Ghosts of the Past

I'm always fascinated to see how history crops up in today's public discussions.  Here's Rep. Peterson talking about basing payments on base acres versus planted acres:

"Rep. Peterson also addressed policy issues associated with planted acres in yesterday’s radio interview with Joel Heitkamp: “But we’re having a fight with the Senate over planted acres versus base acres, and they want to pay people based on what they grew 20 years ago, and we don’t want to do that anymore. We want to go to planted acres. And what that does is it shifts the program, the balance of power, from landowners to farmers. And this is a fundamental change that needs to happen in our policy. We should be supporting farmers, not land. And that’s what we’ve been doing the last 20 years, ostensibly, to placate the WTO or whatever.
“But that’s one of the big hang-ups we’re having with the Senate right now. And some of them want to hang onto these base acres. Well, it’s kind of the same issue you’re talking about with the sugar program, where you’ve got people that have the land and have base on it are renting it to somebody else. It’s much better to have the program follow the farmer, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Now it so happens that in the South the landowner, the plantation owner, has always been at the top of the ladder.  And so it would seem it continues to be so today.

As quoted in Farm Policy.