How the U.S.’s peanut glut could undermine the work of the Clintons

 HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP/Getty Images Former US President Bill Clinton arrives to visit a peanut plantation in Tierra Muscady, in the central plateau of Haiti, on June 29, 2014.

This is a story about peanuts.

When Congress passed an updated Farm Bill in 2014, the legislation included a program focused on the legume. The economics of agricultural subsidies are notoriously complex, but the important part here is that the price point established by the government tacitly encouraged more peanut production, as a Congressional Research Service report from last year noted. So farmers planted more peanuts -- so many that there may not be enough warehouse space this year to contain them all.

There's another important aspect to the government's relationship with peanut growers. The Marketing Assistance Loan program provides up-front financing to peanut-growers (and growers of other crops). The goal is that farmers repay the loans once they sell their crops. But if the price is too low to recoup the cost of the loan, they can also turning the product over to the government as a form of repayment.

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