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WASHINGTON - The Senate shot down Sen. Richard Lugar's plan to make deep cuts in farm subsidies and force U.S. agriculture to rely on crop insurance to make up for income losses because of bad weather or low prices.
The Senate voted 58-37 Tuesday to kill the Indiana Republican's proposal, the first amendment offered during the long-delayed debate on rewriting the country's policies for agriculture and nutrition programs. Support and opposition was bipartisan. Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., voted against Lugar's proposal.
Lugar lamented that “our current farm policies, sold to the American public as a safety net, actually hurt the family farmer. In the name of maintaining the family farm and preserving rural communities, today's farm programs have benefited a select few while leaving the majority of farmers without support or a safety-net.”
The $286 billion plan proposed by the Agriculture Committee would largely keep the subsidy program, which pays the owners of farm land where certain grains, soybeans and cotton are grown.
Under Lugar's approach, the subsidies would have been eliminated. Instead, any farmer - no matter what crop - would have been eligible for an insurance program that would cover up to 85 percent of the farmer's previous income if the crop is devastated by bad weather or low prices.
Lugar said the “irresponsible” direct payments are made whether a farmer's income is high or low, and “much of which will go to some of the largest and wealthiest farming operations in America.” He said only 43 percent of farmers get the direct payments, and half of all the payouts went to 17 congressional districts.
He said taxpayers spend $26 billion to pay roughly $15 an acre for wheat, $24 an acre for corn, $33 an acre for cotton, $11 an acre for soybeans and $94 an acre for rice.
“These subsidies were originally called transition payments. They were meant to be a temporary bridge from supply management based subsidies to free market-based agriculture. They were never intended to be a continuing entitlement,” he said.
He said the system forces up the price of farmland, benefiting landowners - who might not be farmers - and dimming the likelihood of young people becoming land-owning farmers or even farmers who rent land to plant.
“If you are one of hundreds of thousands of farmers in this country who rent land as opposed to owning land, you face a very tough set of circumstances,” Lugar said. “Your rents are likely to go up each year as the value of the land goes up. Worse still, if you are a young farmer who hopes someday to own land, then your prospects diminish year by year.”
He said the bill undercuts the idea of family farms.
“Elderly farmers who may be land rich but cash poor will be more inclined to sell their farms as their retirement nest egg,” he said. “The most likely buyer of that farm is an owner of a larger farm who is in a position to expand thanks to government subsidies. … The facts are that consolidation is increasing, and this bill will perpetuate this cycle.”
Lugar said other aspects of the subsidy system violate world trade rules.
Bayh said Lugar's proposal “contains many worthwhile provisions” but that it would change things too fast.
“My concerns relate to how quickly we can transition to a new system, not our need to do so,” he said in a statement, echoing the complaint of the Agriculture Committee chairman.
“It just moves too far, too fast,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.
sylviasmith@jg.net
