House, Senate Negotiators Break Farm Bill Impasse

House and Senate negotiators, under heavy pressure from Senate GOP leader Robert Dole (R-Kan.) to pass a farm bill this year, reached a compromise late Wednesday and broke an impasse over crop subsidies.

Lawmakers said they would take a tentative farm bill compromise, worked out in a closed session, to a public meeting today. They said a majority of negotiators agreed to the compromise.

The likely agreement was a two-year freeze on grain subsidies with a 2% cut in the third year and a 3% cut in the fourth year--cuts so small that negotiators said the deal was equivalent to a three-year freeze.

“It’s all right,” said Sen. John Melcher (D-Mont.), who had to be satisfied to prevent a filibuster on the Senate floor.

“I’m not dancing with joy,” said Senate Agriculture Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.)

Sen. Edward Zorinsky (D-Neb.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, said Agriculture Secretary John R. Block told him that “he couldn’t accept a three-year freeze. I said, ‘Do you want a farm bill?’ and then we started talking about a three-year freeze.”

Zorinsky got a promise of a vote by farmers next summer on higher prices and mandatory acreage cutbacks. But the vote would only be a poll and would not automatically usher in policy changes as required by other referendum proposals.

The tentative agreement followed an impasse at a public session of the House-Senate conference.

Dole, one of the negotiators, put the first farm bill offer on the table, a two-year freeze of grain subsidies, which House negotiators unanimously rejected. House counteroffers varying on a four-year freeze were also rejected.

Senate negotiators also turned down a three-year offer by Melcher, who had threatened to filibuster anything short of a three-year freeze.

“My view is the President would sign a two-year freeze, and I’m not sure he’d sign anything greater than that,” Dole warned negotiators.

A two-year freeze that might be signed by the President “is a bird in the hand . . . for the American farmer,” Dole said. If the farm economy remains depressed, Congress could always extend the freeze for additional years, he said.

The Administration has pushed for a reduction in grain and cotton subsidy levels to hold down costs and remove some of the economic incentive for overproduction in the face of mounting government surpluses and falling exports.