The House and Senate Agriculture committees face time and funding constraints as they work to produce a multi-year farm bill that will revamp farm-support programs, consolidate conservation programs and affect nutrition policy — while also cutting mandatory spending.
Congress approved the current farm law in 2008, at a time when lawmakers were less focused on fiscal constraints. This time, the political and economic dynamics are markedly different.
House Agriculture Chairman Frank D. Lucas acknowledges that enacting the sprawling bill this year will be a challenge. Major farm groups differ sharply on how to refashion financial safety-net programs. Fiscal conservatives may seek to go beyond the $23 billion in mandatory spending cuts over 10 years that Lucas, an Oklahoma Republican, and his Senate counterpart, Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow, proposed in October to the joint deficit reduction panel.
In the past, when writing a new farm bill has fallen behind schedule, authorizers have typically extended the existing policy. During a visit to freshman Republican Rep. Rick Berg’s North Dakota district, Lucas told farmers that he would prefer a one-year extension, but he acknowledged in an interview that fiscal conservatives might then demand deeper cuts. In appearances before Michigan farm groups, Stabenow said she plans to schedule hearings soon. Those hearings may provide a sense of how much of the five-year farm bill that she and Lucas were negotiating will serve as a blueprint.
Stabenow and Lucas had hoped to send a bill to the congressionally created deficit-reduction panel that was tasked with finding $1.2 trillion in savings over the next decade. They suspended the effort when the deficit panel disbanded without a deal.
The chairmen have confirmed that their plan would have ended $5 billion a year in direct payments and shifted some of the money into a three-tiered safety net for farmers to address regional differences in crops and risk hazards. But direct payments, paid regardless of market conditions, are now considered indefensible to taxpayers and non-farm-state lawmakers.
The Stabenow-Lucas draft included a plan for payments to farmers with small losses not covered by federal crop insurance. The American Farm Bureau Federation opposes what is known as the shallow loss option, instead backing a plan for catastrophic revenue loss coverage that farmers could combine with crop insurance. Crop insurance itself may come under scrutiny because costs rose to $11.3 billion in fiscal 2011.
The Farm Bureau and some economists argue that shallow loss coverage could lead to costly new programs and entice farmers to take imprudent risks. This will be a key area of contention, especially now that North Dakota Democrat Kent Conrad, the Senate Budget chairman and a senior Agriculture Committee member, has outlined a plan for a shallow loss program. Conrad said he plans to play an active role in shaping farm safety-net programs.
Other farm groups will stake out their policy positions in the weeks ahead. But a farm bill’s reach is so broad that anti-hunger groups, nutrition advocates, rural bankers, environmentalists, food companies, renewable-energy trade groups, rural economic developers, public health groups and government reformers will demand to be given a voice.
Anti-hunger groups are worried about efforts to trim costs of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, by changing eligibility criteria. The Agriculture Department’s largest nutrition program accounts for more than half of agriculture spending and aids roughly one in seven people in the United States. Enrollment has been at record levels since the 2008 financial crisis.
Stabenow indicated that, in negotiations last fall, she and Lucas reviewed categorical eligibility, a procedure that qualifies people for SNAP if they receive benefits or services under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families welfare program. The process allows people whose assets exceed the food-aid program’s ordinary threshold to qualify for benefits.
The Government Accountability Office raised concerns in 2010 about the varying standards that states use to determine categorical eligibility. Critics such as Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the Budget Committee’s ranking Republican, want to end the practice, which advocates say makes food aid more accessible to those who already qualify for other anti-poverty programs.
Can farm-state lawmakers revise agricultural, conservation and nutrition policy?
SYNOPSIS: The Agriculture committees are trying to overcome regional rivalries and a smaller baseline for programs to produce a multi-year farm bill.
KEY PLAYERS: Senate committee leaders Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Pat Roberts, R-Kan.; Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D.; Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont.; House committee leaders Frank D. Lucas, R-Okla., and Collin C. Peterson, D-Minn.
TIMING: The current bill expires Sept. 30.
