Lawmakers, Clinton Urge Subsidies, Other Aid for Farms

After several days of arguing over how to address a growing financial crisis on the nation’s farms, congressional Republicans and Democrats, along with the White House, Friday began urgently pushing plans to speed money to growers suffering from low prices and bad weather.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) announced Republican-sponsored legislation to speed payments to farmers of up to $5.5 billion in 1999 subsidies, and he agreed to “look very favorably” on a Democrat-written Senate plan to provide an additional $500 million in disaster payments.

President Clinton was also expected to address farmers’ difficulties in his radio address today, focusing on efforts to expand U.S. sales of surplus grain to needy nations, Agriculture Department sources said.

The Gingrich announcement gave the GOP an election year response to a crisis that affects farmers in 32 states. This week, Democrats failed in their efforts to reopen debate on the GOP’s controversial 1996 farm bill, but won support for lump-sum emergency relief that may not require offsetting budget cuts.

The 1996 farm bill, known as the “Freedom to Farm Act,” replaced the nation’s Depression-era commodity subsidies with a five-year system of fixed and declining “transition” payments.

Some Democrats have charged that the new regime has undercut farmers’ traditional “safety net.” But high commodity prices in 1996 and 1997 muted the debate until huge wheat surpluses this year drove prices down and bad weather crippled production, particularly in the upper Midwest.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) praised Gingrich for supporting the $500-million emergency fund, which he characterized as “by far the more helpful” of the speaker’s two announcements. But Daschle left little doubt that the battle over farm policy is far from over.

“In the longer term, we have to look at the whole issue” of the farm bill, Daschle said. “We could have that philosophical debate and not do anything now, or we can try to do something real for farmers in the short term.”

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), principal sponsor of the emergency relief measure passed by the Senate late Thursday, said excessive rainfall in North Dakota over several years has led to diseases that have ravaged the state’s wheat and canola crops.

“Put it all together and North Dakota stands to lose 2,000 of the 30,000 farmers in the state this year,” Conrad said.

Both parties were pleased with Gingrich’s plans to make available the $5.5 billion in 1999 transition payments on Oct. 1. Half of that would ordinarily be distributed at the end of the year and the other half next September.

Both houses lifted prohibitions on commodity sales to India and Pakistan. Clinton signed the bill in time for the United States to bid on and win a contract to sell 300,000 bushels of wheat to Pakistan.

Wire services, quoting a White House official and Democratic congressional sources, said the president intends to get in the act today, announcing during his weekly radio address that the Agriculture Department plans to purchase a wide range of grains, meat and oil seeds for use in humanitarian foreign aid programs.

Discussions were said to be still underway on the amounts of money and wheat involved and where the wheat would go.