Ready, set, go?

Agriculture News from HPJ - Your Ag News Source

Ready, set, go?

By Seymour Klierly

The House Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation, Credit, Energy, and Research kicked off legislative work on the 2007 farm bill on May 22. It's not common for farm bills to be written at the subcommittee level. Typically the work begins with drafts written by the chairmen then the full committees scrub that draft line by line and offer amendments. This year House Ag Chairman Collin Peterson has thrown another hurdle in the race to finish a bill by September.

Last week Chairman Peterson released his draft conservation, credit, energy and research titles in order for the subcommittee to convene this week to mark them up. Chairman Peterson's plan is to offer a rough framework for each title and then allow the subcommittee to flesh out the details. Once the subcommittee work is completed, the full committee will review the entire bill top to bottom. While his intention is admirable, several members are squabbling that this extra step may be a waste of time.

What may be rubbing some the wrong way is the fact that in order to keep the bill under budget, Chairman Peterson has given each subcommittee instructions that they may not use the $20 billion reserve fund to pay for new programs. Thus, any amendments in the subcommittee that create new programs or increase program costs must come with an offset. This severely limits what the subcommittees can accomplish.

On May 22 they met for six hours on the four titles and had little above the chairman's proposal to show for their work. Sure, there were some substantive changes to existing programs that, if included in a final bill, could benefit agriculture. However, members had little time to review the draft before the mark up. (This scenario may very well play out over on the Senate side too.) Subcommittee Chairman Holden convinced several members to withdraw amendments that increased costs and offer them again during the full committee mark up.

So the question must be asked. If this debate is going to happen again at the full committee level, why waste members' time with a subcommittee mark up where they are told to hold off on amendments? Members will have to travel a long road in rewriting this farm bill, and running into speed bumps and pot holes this early in the process won't make them happy.

Also not happy with House Chairman Peterson is Senate Ag Chairman Harkin. Citing budget constraints and growing criticism about the program's implementation, Chairman Peterson's draft of the conservation title cuts $1.1 billion from Senator Harkin's pet project, the Conservation Security Program. When news reached Senator Harkin, you can imagine he was rather upset. Harkin publicly responded with the following: "The House bill perpetuates the damage to conservation and the environment caused by the previous two Congresses and the Bush administration." Yikes! I'm sure Chairman Peterson, a Democrat, won't appreciate being linked to the Republican administration and the previously Republican controlled Congress, especially on environmental issues.