Glickman Spells Out Preferences For Farm Law Changes

August 4, 1999

Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman believes that farm policy should concentrate assistance to producers suffering from low prices. Supplemental freedom to farm payments don't address the problem, he says. Many who get those payments are absentee landlords who are not active in farming. He also declined repeatedly to put a price tag on how much assistance he thought farmers needed this year.

"To be sure, the immediate need is to provide cash assistance to mitigate low prices, falling income and, in all likelihood, falling land values. Additional financial support needs to be provided soon to alleviate income losses and financial distress resulting from low prices," he told the Senate Agriculture Committee Tuesday.

Congress should enact "a new program or a program that utilizes existing mechanisms to target assistance to producers suffering from low prices," he said. The freedom to farm transition payments should continue to be advanced, he added, but supplemental payments do not provide the targeted relief that is needed.

"Only those with existing production flexibility contracts are entitled to receive a payment and many of the payments benefit absentee landlords rather than producers," he said. Supplemental payments would not benefit soybean or hog producers, "even though they face great financial hardship."

Payments should be targeted better to smaller and medium sized farmers, and a separate payment limitation should be used for emergency assistance payments, according to Glickman.

Glickman also predicted that hog, cattle and field crop prices likely will be low for the rest of this year and much of 2000. "For principal crops, net income could fall further," he said. "For the next crop year, our current projections place cotton and soybean market prices at the lowest levels since the early 1970s, feed grain prices at the lowest levels since the mid-1980s and food grain prices at the lowest levels since the early 1990s."

Glickman's analysis of why prices are low, ironically, did not differ greatly from that of the committee's chairman (see next story), though their conclusions were far apart. Senators of both parties told Glickman the Administration needed to play a greater role in crafting a compromise. Congressional Democrats have been frustrated with what they see as the Administration's halfhearted approach to the issue, a frustration that has sometimes spilled over into public comments.