Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast, this is your host Anastasia Yugova.

This episode is for Wednesday, April 18.

The 2002 Farm Bill is set to expire in September, and agricultural lobbyists are

already hard at work to make this year's Farm Bill even more formidable, but as outlined in

the new Cato PA, freeing the farm a farm bill for all Americans

the Farm Bill is a failure in need of major reform you can find the PA on our

website or in your podcast's RSS feed.

Today's guest is Cato Trade Policy analyst Stally James, one of the PA's authors.

How damaging are farm subsidies to the United States?

Well, the actual dollar figure will vary. are farm subsidies to the United States?

Well the actual dollar figure will vary from year to year because of world prices, domestic prices,

you know production in the United States, weather etc.

All those things can impact on the amount of money

that the government will give to farmers through disaster payments or the

more traditional commodity subsidies. But in 2005, financial year 2005, it was about 21 billion dollars.

And I should say that more than half of that went to large farming interests.

It's not necessarily the small struggling family farm that people often think of that are getting the lion's share of this money.

But in addition to the actual fiscal outlays, the line item in the budget, there's also cost to consumers for products like sugar

and dairy that mainly supported through high, artificially high domestic prices that are caused

by trade barriers at the border to stop

competitive imports coming in and other policies as well so it's important to think

about the different ways the government directs money and sugar and dairy you can

...