farm subsidies

U.S. farm groups are giving priority to winning higher reference prices, a key factor in calculating crop subsidies, in the farm bill due this year in Congress. But the benefits would flow to a relative handful of large cotton, rice, and peanut growers, said an environmental group on Tuesday.

A decade after the House briefly put the idea into play, a senior Republican on the House Agriculture Committee said the far-ranging farm bill should be divided into two separate pieces of legislation: SNAP and everything else. SNAP, which cost $119 billion last year, has become “an emotional, political issue” that taints consideration of farm supports, said Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia.

The “very difficult” politics of SNAP are among the greatest obstacles to passing the new farm bill, said Senate Agriculture Committee chair Debbie Stabenow on Wednesday. The Michigan Democrat is a stalwart defender of public nutrition programs in a year when House Republicans want to apply a 90-day limit on food stamps to a greater number of recipients.

After two record-setting years in a row, U.S. net farm income will decline sharply in the near term, pulled down by lower crop and livestock prices, though it will remain well above its 10-year average, said FAPRI on Wednesday. The University of Missouri think tank said food inflation would drop to 4.4 percent this year — less than half of last year’s rate — and run at 2 percent in following years.

Congress needs to modernize the crop insurance program and update farm subsidies to reflect higher input costs and volatile commodity markets when it writes the new farm bill, said the leader of the largest U.S. farm group at a listening session in Texas on Wednesday. An anti-hunger leader asked lawmakers to “keep the importance of access to SNAP and the adequacy of those benefits top of mind throughout farm bill discussions.”

The price tag for SNAP is going up so quickly — doubling during the pandemic — that it will poison support for the farm subsidy and land stewardship programs that make up the rest of the farm bill, said the senior Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee on Thursday. “You are going to crowd out our ability ... to use funds on other programs,” said Arkansas Sen. John Boozman.

The government has spent nearly $70 billion on disaster, trade war, and pandemic relief since the 2018 farm bill was enacted, a huge amount that shows the need for a strong farm safety net that’s written into law rather than on the fly, said farm-state senators on Thursday. They called for a stronger and expanded crop insurance program as the first line of support for farmers and ranchers against uncertain weather, volatile commodity markets, and rising production expenses.

The new farm bill could cost nearly $130 billion a year — the highest price tag ever — with public nutrition programs getting more than $4 of every $5, wrote associate professor Roman Keeney in Purdue’s annual agricultural economics review. “The overall budget, and particularly spending on the nutrition title (primarily food assistance for low-income households), should continue to be the most politically divisive component of the farm bill debate.”

House Democrats elected Georgia Rep. David Scott as their leader on the Agriculture Committee on Thursday for the congressional session that begins on Jan. 3. The vote means the “four corners” of the 2023 farm bill will be the same four lawmakers who led the House and Senate ag committees for the past two years.

Environmental groups at the UN Biodiversity Conference hoped for a "Paris moment" for nature — one that would bring the same urgency to the fight against biodiversity loss that now propels the one against climate change. As the conference came to a close in Montreal on Monday, there was the sense among many that they had largely succeeded, even if putting the deal into practice will require a huge effort. (No paywall)

Congress should "substantially scale up" programs like a produce prescription and nutrition incentive program at USDA and create a food box program to provide locally grown produce to Medicaid participants, said Sen. Cory Booker on Tuesday. "Food as medicine programs can be transformative," said the New Jersey Democrat during a Senate Agriculture subcommittee hearing on the issue.

With one million species at risk of extinction, policymakers, scientists and activists gathered for the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal to hammer out a plan to end and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. Agriculture — considered the driver of 70 percent of all biodiversity loss — is key to the negotiations, which will center on conserving land and water, reducing pollution, redirecting subsidies that enable environmental harm, and curtailing unsustainable production and consumption. No paywall

The largest U.S. farm group believes “it makes perfect sense” to combine commodity supports and SNAP in the same piece of big-ticket legislation, said president Zippy Duvall in announcing the American Farm Bureau Federation’s farm bill priorities on Thursday. The AFBF called for higher subsidy rates, at a still-to-be-determined cost, and more emphasis of stewardship on working lands rather than long-term idling of cropland.

Net farm income is at record levels, thanks to high commodity prices, and is expected to remain strong for two or three years, yet farm groups are telling Congress “that existing subsidy programs should be continued, their scope expanded, and federal spending increased” in the 2023 farm bill, said an American Enterprise Institute analyst.