Green payments may gain if Senate's leadership shifts
Date: 24-May-01
Country: USA
Author: Charles Abbott
The upheaval, if it happens, will likely happen tomorrow, when Vermont Sen. James Jeffords is widely expected to bolt the Republican party for the other side of the aisle, giving the Democrats a Senatorial majority, 51-49.
Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin, who filed a "green" payment bill on Tuesday, was in line to become Agriculture Committee chairman if Republicans lost control of the chamber.
Expansion of soil and water conservation programs would be a top issue if Harkin succeeded Indiana Republican Richard Lugar as chairman, analysts and farm lobbyists said yesterday.
About $2 billion is spent annually on agricultural conservation programs now, most of it to idle fragile land. Harkin's bill could pay farmers double that amount, or $4 billion a year, to limit erosion, protect water purity, or benefit wildlife on the hundreds of millions of acres of "working lands" on U.S. farms.
"Conservation will be a big issue" if Harkin becomes chairman, said Ferd Hoefner of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, and Harkin's Conservation Security Act would gain prominence "because it's got his name on it."
The prospective turnover would come just as Congress was preparing to write a replacement for the "Freedom to Farm" bill that deregulated farming in 1996.
Green payments could be the defining mark of a Harkin chairmanship. There was a consensus in the House and Senate to retain the so-called planting flexibility of the 1996 law while creating a mechanism to send more money automatically to growers during the inevitable price troughs.
Congress has enacted nearly $25 billion in farm bailouts since late 1998 when grain prices collapsed. A farm-sector recovery was a year away at the earliest. Some $5.5 billion has been earmarked for a farm rescue this year.
Private consultant Bill Lesher said the new farm policy law would look "pretty much the same" whether Harkin or Lugar was chairman because of the narrow margin of control in the Senate.
"It wouldn't be night and day," Lesher said, although there would be some differences in emphasis.
With Harkin as chairman, there would be "a whole lot of discussion about a larger conservation" role, said Mary Kay Thatcher of the five million-member American Farm Bureau Federation. "It's very clear that's where he's wanted to go for a long time."
Harkin's conservation bill, which has a House companion, would pay farmers up to $50,000 a year, depending on how aggressively they adopted stewardship techniques. Farmers could be paid $20,000 a year for practices like cover crops with larger payments, peaking at $35,000 or $50,000, if they install buffer strips, restore wetlands, or adopt an all-farm conservation plan.
A number of farm groups, the Farm Bureau among them, support the concepts in the Conservation Security Act but have qualms about the language of the bill. Thatcher said the bill was "unworkable ... for a lot of folks."
"I would anticipate we would have a lot of discussion about 'one size doesn't fit all'," she said.
Critics say the bill is flawed in a number of ways. It offers the same lump payment to farmers, regardless of size of their operations or problems they face. Farmers would be paid for practices already in use, so federal outlays would rise without any gain in conservation.
