The year-end holidays are a traditional time for summing up and for trying to forecast the future. Here is the Ag Insider list of five salient issues in food and agriculture policy likely to lead the headlines in the new year, as they did in the year now waning. The issues in no particular order:
Crop insurance becomes the backbone of the farm subsidy program and a target. The government will spend more money to subsidize crop insurance, more than $8 billion annually, than it will put into traditional crop subsidies during the life of the 2014 farm law, according to budget estimates. The shift reflected budget pressures and the political calculation that insurance is an easier concept to defend than subsidies. Under the farm law, the cotton program was converted to a revenue insurance program, to settle a trade dispute with Brazil, and the Supplemental Coverage Option was created to compensate for “shallow” declines in revenue that are not covered by the standard revenue policies. Reformers say the program is skewed to big farmers who grow corn and soybeans and skewed against smaller operators and diversified farms. Some analysts say the government pays too much of the premium – 62 cents on the dollar. One research paper predicts crop insurance is certain to be a topic of congressional debate in 2015.
The golden day of the agricultural boom fades into a twilight of lower farm income. U.S. agriculture enjoyed record-setting prices and high income in a breath-taking run ignited in 2006 by biofuels and a surge in food demand worldwide. Farmers updated equipment and drove up land prices during the economic heyday, the best times since the export boom of the 1970s, and were a U.S. bulwark during the global financial turmoil of 2008-09. Farm income peaked in 2012 and is falling for the second year in a row under the weight of back-to-back bumper harvests. Forecasters see, for the near term at the least, an era of lower crop prices that will squeeze income because of high production costs. While some crop farmers are likely to lose money, cattle, hog and poultry growers enjoy relief from years of high feed costs.
Public nutrition programs, particularly food stamps and school lunch, are attacked as too costly or too dictatorial. Senate Democrats thwarted proposals by conservative House Republicans for the biggest cuts in food stamps in a generation as part of the 2014 farm law. The debate is far from over. The incoming chairman of the House Agriculture Committee wants an overall review of food stamps. A leading target is a provision that provides additional food stamps to people with high utility costs. Conservatives also want to restrict eligibility. Child nutrition programs, most notably school lunch, are due for reauthorization in 2015. House Republicans say the 2010 reauthorization obliged schools to make expensive changes to their menus.
GMO labeling is the poster child of the multifaceted tussle between conventional and alternative agriculture. Pro- and anti-labeling groups want a national forum in 2015 after three years in a row of state referendums on labeling and Vermont’s passage of a labeling law to take effect in July 2016. Labeling is one of the areas where alternative agriculture and the amorphous food movement conflict with large-scale “production” agriculture. Conventional agriculture feels vilified by by alternative growers, who, in turn, fear being trampled. Attempts at coexistence – resolving concerns about pesticide and pollen drift or seed patenting – have made little progress.
Comprehensive immigration reform is broken into pieces. Republicans, who will control the House and Senate in the new year, favor incremental legislation with a limited scope, starting with border security, rather than the panoramic Senate-passed bill that stalled in the House throughout 2014. With estimates that more than half of the agricultural workforce is undocumented, reform is a key issue since the current guest worker program fails to meet agriculture’s needs. The Senate bill offered a special path to citizenship for farm workers, an incentive for workers to stay on the farm. The goal may shrink to getting a legal status for undocumented workers. Food processors and some farm groups say reform should create a year-round visa, which would benefit livestock farms, where animals need daily care, compared to the short-term visas now granted, often for harvest.