What do Caribbean trade, switchgrass, food stamps, Pacific salmon stocks and thoroughbred racehorses all have to do with each other?

They're all elements of the farm bill.

Don't hold your breath, but that bill may be in its final negotiations and headed toward passage by the House and Senate; whether President George W. Bush will sign it is unknown. That legislation consists of both spending to support agriculture and spending on the federal government's nutrition programs, such as food stamps and emergency food assistance.

With a price tag hovering around $300 billion, there are a lot of people in Washington, D.C. and across the country who want a piece of the farm bill action.

Thus, the dealmaking to help out U.S. farmers and this country's growing population of hungry people includes a provision promoting commerce with the Caribbean. A congressional promise to grant trade preferences for a handful of countries in that region was essential to getting support for the bill from Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who is the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and whose district includes a significant number of Caribbean immigrants and their families.

Subsidies to promote the cultivation of switchgrass, which can be turned into fuel, were important to getting support from farmers.

About $170 million in the farm bill will go to aid commercial fishermen suffering from the collapse of salmon stocks on the West Coast, which helped get lawmakers from that region on board.

And tax credits for thoroughbred horse breeders pushed some southern legislators to go along with the bill.

All that horsetrading has resulted in a new farm bill that looks remarkably like the old farm bill, with a significant exception. So while longstanding and bloated subsidies for agribusiness have been largely maintained (with a few token cuts here and there), the big difference is that spending on nutrition programs, including food stamps, has been increased by $10 billion, or about 5 percent.

Funded by an increase in fees paid by those who use the U.S. Customs Service -- not a tax hike, which the president had threatened to veto -- the expanded nutrition spending comes food prices have risen almost 5 percent in the last year in the U.S., with the cost of individual items like bread and milk even higher.

Reformers wanted a new and very different type of farm bill this time around. There was much talk about cutting subsidies to high-earning commodity farmers who get government payments regardless of the prices their crops currently fetch -- or in some cases, whether they're even farming the acreage earning those payments.

Reformers -- who included conservatives as well as liberals -- also rumbled about how "farmers" on Park Avenue (partners in large corporate agricultural operations) were getting payments worth millions of dollars.

At the same time, there was a growing awareness in Congress that the food stamp program (being used increasingly by cash-strapped middle class, working families) wasn't giving enough benefits to enough people.

Despite factors that should have contributed to farm bill reform, in the end, the status quo was maintained. While it's laudable that Congress has evidently seen fit to increase spending on nutrition programs, it's lamentable that the price of doing so is keeping unjustified agricultural subsidies at a time of record prices in America's farmbelt.

It's certainly not the best possible bill. But if this is going to be the farm bill that passes and gets signed by President Bush, it's a better farm bill than the last one because it will feed more people.