Bush Calls for Farm Bill Completion

April 25, 2002

President Bush Wednesday called on the House-Senate farm bill conference committee to complete its deliberations and get a final farm bill to his desk. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman expressed some frustration with the conference committee's pace so far.

Bush told a gathering in Sioux Falls, SD, that he supported ethanol's role in a reformulated fuel standard. He also called for a final trade promotion authority bill to be finished by Congress.

Although he mentioned the farm bill and the need to complete the conference deliberations so a final bill can be delivered to the White House for his signature, he did not go into detail about any of the details of the bill he'd like to see in the final version.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Veneman said the process "has gone up and down, where sometimes you think they're working with you and everybody's at the table and you're working out compromises."

She added, "And there have been two or three times during this conference process where they believed they had an agreement on something fairly major in terms of a piece of it, particularly the commodity title, and then the Senate Democrats have pulled back. And so it's been kind of a continuous story like that."