Farm bill advances over Arkansas nays

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday approved a farm bill that would cost nearly $1 trillion over the next 10 years, financing dozens of price-support and crop-insurance programs for farmers and food assistance for low-income families.

The bill passed with bipartisan support, 64-35, though it failed to draw the support of Arkansas’ senators - Democrat Mark Pryor and Republican John Boozman.

The legislation now goes to the House, where it facesa much tougher road because conservative lawmakers want to make deeper cuts in the food-stamp program, which serves about 45 million Americans.

“This bill represents significant reform,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and head of the Senate agriculture committee. “It cuts subsidies, it cuts the deficit, and it creates jobs.”

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the ranking GOP member on the committee, called the legislation the best bill possible.

“It shows what can happen if we break the logjam of partisanship and work together to get something done,” Roberts said.

Although the bill is known as the farm bill, the majority of the spending, about $80 billion a year, goes to the food-stamp program. The Senate bill would cut $23.6 billion from current spending levels, including about $4.5 billion from food stamps, but senators rejected several proposals that would have made even deeper cuts.

Stabenow said savingsfrom the food-stamp program would come mainly from changes including banning lottery winners from getting assistance.

The House Republican budget introduced earlier this year by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., would reduce foodstamp spending by about $134 billion over the next decade and turn the program into block grants for the states.

In the House, the chairman of the agriculture committee, Frank Lucas, R-Okla., said work on the bill would begin July 11. He said committee members would work on a spending bill next week. Congress will recess for the July Fourth holiday week.

“Although there will be differences between the Senate approach and our own, I hope my colleagues are encouraged by this success when we meet on the 11th to consider our own legislation,” Lucas said.

Although the Senate bill makes significant changes to some farm programs and eliminates or consolidates others, it leaves in place several Depression-era programs such as supports for U.S. sugar growers that set prices and limit imports.

The bill eliminates about $5 billion a year in direct payments that have been given to farmers and farmland owners, whether or not they grew crops. It makes the highly subsidized crop-insurance program the primary safety net when crop prices drop. Currently, the government subsidizes about 62 percent of the crop-insurance premiums, and the policies typically guarantee 75 percent to 85 percent of a farmer’s revenue. The crop-insurance subsidy would cost about $9 billion a year.

But for the first time crop insurance would be subject to payment limits, and recipients of the subsidy would have to follow soil and water conservation requirements as they do in other farm programs. The bill reduces the premium subsidy for farmers with adjusted gross incomes of more than $750,000. The measure would save $1 billion over 10 years.

Pryor said in a statement that the farm bill “fails rice farmers by employing an unworkable crop-insurance program. This plan will compromise tens of thousands of jobs in Arkansas and billions in economic activity.”

Boozman, in a statement, faulted the bill for a lack of “vital protection for southern farmers, especially rice and peanuts. I cannot support a Farm Bill that does not have a strong safety net for all cropsand regions.”

Randy Veach, president of the Arkansas Farm Bureau, said in a statement that the Senate’s bill “offers no safetynet for much of southern agriculture.”

“Rice, in particular, is left without any programs that help farmers manage their risk,” Veach said. “That, alone, makes this legislation unacceptable to us, though it is far from the only issue we find with this Farm Bill. We fear this could destabilize southern agriculture and could affect food prices.”

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack praised the Senate bill for making progress toward “providing a reformed safety net for producers in times of need,” supporting agriculture research, conserving natural resources, strengthening local food systems and promoting jobs. He expressed hope the House “will produce a bill with those same goals in mind.”

Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a Washington research organization, said thebill failed to achieve real savings because it expands crop insurance.

Still, he said, “We applaud the provisions that require farmers who receive crop insurance subsidies to carry out basic environmental protections on their farms and to reduce insurance subsidies for the largest and most successful agribusinesses.”

While most agriculture groups support the Senate bill, many Southern farmers, especially rice and peanut farmers, say it provides an inadequate safety net because it eliminates direct payments.

“Crop insurance does not provide adequate coverage for peanuts farmers when there are fluctuations in the market,” said Armond Morris, chairman of the Georgia Peanut Commission in Tifton, Ga.

Food and nutrition groupssaid they were disappointed by the food-stamp cuts. While they said the bill provides incentives for low-income families to purchase more fruits and vegetables, they argue that the cuts will have a devastating effect on low-income families during a time of high unemployment.

Feeding America, an antihunger group based in Chicago, said the cuts would reduce benefits by about $90per family and affect 500,000 households in 15 states.

“Now is the time to protect and strengthen food nutrition assistance, not cut it,” said Eric Olsen, the group’s senior vice president of government relations and public policy.

POLITICAL CONVENTIONS

In other developments, the Senate endorsed a proposal to end public funding for the Democratic and Republican national nominating conventions.

The Senate voted 95-4 vote to adopt Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn’s plan to end taxpayer funding for conventions. Boozman and Pryor supported the plan.

Coburn offered it as an amendment to the farm bill. He said it is hypocritical for lawmakers to spend public money on their party conventions after criticizing the General Services Administration for spending $823,000 on a 2010 conference near Las Vegas.

The nominating conventions are funded through a combination of public andprivate money. Congress appropriated $100 million for security at the conventions with an additional $36 million going to the two parties for other convention expenses. The program is designed to reduce the influence of campaign contributions.

The funding comes from a $3 voluntary checkoff on income tax returns, which is intended to help fund presidential campaigns.

Coburn’s proposal would bar funds from the voluntary checkoff program from being used to pay for conventions beginning in 2016 and allowing unused money from the 2012 cycle to be returned to the Treasury.

Information for this article was contributed by Ron Nixon of The New York Times; by Jim Abrams of The Associated Press; by Arkansas Democrat-Gazette staff; and by Kathleen Hunter and Brian Faler of Bloomberg News.