House Gives Final Approval to Farm Bill

As some of the nation’s farmers started spring planting, the House gave final approval Thursday to legislation that would phase out government subsidies for a welter of crops as part of the broadest overhaul of farm programs in 60 years.

Passage of the “Freedom to Farm” bill, by a 270-155 vote, marked a historic move away from government intervention in the farm sector--a shift resisted by many farmers and their representatives in Congress.

The objections were overcome by an unusual coalition of conservative Republicans, who attacked the farm subsidies as costly and distorting, and liberal Democrats, who charged that the programs unfairly drive up prices for consumers.

“We have changed the farm program world,” Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said after the vote.

Subsidies would be phased out over seven years, providing $46.6 billion for farm programs over that period. The Senate passed a similar bill Feb. 7, and congressional leaders do not expect problems in combining the versions into a single measure acceptable to both houses.

The Clinton administration, which initially hinted that it might veto the bill because it would not provide farmers with a sufficient “safety net,” has called the legislation a good first step.

Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, in a statement to reporters, called on House and Senate negotiators to boost funding for nutrition programs that are part of the nation’s welfare system and for development in rural areas.

The negotiating committee “must make improvements in both the Senate and the House bills before I can recommend [that] the president sign the legislation,” Glickman said.

In two days of debate, House lawmakers rejected bids to bring an abrupt end to the Agriculture Department’s peanut support program and its sugar program--two government subsidies long criticized as wasteful and unnecessary. While those programs are to undergo minor reforms in the bill, critics from both parties argued Thursday that they should be scrapped altogether.

Lawmakers amended the bill to reject a dairy plan that would have reversed the long slump in dairy farm revenues while raising consumer costs along the way.

The bill’s greatest impact would be on growers of cotton and feed grains such as wheat, corn and soybeans. Since the Depression-era New Deal, the government has undergirded the price of such crops by making “deficiency payments” to farmers when market prices have fallen below levels established by Washington. But by 2002, farmers would receive no direct payments from the government.

To ease the transition and shore up support for the legislation among farmers, the House and Senate bills both provide for fixed-but-declining direct payments to farmers over the next seven years. Unlike payments made under the current program, those funds would be disbursed without conditions that have dictated farmers’ planting decisions in past years.

Farm groups such as the American Farm Bureau have supported the bills, despite misgivings, because withdrawal of government control would allow farmers to make planting decisions based on market conditions rather than government dictates.

The House, responding in part to criticism that Republicans have been too hostile to environmental programs, also added a conservation package similar to the one in the Senate bill. Under the Conservation Reserve and Wetlands Reserve programs, the government would pay farmers to take environmentally sensitive lands out of production.

The House measure, like the Senate version passed last month, would also add a $200-million-a-year program to help crop and livestock producers fight pollution.