The umbrella group National Cotton Council said it will seek short-term aid to cotton growers from the USDA now that an industry request for $1.2 billion in cottonseed subsidies has been rebuffed by Congress. The Cotton Council said Democratic Sens. Pat Leahy of Vermont and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan are to blame for cottonseed assistance being left out of the bill to fund the government for the rest of this fiscal year.
It was unusual for a farm group to publicly label lawmakers as obstructionist, particularly senior lawmakers. Stabenow is the Democratic leader on the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Leahy is the Democratic leader on the Senate Appropriations Committee as well as a member of the Agriculture panel. Both are from dairy states and the Cotton Council said their “desire to help dairy producers somehow became a prerequisite for whether Congress could provide a policy to cotton producers.”
Cotton and dairy producers have endured a collapse in market prices and have said the insurance-like subsidies created in the 2014 farm law are failures. Groups representing dairy and cotton hoped to place riders in the government funding bill that would increase the budgetary baseline for their commodities, making more federal support possible. The changes would have freed $3.5 billion for this year and would have increased the baseline for the 2018 farm bill. Neither was written into the spending bill.
The cotton industry proposed that cottonseed be classified as eligible for the subsidies available to grain and soybean farmers. The Obama administration said it did not have the authority to do that. The proposal rankled some in the farm sector as double-dipping because cotton fiber also is eligible for crop subsidies.