More than 70 years ago, Congress created the Farm Bill. It was designed to give American farmers a safety net when the market bottomed out. Fast forward seven decades and this legislation hurts farmers in rural America and around the globe.

Today's Farm Bill gives out large government checks - commodity subsidies - to producers of a small number of crops. Most American farmers get little or nothing. Meanwhile, people in rural communities are suffering. They lack medical services, good schools and their land suffers environmental degradation.

According to Bread for the World, a leading anti-hunger organization, the times they are a changing from the birth of the Farm Bill:

The landscape of rural America is quite different now than during the 1930s, when direct government support for farmers began, yet the farm bill has not kept pace with changing times. Less than 2 percent of the U.S. population is currently engaged in farming, compared to 21 percent in 1930. Today the vast majority of rural residents work in non-farm jobs, such as retail service or factory work. Many farmers, in fact, take second jobs off the farm. Roughly the same amount of farmland is being used, but the farms themselves have grown larger, more specialized and more corporate. Federal farm policy has not kept pace with changes in the farm sector or with changes in rural America.

In fact, the Farm Bill not only harms people in the U.S., it especially burdens farmers in developing countries. The current state of U.S. farm policy encourages domestic overproduction of crops such as cotton and rice. The commodity payment to large ? mostly corporate-owned farms - creates a glut that drives down world prices, undermining the livelihoods of millions of small farmers around the world.

Cotton farmers in countries like Senegal, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali have much lower production costs than those in the U.S. However, these African farmers cannot survive when world prices are so low, thanks in part to U.S. cotton commodity payments. For these African nations, where 10 million people who earn roughly $1 to $2 a day depend directly on cotton, U.S. farm programs shatter hopes of reducing hunger and poverty.

Rekha Basu, of the Des Moines Register, writes:

Between 2002 and 2005, American taxpayers shelled out $47 billion in commodity payments to producers of only five crops, to make up the difference between the market price and a "fair" price. Never mind if there's a glut of a product, or if a farmer would serve himself and his community better by diversifying.

"Direct payments are not a safety net, and are paid regardless of harvest or market conditions," acknowledges Sens. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., who have proposed a farm bill containing modest reforms. "Large payments go to a subset of the largest producers even in times of record profits."

Not only does this system of corporate welfare for wealthy farmers hurt small farmers' ability to compete, but in poor countries linked to us through so-called free-trade agreements, it makes it impossible for farmers to survive.

Besides direct subsidies, U.S. cotton farmers have the benefit of American infrastructure and technology to develop, for example, pesticide-resistant seeds. Meanwhile, cotton farmers in Mali, the world's poorest country, get no subsidies and lack decent roads to deliver goods to the port. As America pumps out a glut of cotton, the world price declines, and Mali's farmers suffer.

As Rekha notes, there has to be a better way, don?t you think?