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The Farm Bill Is Closing the Digital Divide Between Rural and Urban America [1]

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Date: 2023-05-09

The renewal of the $1.4 trillion Farm Bill , first passed in 2018, is an important step in the modernization of rural America. The bill consists of 12 titles, covering things such as research, rural energy, broadband expansion, climate, crop insurance and colleges. The bill is a comprehensive attempt at bringing rural America into the 21st century, and its renewal is essential.

The most eye-catching development since the passing of the bill, has been billions of dollars in spending on broadband expansion, connecting 12 million households to broadband internet. For a long time, rural America remained somewhere in the pre-internet to early-internet era, far behind the rest of America. This is still so in many places, and is a real impediment to development. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who wrote the Rural Internet Improvement Act which could be folded into the bill, observed that “It’s been clear for a long time how critical an internet connection is to the future of everything, from education and health care to business and everyday life”.

Modernisation is the underlying philosophy of the bill. Rural America now speaks about broadband access in the same breath as disaster relief. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) set a target of 25 Mbps download and 3 MBs upload, which means that some 14.5 million Americans do not have access to broadband internet, with three quarters of them living in rural America. Service providers who want to participate in the Reconnect program that will fund infrastructure development, have to be able to meet this minimum requirement.

Rural America has largely been left behind because households are so sparsely distributed that service providers cannot make any money from providing access to broadband. They need public support to make it worth their while. So far, there has been enormous interest, and, with $3.1 billion spent on Reconnect in the last three years, there was not enough funding to satisfy demand. Increasing access to broadband will dramatically improve agricultural output, access to information, and efficiencies.

Despite the name, the bill is not just about farmers, but about the whole of rural society. Dennis Nuxoll, vice president of government affairs at Western Growers, a farmer advocacy group, said that “You can live in a rural community and be a librarian in a small, rural town, and there are programs that your small town, because it's in a rural community - access to build the library and build, you know, some of the infrastructure of your town. And you - you're the librarian. You don't actually grow anything. You're not a farmer.”

Another important area in the Farm Bill involves disaster relief. Given climate change, we are likely to see environmental disasters accelerating over the next few decades. Rural America needs to be able to access disaster relief much faster than usually happens. Typically, after Congress approves funding for disaster relief, it can take years before rural America sees any of the money. The bill seeks to improve funding allocation so that communities receive the money much more quickly.

All across the bill, there is a concerted effort at ensuring that rural America, so often lagging the rest of the country, can finally catch up. This is good news in a sea of horrible news coming out of D.C. Let’s embrace it.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/9/2168490/-The-Farm-Bill-Is-Closing-the-Digital-Divide-Between-Rural-and-Urban-America

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