New farm bill goals include aid, fair trade
Lawmakers hope to avoid crisis by shoring up farmers
WASHINGTON — With commodity prices down and many farmers struggling, lawmakers are ready to begin work on the nation’s next farm bill, hoping to bolster the nation’s growers and help them through tough times.
The House Agriculture Committee had a hearing on the topic last week and the Senate Agriculture Committee will hold its first hearing Thursday on the key piece of legislation Thursday in Manhattan, Kan.
“We want to learn from farmers what’s working, what isn’t. We know that we’re going through a rough patch. … We hope that we’re not getting into a situation like it was in the 1980s. We can’t let that happen,” said the committee’s chairman, U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan.
In the 1980s, commodity prices dipped, land values plummeted and thousands of farmers and ranchers went bankrupt.
Three decades later, crop prices have fallen again. And with tension between the two nations rising, there’s fear that Mexico will look elsewhere to buy corn and other foodstuffs, further complicating matters for U.S. farmers.
Lawmakers in the House and the Senate will work with former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, the agriculture secretary nominee, to shore up the industry and avoid another farm crisis, Roberts said.
“We’re all united,” he said, emphasizing the importance of providing farmers and their lenders with “consistency and predictability.”
U.S. Sen. John Boozman, a Republican from Rogers, agrees.
“I think the important thing is recognizing that we
need a safety net in place for farmers. We’ve got the cheapest, safest food supply in the world and we want to protect that,” he said.
The legislative battles won’t be partisan; they’ll be geographic, Boozman predicted.
“Agriculture is not Democrats and Republicans. It’s regional,” he said.
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, who grew up on his family’s cattle farm in Yell County, also emphasized geography, saying President Donald Trump’s selection of Perdue is a positive step for Arkansas farmers.
“I think it’s good that we have a Southern secretary of agriculture for the first time in 25 or 30 years. It’ll make sure that our perspective is well represented inside the Department of Agriculture because Southern agriculture is simply different from Midwestern agriculture,” the Republican from Dardanelle said.
U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford, a Republican from Jonesboro who serves on the House agriculture committee, said lawmakers have a lot of work ahead of them.
“The idea would be to try and mark up a farm bill the latter part of this fall,” he said. “I think what we’re doing [now] is beginning the process.”
The last farm bill, signed into law by President Barack
Obama in February 2014, authorized about $489 billion in spending over five years.
According to a Department of Agriculture analysis, the 2014 Farm Bill allocated 80 percent of the funds for nutrition and food stamp-type programs; 8 percent for crop insurance; 6 percent for conservation efforts; 5 percent for commodities programs and 1 percent for everything else.
Given the current environment on Capitol Hill, Crawford doesn’t expect to see a funding increase.
“If anything, it will go down,” he said.
Lawmakers hope to include trade provisions in the Farm Bill that will increase U.S. exports.
Crawford, for example, is pushing for legislation that would enable U.S. farmers to extend credit to customers in Cuba, a move he says would help Arkansas’ rice and poultry industries.
Others hope the legislation will combat what they view as unfair trade practices.
Arkansas Farm Bureau President Randy Veach says it’s a perilous time for American agriculture.
“We are losing a lot of really good farmers … because we do not have enough [of a] safety net that can keep them in business to get them through these rough times,” he said.
At a time when the United States has a massive trade deficit, “we cannot afford to cripple the only industry that has a trade surplus,” Veach added.