With food stamps topping the list, The Hill details the seven Farm Bill food fights to watch this week in the US House of Representatives: The Midwest vs the South, The Dairy War, The Sugar War, The Egg War, Farm Subsidy Skeptics, and the International Food Aid Skirmish.
Here’s a segment from the farm subsidy skeptics section:
Bipartisan skeptics of farm programs will also offer a series of amendments, some of which have a shot of passing.
Rep. Richard Hanna (R-N.Y.) and Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) have introduced an amendment identical to a Senate-approved measure that adopts a 15 percent reduction in crop insurance payments for those making over $750,000.
Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) go further and limit crop insurance subsidies for wealthy farmers, ending them for those making more than $750,000.
Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/agriculture/306049-seven-farm-bill-fights-to-watch#ixzz2WZgPe4c1
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Another major sticking point with the Farm Bill- sticky rice.
Here’s the headline at Bloomberg.com: Sushi Aid in $1 Trillion U.S. Farm Bill Irks Watchdogs
Tucked deep in the 1,198-page U.S. House agriculture policy legislation is an initiative to guarantee prices for sushi rice. So too is insurance for alfalfa and a marketing plan for Christmas trees.
Temperate japonica rice used in sushi would be added as a crop eligible for price supports. The new program is justified because direct payments to rice farmers would be eliminated in the bill, said Charley Mathews Jr., who raises 600 acres of the rice variety near Marysville, California, about 40 miles north of Sacramento.
“We’re in a golden age of agriculture,” with producer profits projected at a record $128.2 billion this year, Vince Smith, a professor of agricultural economics at Montana State University, said at a briefing on Capitol Hill last week. The House bill “is about as bad a bill as I could think of writing as an economist,” he said.