Iowa congressmen say quick action needed on Farm Bill

Iowa congressmen are warning that failure to approve the 2012 Farm Bill will compound drought-related problems faced by producers across much of the Midwest.

“Failure to quickly pass a farm bill will have a devastating impact on our constituents and the agriculture industry across the country,” 1

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District Rep. Bruce Braley, a Waterloo Democrat, wrote in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner urging action on the Senate-passed bill.

However, an Iowa-based agricultural economist says the impact would be “almost none” if Congress doesn't approve the Farm Bill before harvest season.

“The big stabilizing force in the crop sector is crop insurance,” Bruce Babcock, professor of economics and the director of Iowa State University's Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, said on Iowa Public Television's Iowa Press. About 90 percent of Iowa row crop farmers have crop insurance protection. In a worst-case scenario, he said, indemnities paid to Iowa farmers for their losses could be as much as $4 billion this year.

While there was bipartisan support for the Farm Bill in the Senate and the House Ag Committee, Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, has held up action reportedly to prevent an intra-party fight before the November election.

Second District Rep. Dave Loebsack, an Iowa City Democrat, blamed Tea Party members in the House Republican caucus who say the bill is full of “special interest entitlements.”

Farm state Republicans don't want to be seen as unsupportive of programs to protect farmers. At the same time, many Republicans don't like the “ObamaCare for corn” nature of crop insurance and other farm programs.

The analogy came up last week during a discussion between Babcock and Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's Colbert Report.

Babcock called it an appropriate description because just as the Affordable Care Act attempts to enlarge the pool of the insured to be representative of the population at large, farm “subsidies have been so large that the pool of insured represents the population of farmers now.”

“And the further analogy is that crop insurance subsidies are justified in order so that people don't demand disaster assistance whereas with ObamaCare the subsidy is to get them in the pool so that they don't go to emergency care for their primary physician,” he said on Iowa Press. “So, in fact, it kind of is ObamaCare.”

Babcock did express concern for livestock producers who already are culling their herds because of lack of grazing land and higher feed prices as a result of the drought.

The livestock disaster provisions that were in the 2008 farm bill expired in 2011 as part of a congressional budget “gimmick.” He said.

“So there's talk now of resurrecting some of those in a one-year extension and so that would be really the only justification or reason for needing a Farm Bill in order to deal with this drought,” he said.

However, Sen. Tom Harkin warned the Senate may not go along with either a one-year extension of the Farm Bill or passing some sort of targeted drought disaster assistance.

“If the House tries to pull this at the last minute, I don't see any way they are going to get it through the Senate” before Congress adjourns for its August recess, he said.

“I'm all in favor of getting it through as rapidly as possible. But there are some people over here who don't feel that way,” Harkin said. “I would not have a lot of hope of it getting greased through the Senate.