Tobacco country’s dirtiest open secret (Mel Magazine)

Mel Magazine published an article on the tobacco industry in the United States. The article states Capitalism, corruption and exploitation created the broken system of ‘insurance farming’ — and the biggest loser is the American taxpayer. Year after year, then, a bundle of farmers scam the government. That’s because the system, per Joseph Glauber, a senior research fellow at IFPRI, is effectively designed to be corrupted. “When you sign up for insurance, they give you a price that they’re going to pay for your crop, and you can imagine if the price for that crop drops a lot during the growing season and you go into the harvest time, you’re going to get paid a lot more on every bushel you lose relative to the one you harvest,” he says. “Well, there’s some incentive to claim losses. You may even just decide that it looked better as a total loss.” According to Glauber, checking to make sure insurance claims are legitimate isn’t easy.  “it’s hard when you have people in Washington, D.C., monitoring some farm in a little hollow and holler in Kentucky, rolling tobacco.”