Revenue-assurance changes in the counter-cyclical program that have been such a pivotal part of the farm-bill debate could get dropped from the bill during conference negotiations, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee said Monday.
Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., has been working on the farm bill throughout much of the congressional break, which includes holding ongoing talks with Acting Agriculture Secretary Chuck Conner about the Bush administration's concerns with the bill.
Key components that keep creating more questions than answers involve the two different revenue-assurance plans in the House and Senate versions of the bill. Both provisions are optional for producers, but the Senate version is more extensive in scope. Peterson said it's unclear if the revenue plans are necessarily needed in the mix of the current safety net.
"There are a lot of questions about whether the revenue actually makes any sense or not," Peterson said Monday in a phone interview with DTN. "The more people look at it and the more questions they have about it."
The revenue-assurance provisions were expected to help producers more than the current commodity programs should there be drastic fall in the current commodity markets. Advocates for revenue programs argue that the current safety net of marketing loans and counter-cyclical payments create a wide spread for potential farm-revenue to potentially collapse.
Besides adding complexity to the current farm programs, there are questions about how the revenue-assurance programs would work with crop insurance and the new permanent disaster assistance program that is part of the legislation, Peterson said.
"That's going to be an area that's going to take some work and we don't fully understand all of it at this point," Peterson said.
A spokeswoman for Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, responded Monday in an e-mail that Senate staffers did not think the average crop revenue program as passed by the Senate would complicate the administration of either the crop insurance program or disaster assistance.That's mainly because the payments are not linked, she stated. The conferees will have to consider whether there would be an unacceptable duplication of farm program support and crop insurance coverage, but such concerns would apply to the traditional farm program payments as well as the ACR.
Groups such as the National Corn Growers Association were pleased last summer when the House bill included an optional revenue-based counter-cyclical program that would be pegged to the overall per-acre revenue that a crop generated nationally. The Senate expanded on by creating the Average Crop Revenue Program. That provision ties potential revenue payments to state revenue on a per-acre basis and also would replace direct payments with a $15-per-acre payment. The ACR also changes the way farmers used the marketing-loan program.
Peterson noted state affiliates of the National Corn Growers Association, particularly in Texas and his home state of Minnesota, opposed changing the current commodity programs or creating the new revenue programs.
"There's a division within the corn growers," Peterson said. "The more we look into it, the more questions we get than answers."
Unless questions about some provisions "get nailed down a little better," Peterson said he would likely have a meeting with the NCGA and discuss the issues being raised and potentially dropping the revenue programs from the farm bill through conference talks.
Besides the issues raised with revenue assurance, Peterson and his staff also have held five meetings with Acting Agriculture Secretary Chuck Conner and USDA officials about the farm bill. Talks have centered on the adjusted gross income levels for payment eligibility, actual payment caps and financing for the bill.
"We're making progress, but we're a long, long ways apart," Peterson said. "Discussions are better than they were a week ago, but we've still got a long ways to go."
The problem hammering out an agreement will not be as big a challenge between the Senate and the House as it will be between Congress and the Bush administration, Peterson said. The Bush administration has promised to veto both the House and Senate versions. As of now, though, it is too early in the process to suggest any items in the bill are non-negotiable, he said.
"The administration doesn't like our bill too much, but they really don't like the Senate bill," Peterson said.
The Senate bill spends more money than the House bill, Peterson said, and terminates some programs after five years, raising questions about how and if programs would receive money through the next five years of budget authorization.
"A lot of folks had problems with what the Senate was doing, but they didn't weigh in because they were afraid that if they asked too many questions they would never get a bill done," Peterson said. "So the Senate kind of got a pass."
House staffers did not actually receive full language on the Senate bill until last Friday. The Senate version of the bill is about 1,000 pages longer than the House bill. Peterson said House leaders want to get a bill completed as quickly as possible. Still, the chairman was cautious about making any suggestions about when conferees would be named. For now, Peterson said he is talking with the administration and keeping his members updated on what is going on.
"The process is going to go on whether there are conferees appointed or not," Peterson said. "At some point we will have conferees and discuss in public what we have done or what we are going to do."DTNAg
