Conferees Ready to Finalize Crop Insurance

May 22, 2000

Senate and House conferees could meet early this week to finalize a crop insurance reform bill and send it back to both chambers for action before it goes to the White House. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman continues to have problems with the bill, including the expected addition of more than $7 billion in farm assistance.

"The administration strongly opposes assistance in the form of supplemental Agricultural Marketing Transition Act (AMTA) payments and urges Congress to consider the President’s farm safety net proposal," Glickman said in a letter to Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-IN) and House Agriculture Committee Chairman Larry Combest (R-TX).

Instead, farm income assistance should be targeted based on the level of producers’ economic hardship, he added. "Unfortunately, supplemental AMTA payments, such as we have seen in the over $8 billion Congress legislated in the last two years, would again be distributed without any adjustment for the estimated hardship facing individual producers this year."

The payments are based on what producers grew prior to 1996, Glickman continued, "not what they are growing now. Therefore, producers who may not even be growing crops anymore because they have switched to livestock production may receive payments, and producers who are growing soybeans this year may receive based on their old corn production."

Using many of the same arguments he used last year in a failed attempt to counter supplementing AMTA payments with farm assistance, Glickman also said he thought payments should be based on "what is happening on the ground this year and be focused to counter any likely drop in income derived form the crops producers actually are growing."

He also said the administration was concerned because the bill does not re-establish linkage between crop insurance participation and other USDA farm program benefits. He also urged Congress provide "adequate implementation funds and not restrict them to compliance purposes and that implementation deadlines in he bill are realistic."