Lugar Provides Treatise On Farm Income, `Crisis' For Colleagues

August 4, 1999

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Richard Lugar brought his rationale to the Senate floor this week for $2-3 billion in direct aid for farmers that would bring farm income about equal to the average of the 1990s. To do more, he told Senators, would make 1999 "one of the best years agriculture has ever had."

In his floor statement Monday, Lugar said the projected $43.8 billion in net farm income this year will be pretty close to the $45.7 billion average for 1990-97. The difference is about 4%. "As I have listened to the debate, Senators appear to be describing a loss that is substantially greater than that," Lugar said.

He noted that Sen. Tom Harkin's (D-IA) claim that agricultural income could decline 29% this year is a decline in prices for principal field crops, not all of agriculture. Harkin, too, has acknowledged that.

Lugar concludes that some assistance "might be justified." U.S. farmers could not have anticipated the Asian financial crisis that began about two years ago. That could have taken away 40% of Asian demand for U.S. agricultural products. Good weather in major crop producing areas of the world has contributed to plentiful crops and trade competition. Europeans are rejecting corn and soybeans that have been genetically engineered just as U.S. producers are expanding dramatically the production of these crops.