their markets.

Republicans should follow the Bush blueprint or, better yet, make all of the agriculture cuts from crop subsidies, while protecting programs that are essential to impoverished Americans.