Congress fails to agree on new agriculture bill

— Unable to complete work on a comprehensive agriculture bill Friday, lawmakers streamed out of Washington for the next two months to harvest votes.

The Senate passed its version of the farm bill in June, and the House Agriculture Committee followed in July, passing its version on a lopsided bipartisan vote. But as election season neared, the House Republican leadership declined to put the matter up for a floor vote.

Congress is unlikely to reconvene until after the Nov. 6 elections.

The current farm bill, which covers crop payments to farmers, food stamps and other nutrition programs, conservation efforts, and rural development funding, expires Sept. 30.

Arkansas’ U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat, said he was “puzzled” about the House’s inaction.

“Frustrated” is how his Republican colleague, Arkansas’ U.S. Sen. John Boozman, put it.

Both senators voted against the bill in the upper chamber on the belief that it treated Southern growers unfairly compared with their Midwestern counterparts. But they thought the House bill addressed those concerns and that a compromise between the two could be reached before Congress recessed.

The Senate bill would have funded U.S. Department of Agriculture programs at $970 billion over 10 years, with about 80 percent funding going to nutrition - mainly to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps.

The Senate bill outlined $23 billion in cuts, with $4 billion of the spending reductions in the nutrition programs.

The bill passed by the House Agriculture Committee went further, seeking $35 billion in cuts, including a $16 billion reduction in nutrition programs.

Arkansas’ U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford, a Republican from Jonesboro who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, skipped his party’s national convention in Tampa, Fla., in August so he could work to push the farm bill.

The House bill, like the Senate bill, would end direct payments to farmers, which many growers say are essential to planting profitable crops, and would increase crop insurance funding.

But unlike the Senate bill, which would tie insurance to a farm’s yield, the House bill would allow farmers to take out insurance to guard against price swings.

That approach is favored by many Southern growers, who see relatively stable yields because they irrigate many of their fields but are prone to take losses when prices drop too low.

Crawford said the committee-passed bill was met favorably by the farmers he met with on the 14 farming operations he visited in his district in August.

On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio said the bill did not have enough votes to pass.

Crawford didn’t agree.

He said many conservatives feel that the cuts in farm and nutrition programs don’t go deep enough, while many liberals in the chamber would like smaller cuts, or even increases, in food-stamp funding.

“We would have had 150 votes or thereabouts on the Republican side, and we probably had 85 to 125 on the Democratic side,” he said. Bills need 218 votes to pass in the House.

“It’s unfortunate this has turned into a wedge issue,” he said. “I don’t think either side wanted to be embarrassed by the farm bill” before the election, he said.

Crawford is one of 79 legislators who signed a “discharge petition” that would take the bill directly to the floor. Arkansas’ other House members have not signed it but say they support it.

Scott Ellington, prosecuting attorney for Arkansas’ 2nd Judicial District and Crawford’s Democratic challenger in the November election, blamed Crawford and the Republican-led House for failure to pass a bill.

“House Republicans are more worried about getting re-elected than they are about serving their constituents at home,” he said in a release.

In August, the USDA projected that median farm household income was $53,424 in 2011 and projected it would increase 3.2 percent over that mark this year.

The agency predicted that national net farm income would top $122 billion this year, a record high.

With lawmakers struggling over how to stretch the federal budget, farmers - particularly those with high incomes - shouldn’t receive taxpayer support, said Emily Goff, a research associate at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington advocacy group that favors reducing farm subsidies.

“It’s time for farmers to start assuming responsibility for their businesses but reaping the rewards of their risks and also dealing with the consequences,” Goff said.

That doesn’t sit well with Randy Veach, executive director of the Arkansas Farm Bureau.

“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said.

Veach said farm-support payments help reduce the cost of food to consumers and provide a safety net to farmers during tough times.

With no farm bill in place and the current policy set to expire at the end of the month, farmers “are in uncharted waters,” he said.

Many livestock producers are hurting right now because of this summer’s debilitating drought, he said, but without a new farm bill there is no federal disaster assistance available for them.

Before next spring’s planting season in Arkansas, farmers need to make decisions on how many acres to grow, what equipment to buy and what rental contracts to enter into.

“All those decisions will be in limbo” until a new bill is passed, Veach said.

Veach said if lawmakers don’t pass a five-year bill during the short “lame-duck” session in November and December, it will be more difficult to pass one next year.

He said high federal crop insurance payments being made as a result of the drought will inflate the farm program’s price tag, making it potentially more difficult for lawmakers to reach an agreement in 2013.

Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition - a Washington group that would like to reduce subsidies and increase conservation programs - agreed.

He said Congressional Budget Office calculations of the cost of farm programs likely underestimate their price tag.

The calculation, he said, is based on an assumption that commodity prices will remain at their current, relatively high, levels. When commodity prices are high, farmers rely less on taxpayer support.

“Could it happen?” Hoefner asked. “Yes. Has it ever happened in the past? No.”

Hoefner said Boehner didn’t want to “put the screws on people to shut up about food stamps,” and take the House bill to the floor before the election. But with a very limited schedule during the “lame-duck” session, Hoefner said he wasn’t optimistic that Congress could pass a full five-year bill.

Boozman, who sits on the Senate Agriculture Committee, was more optimistic.

He said the farm bill offered billions of dollars in spending cuts that could be used to offset reductions in federal revenue that are likely to accompany tax legislation during the “lame-duck” session.

“The good news is everybody wants to get the farm bill passed,” Boozman said. “The bad news is no one had really figured out a way to do that.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/24/2012

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