Farm Legislation Sprouts on Hill
There's no shortage of headline-grabbing issues on Capitol Hill this week. The House Judiciary Committee continued to probe the Justice Department's firing of U.S. attorneys, while the Senate struggled in its efforts to pass a funding bill for the Iraq war. But away from the klieg lights, another major brouhaha was just beginning to take shape: the crafting of a new farm bill.
The farm bill is a massive package of legislation that addresses farm subsidies, food programs, renewable energy, and the environment. New legislation would replace the existing Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002, which partially expires in September. The House Agriculture Committee is starting the process this week; the conservation, credit, energy, and research subcommittee amended and approved a portion of the measure Tuesday, with the other five subcommittees holding markup sessions Thursday and next week.
The biggest point of contention for critics of the 2002 farm bill is the expensive system of federal subsidies that have traditionally been directed at farmers who grow corn, soybeans, rice, cotton, and wheat. Those subsidies cost $93.3 billion in fiscal 2002 through 2006, and they've also helped stall the Doha Round of international trade talks. The subsidies further rile an eclectic mix of groups concerned with environmental and overproduction implications of the subsidies—groups like Environmental Defense, Bread for the World, and the Cato Institute.
Analysts at the Cato Institute suggest paying off, or in other words "bribing," farmers by offering them buyouts to end the subsidization program, according to Cato trade policy analyst Sallie James. However, Sen. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican and one of three farmers in the Senate, has another proposition. He introduced the Food and Agriculture Risk Management for the 21st Century Act last week. Lugar's bill would wean farmers off the controversial subsidies and eventually replace them with "risk management accounts." Subsidies would be incrementally decreased, and the cash would go into accounts that could be used when farmers made less than 95 percent of the average of their farms' earnings over five years. "My plan would create a true safety net that would embrace all farmers, avoid incentives to overproduce commodities when market signals do not exist, and lower cost for taxpayers," Lugar said in a statement. But there's plenty of congressional support out there for the existing system as well. And so the arguing is likely to go on for months.