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Stabenow: Ag leaders proposal to supercommittee will be sound basis for new farm bill in 2012

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., said today that the farm bill proposal prepared for the failed supercommittee on deficit reduction fit within the budget allocated for it and will provide the basis for starting consideration of the farm bill next year, but that she does not plan to release a detailed copy of the bill.

Although questions have been raised about whether the Congressional Budget Office ever declared that the farm bill she and House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla., prepared was within allowable spending and still created $23 billion over 10 years in budget savings, Stabenow told reporters today that the bill — to use CBO language — “scored” within the allocated 10-year funding level.

Stabenow spoke to reporters after giving a speech to the Farm Journal Forum.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich.
“We will resume holding hearings when Congress returns in January,” Stabenow said in her speech. “The goal is for the committee to complete an initial product in the spring to provide plenty of time for Congress to complete its work.”

Stabenow also said that the process of writing the bill allowed her to get to know and respect Lucas and his staff. The bill they developed, she said, can be a starting point for next year, although she acknowledged that working out the details of the commodity title is still a challenge.

“We do not want to start from zero,” she said. “We have flushed out the areas where the tough questions are.”

She added that the committees can “move forward, using ideas and relationships that have been built. Farmers need predictability.”

Senate Agriculture Committee ranking member Pat Roberts, R-Kans., who also spoke to the forum, has said he wants to start “at square one through regular order,” a spokeswoman said.

Roberts has also said he was not included in the later stages of the development of the bill, but Stabenow said today that she, Roberts, Lucas and House Agriculture Committee ranking member Collin Peterson, D-Minn., “were involved every step of the way in areas they wanted to be involved in.”

Some commodity group leaders have said they worry that high target prices in the new program will lead farmers to plant to get program benefits rather than follow market signals. Stabenow said there were “legitimate questions on levels of what were called reference prices.”

Responding to a question on whether the new programs proposed in the commodity title of the farm bill would cause problems with the World Trade Organization, Stabenow said, “I don’t buy that.”

Stabenow said she has no plans to issue a formal update of a draft proposal she sent to the supercommittee but that her staff described as dated at the time it was leaked to the press.

Details of the final proposal will come out in the hearings this winter, she said.

Stabenow said she will continue to focus on “principles, not programs,” and that the first principle of her bill would continue to be risk management.

Hearings showed that farmers considered crop insurance to be the most important program, and that there was not enough support to continue direct payments. There was a “consensus,” she said, in favor of a program to cover the “shallow losses” that crop insurance does not cover. But she acknowledged that crop insurance does not work as well in some parts of the country as others, and that the committee will work on programs to help farmers in those areas.

The conservation title was one of the best accomplishments in the process, she said, noting that 23 programs were streamlined into 13 programs. Under the proposal, those programs would be put into five “tool boxes,” she said:
  • Working lands, including the environmental quality incentives program
  • Regional partnerships to address problems of soil conservation, water quality.
  • Easements to protect farm land from development and to protect wetlands
  • The Conservation Reserve Program to idle fragile lands, but also help with the transfer of land to beginning farmers.
  • Private grazing and small watersheds.
Stabenow also noted that the bill included measures to address fraud and abuse in the supplement nutrition assistance program known as SNAP or food stamps.

“I bear no tolerance for someone receiving food assistance who should not receive it,” she said. “I want it to go to those who need it.”