How Will the Budget Process Affect the 2012 Farm Bill

 How Will the Budget Process Affect the 2012 Farm Bill. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

When Congress returns from the August recess - there won’t be much time left for the committees to make their recommendations to the super committee tasked with developing a bill to make dramatic spending cuts and potentially dramatic policy changes. House Ag Committee Chairman Frank Lucas notes October 14th is the target date for making recommendations to the super committee. He says his priority is working with Ranking Member Collin Peterson and the other Ag Committee members to get a grip on this budget process and how to handle the committee’s recommendations.

LUCAS: If this committee cannot come up with the trillions of dollars in savings that were agreed to earlier in the year then there’s an automatic sequestration process, we’ll have an automatic set of cuts across the federal budget. There will be certain things exempted. It appears, for instance, that CRP might be exempt from sequestration but things like EQUIP would not be - we’re trying to work through that to figure out what would be impacted because that impacts what kind of recommendations that we make to the committee.
 
Based on rough estimations - Congressman Peterson suggested ahead of the August recess that agriculture might fare better under across-the-board cuts. Lucas is trying to determine if that’s the case - but wants hard numbers before a decision is made.

LUCAS: The bottom line has to be, how do you preserve the integrity of federal farm policy? Now there are those who do not understand ag policy who say do away with this section or that section or this section of the farm bill, but it’s all intertwined. For instance, a lot of people say let’s do away with the direct payments. Well perhaps if you are a corn farmer where you’ve got the renewable fuels standard, you’ve got the blenders tax, you’ve got all these other issues that help support your price then maybe that’s not such an important thing. But if you look at cotton, you look at rice, you look at sugar there are other programs where the direct payment is a huge portion of their safety net. So it’s not just a simple equation.
 
If the super committee were to target and eliminate direct payments - Lucas says the House Ag Committee would suddenly be faced with having to write a new farm bill.

LUCAS: You cannot take the direct payments out and still in my opinion have a functioning section. For instance, wheat or the cotton people; you can’t do that. So it all comes down to what does the committee recommend and remember of the 12 members there’s only one real aggie in the whole bunch and that’s Senator Baucus from Montana and this group has the power as long as seven of the twelve members agree to make dramatic recommendations in virtually any part of the federal budget.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.