Bitter harvest ahead. (Scan).(economics and agricultural assistance)(Brief Article)

The multi-year farm bill grinding its way through Congress has shaped up as a disaster. It will sock taxpayers for $170 billion, and then cost consumers and farmers many billions more. The only people winning in the long run will be politicians manipulating new and expanded government subsidies to dazzle and bribe farm-state voters into re-electing them. But the bills will come due.

Last month, Kraft Foods announced that Life Savers candies, a 90-year-old American icon, will no longer be made in the U.S. The Michigan plant is being closed, and production shifted to Montreal. Why? Because U.S. farm programs double the price of U.S. sugar. Federally price-supported sugar is "at least twice as expensive as on the world market," notes Kraft spokeswoman Claire Regan. Just by moving to Canada, the cost of the main ingredient in Life Savers will drop by $10 million per year.

Hershey laid off 1,000 employees and closed plants in Colorado and Pennsylvania last year. Brach's recently announced it will close its flagship Chicago plant and move 1,100 jobs to Mexico (where, as in Canada, sugar can be bought at the world market price). "I just got tired of paying welfare to Big Sugar," another candymaker sighed to the Wall Street Journal after transferring a plant from Georgia to Mexico. Many candy companies that have continued to buy sugar at U.S. prices are now going bust.

This is just one example of a long roster of economic damage wrought by government attempts to prop up farm prices artificially. A decade or so ago, the feds essentially subsidized the launch of massive new overseas competition for American's valuable soybean industry. U.S. farm programs created shortages and higher than natural prices, which made it profitable for Brazilians and Argentinians to cut down forests and plow up pastures in order to plant beans. Now they are permanent competitors who have stolen a big chunk of our international franchise.

Other farm programs turn away customers. In New York state, a program aimed at creating healthier student diets by installing vending machines in schools that dispense milk and flavored milk drinks is hampered by the fact that at $1 per vend, the price-supported milk is too ...