Left at the barn door, farm bill negotiators must now decide what can be salvaged from the supercommittee?s wreckage as they shift their focus toward producing their own stand-alone legislation before the current authorization bill expires next September.
It was always a shotgun marriage: the House and Senate agriculture committees would generate $23 billion in savings and get a ticket on the supercommittee?s fast-moving, amendment-free deficit train. But more than most of their colleagues, the agriculture leadership did at least try, and the weeks of backroom negotiations could prove valuable still as a first Washington exercise in the need for change in agriculture policy.
Continue ReadingWhat emerged was a broad consensus that the current system of direct cash payments to producers ? costing $5 billion a year ? can no longer be defended. Government support for farmers should be a function of real planted acres, not outdated data measuring a producer?s ?base? acreage from years ago. And tighter payment limits of $105,000 are proposed for new safety net programs.
But instead of one overarching replacement for direct payments, the draft bill proposes at least three options, one tailored specifically for a single crop, cotton. Indeed, the old farm coalition may never be quite the same, as cotton?s decision to go it alone isolated rice and peanuts, making the South less of a player. Instead, the biggest tension matched the Corn Belt ? flush with ethanol-driven prices ? vs. the Great Plains wheat country represented by powerful Senate Democrats.
The last farm bill was also written in an election year, 2008, so that needn?t prevent the committees from trying again in 2012. And even before January, any plan that promises $23 billion in savings could prove a hot date for those trying to pay for year-end bills, such as extending jobless benefits or reduced payroll taxes.
In a statement Monday, Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) and Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), the House and Senate Agriculture committee chairs, gave no hint of their plans, but the two have come out of the past month with their working relationship strengthened.
?The Joint Select Committee?s failure to reach a deal on an overall deficit reduction package effectively ends this effort,? Lucas and Stabenow said. ?We are pleased we were able to work in a bipartisan way with committee members and agriculture stakeholders to generate sound ideas to cut spending by tens of billions ? We will continue the process of reauthorizing the farm bill in the coming months and will do so with the same bipartisan spirit that has historically defined the work of our committees.?
No plans have been announced to release the bill itself, but within the all-important commodity title, the latest scoring from the Congressional Budget Office is said to credit the committees with $16.7 billion in outlay savings ? a 27 percent reduction.
Direct payments and the related ACRE program would be ended and producers given the choice of three primary options, the largest of which is a new revenue protection plan expected to cost nearly $16.5 billion and designed to cover so-called shallow losses outside of the crop insurance typically bought by growers.
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