Crop supports would be set so high in the farm bill written by House Republicans that cotton, peanut, and rice growers, and probably wheat and sorghum farmers too, “would receive a payment every year,” said an environmental group on Tuesday. Farm groups called for Agriculture Committee passage of the bill later this week despite questions about the financial underpinnings of the five-year legislation.
The GOP bill would increase so-called reference prices, which are the trigger points for subsidy payments, by 10-20 percent. It would also cut SNAP spending by $27 billion over 10 years and allow $15 billion in climate funding to be spent on any conservation practice whether or not it captured carbon or reduced greenhouse gas emissions — two steps strongly opposed by Democrats on the committee
“If this bill were to become law, cotton, peanut, and rice farmers, and other farmers who grow certain commodity crops would receive a payment every year,” said Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group during a video news conference. Wheat and sorghum growers also would benefit, he said, from reference prices that would be set higher than the projected season-average price for the crops over the life of the farm bill. “A safety net that pays off every year is not a safety net,” Faber said. “It’s a trampoline.”
Three fiscally conservative groups, the Heritage Foundation, the National Taxpayers Union (NTU), and Taxpayers for Common Sense, speaking at the same event as Faber, decried the Republican bill as an unwarranted giveaway when farm income is well above its 10-year average. “There’s going to be significant opposition” on the House floor from deficit hawks, said Bryan Riley of the NTU.
House Agriculture chairman Glenn Thompson would pay for the projected $50-$53 billion increase in crop subsidy and crop insurance spending by sharply restricting USDA’s access to a $30 billion reserve fund. Huge amounts of money were paid to farmers from the fund to offset the impact of the Sino-U.S. trade war and the pandemic, chiefly during the Trump era.
“Suspending the discretion of the secretary (of Agriculture) to spend money is not a pay-for,” said Josh Sewell of Taxpayers for Common Sense, because the money is not a mandatory outlay, as farm subsidies are. The Congressional Budget Office has scored the restriction as an $8 billion savings. Thompson has asked the House Budget Committee to deem it a much larger amount, above $50 billion.
The largest farm group, the American Farm Bureau Federation, said it supported Thompson’s bill and backed committee passage, expected on Thursday, as “a good start” to enacting a replacement to the 2018 farm law, which is eight months overdue. The National Pork Producers Council, whose members include packers, said more than 900 groups endorsed a provision in the bill to override California’s Proposition 12 animal welfare law. The National Cotton Council, an umbrella group for the cotton industry, said growers “are struggling under enormous pressures” of rising labor, land, and equipment costs, and that the House farm bill “offers a lifeline to our farmers.”
The reference prices proposed in the GOP farm bill, 42 cents per pound for cotton, $630 per ton for peanuts, and $16.90 per hundredweight for rice, were higher than CB0 projections of season-average prices for the commodities in coming years.
“No time in the next five years is the market price for peanuts expected to exceed $460,” said Faber in criticizing the reference price proposals. “So, clearly, again, payments every year. That’s not just true for rice, seed cotton and peanuts; it’s also true for wheat, sorghum, and dried peas.”