Senate Passes Long-Stalled Farm Bill, With Clear Winners and Losers
by Ron Nixon, New York Times
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WASHINGTON — No one was happier than Danny Murphy, a Mississippi soybean farmer with 1,500 acres, when the Senate on Tuesday passed a farm bill that expanded crop insurance and other benefits for agribusiness. “It’s a relief,” Mr. Murphy said.
Few were as unhappy as Sheena Wright, the president of the United Way in New York, who expects to see a surge of hungry people seeking help because the bill cuts $8 billion in food stamps over a decade. “You are going to have to make a decision on what you are going to do, buy food or pay rent,” Ms. Wright said.
The long-stalled farm bill, which represents nearly $1 trillion in spending over the next 10 years and passed on a rare bipartisan vote, 68 to 32, produced clear winners and losers. Over all, farmers fared far better than the poor.
The nearly 1,000-page bill, which President Obama is to sign at Michigan State University on Friday, among other things expanded crop insurance for farmers by $7 billion over a decade and created new subsidies for rice and peanut growers that would kick in when prices drop. But anti-hunger advocates said the bill would harm 850,000 American households, about 1.7 million people spread across 15 states, which would lose an average of $90 per month in benefits because of the cuts in the food stamp program.
“It’s absolutely devastating,” Ms. Wright said.
Nonetheless, supporters of the bill said it was a success given that lawmakers had to address the competing concerns of agriculture interests, anti-hunger advocates, proponents of changes to the international food aid program and budget watchdog groups that want to cut government spending. They noted that it is projected to cut $17 billion from the budget over a decade.
Lawmakers also drew praise for new soil conservation measures in the bill and for creating a pilot program to encourage recipients of food stamps to buy more fruits and vegetables.
“This is not your father’s farm bill,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow, the Michigan Democrat and chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, who is the bill’s author.
Specifically, Ms. Stabenow pointed out that the bill eliminates a much-criticized $5 billion-a-year crop subsidy to farmers who received the payments whether they grew crops or not. “Instead of getting a government check even in good times, farmers will pay an insurance bill every year and will only receive support from that insurance in years when they take a loss,” Ms. Stabenow said.
In addition, she said, the food stamp cuts affect 4 percent of recipients and do not remove anyone from the program. It closes a loophole that states use to increase benefits for food stamp recipients.
But critics said that the bill continued an age-old Washington tradition of doling out favors to economic interests in lawmakers’ home states. Among its pages are dozens of obscure but economically valuable provisions that benefit not only crop insurers but also sugar producers and catfish farmers.
“The agriculture industry simply does not need all of these supports,” said William Frenzel, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota and a budget analyst at the Brookings Institution. “They saved a little bit of money, but still left us with bad budget and agriculture policy.”
Unlike the food stamp program, the federally subsidized crop insurance program was not cut. The program, which is administered by 18 companies that are paid $1.4 billion annually by the government to sell policies to farmers, pays 62 percent of farmers’ premiums.
Crop insurers scored a major victory from a provision in the bill that bars the Agriculture Department from renegotiating lesser payments to those companies over the five-year life of the bill. In previous years, the Agriculture Department’s renegotiations with insurance companies have resulted in billions of dollars in savings for the government.
But the industry said it lobbied for the provision because it was opposed to any further cuts that would affect an important program for farmers.
Critics of the crop insurance program, like Craig Cox of the Washington-based Environmental Working Group, said that even for a farm bill, the provision was blatant. “It seems remarkable to me that Congress would pass a law that gives private insurance companies such favorable treatment,” Mr. Cox said.
Other winners in the farm bill included the catfish industry, which benefited from a provision that moved catfish inspections out of the Food and Drug Administration and into a new $20 million office at the Agriculture Department.
Southern lawmakers said the office was needed because the F.D.A. lacks the resources needed to inspect imported catfish properly. But Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and a vocal opponent of the office, called it a protectionist measure intended to limit imports from countries like Vietnam.
“It seems that catfish is one bottom feeder with friends in high places,” Mr. McCain said.
Not all the winners in the farm bill were agriculture groups. Consumer groups foiled an effort to remove a labeling provision in the bill that requires beef, lamb and poultry producers, among others, to stamp their products with the country of origin. The meat industry has complained that the rule is too onerous.
An earlier version of a picture caption that appeared with this article misstated the position of Senator Elizabeth Warren. She voted against the farm bill, not for it.
