Agricultural News
Senate Gets House Farm Bill- Lucas Ponders Path Forward on Food Stamps
Wed, 17 Jul 2013 06:09:47 CDT
The middle of this week finds the Chairwoman of the Senate Ag Committe, Debbie Stabenow, working on paperwork that will lead to a Senate vote to send back to the US House requesting a formal conference with them on the 2013 Farm Bill. On Monday, Stabenow complained about the House not moving quickly enough, but her concerns were dealt with on Tuesday as the tect of HR 2642 arrived on the Senate side of the Capitol.
Meanwhile, the Chairman of the House Ag Committee, Frank Lucas of Oklahoma's Third Congressional District, has been quoted in The Hill blog as saying that that a formal farm bill conference with the Senate will have to wait until the House decides what to do with a standalone food stamp measure.
Lucas said that he cannot "in good faith" press GOP leaders to appoint conferees until he works to craft a bill cutting food stamp funding. "It would be difficult for me to move for a formal conference unless we address the nutrition issue," Lucas said.
Lucas issued a two page memo to the GOP Members of the House Ag Committee that thanked them for helping pass the House version of Farm Policy, sans Nutrition, last Thursday. In that memo, Lucas admitted the House Farm Bill has veered into a lane not normally traveled by previous farm bills. "There certainly have been some bumps in the road over the last few months, and admittedly we have broken with recent tradition by sending the Senate a "Farm-Only Farm Bill."
"However, the vote last week was a critical step in completing the bill as soon as possible. The simple fact is we now have a vehicle with which we can put in place a formal process to send a final 2013 Farm Bill to the President for his signature. Any suggestion to the contrary is playing politics with this process and does a disservice to our farmers and ranchers."
He told GOP members that he and Majority Leader Cantor are working on a "path forward" when it comes to the Nutrition title. It has been reported by Politico and The Hill that Lucas has the green light to bring a Nutrition title forward once he sees he has 218 votes to pass it- but that is not likely to be an easy task.
Regarding conference discussions with the Senate on the other 11 titles of the bill that are done in both bodies- Lucas says there is some heavy lifting to do with the Commodity Title and with Crop Insurance. "The Senate farm bill is inadequate on a number of fronts beyond providing insufficient reforms to SNAP. The Senate Title I fails what has been my fundamental threshold in the development of the next farm bill: it simply does not work for all commodities in all regions of the country and leaves many producers without a viable safety-net while locking in profits for others.
"Additionally, the Senate bill puts in jeopardy our crop insurance system which we have heard over and over is every producer's top priority by restricting participation of the most efficient producers and placing unnecessary and burdensome regulations on others."
You can read the full memo from Chairman Lucas to the GOP Members by clicking on the Lucas Memo.PDF link at the bottom of this page.
You can also read more from several different angles the latest farm bill developments- Keith Good with his Farm Policy blog pulls together everything for today- click here to read more.
00235_lucas-memo.pdf
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