Cantwell on Farm Bill Part 2

Cantwell on Farm Bill Part 2

Cantwell on Farm Bill Part 2. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

Last week Washington Senator Maria Cantwell, travelled around the state talking about a number of issues including the Senate version of the farm bill that was recently passed. Overall she is pleased with the Senate’s version although there were a number of issues she wasn’t happy with. But one aspect she supported was the MAP program.

CANTWELL: This is something I supported by obviously one of my colleagues led a charge was the MAP program which is the market assistance program. A lot of people will attack that program and say that we shouldn’t do that or sometimes in the past people have attacked the research programs and said we don’t need to keep doing that research and people just don’t understand. We’re a lot of different farming interests. We’re not big companies who have their own research budget so we still need the research and we still need the market access because we’re helping countries like Nigeria or Asia start consumption of these products. And when they do, huge return of benefit.

As the House works on putting together their bill there is some concern that the midwest and the south may be hijacking the bill with their own interests.

CANTWELL: I think you are going to see some discussion between the House and Senate and we’ll see what the House ends up passing and we had a hundred people we had to work with but I do think that we benefitted. Senator Stabenow who chairs that committee is from a state that has a lot of specialty crops so I think she got that very easily. We had a lot of what I call northern tier senators - Idaho and Montana and North Dakota to help us on the PULSE issue and that may play differently in the House where you have so many members but yes, right now it looks like they’re responding with some of these older programs that they want to keep.

Cantwell has a message for those politicians.

CANTWELL: My message is that whether it’s some of my colleagues from Oklahoma or what have you is look at the details and look at the substance. The MAP program for example is a program that works very well in returning huge economic benefits because for our states we export huge amounts. It might be as much as 90%, it might be 50%, but we’re exporting overseas.

We’ll wrap up tomorrow.

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

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