WASHINGTON — The Senate has begun laying the groundwork for a half-trillion-dollar farm and food bill that would end unconditional subsidies to farmers, but House Republicans’ resolve to cut its biggest component — food stamps — by $13 billion a year dims its prospects of passing Congress.
The current five-year farm bill expires at the end of September. The Senate’s agriculture committee on Friday released a draft of its plan to redesign safety nets that help farmers weather bad times while achieving about $23 billion in deficit reduction.
The full committee is to vote next week on the plan, which consolidates conservation programs and takes several steps, such as stopping lottery winners from getting assistance, to make the food-stamp program more accountable.
But before getting a bill to the president, lawmakers must satisfy multiple constituents with different agendas — northern corn growers, southern cotton farmers, insurance companies, banks, nutrition groups and environmentalists. Most difficult will be narrowing the gap between the Democratic Senate and House Republicans taking aim at the food-stamp program, which is about 80 percent of the bill’s spending.
Farmers are cursed by their own successes. With incomes as high as they’ve been in decades, it’s harder to convince lawmakers that they still need strong protections for future disasters and market downturns.
Most give chances of success at no better than 50-50, which frustrates farm groups seeking some certainty in government policy. There’s seven months to work on a bill before the presidential election, said Jon Doggett, vice president for public policy at the National Corn Growers Association.
“Our membership is getting extremely concerned to hear members say we can’t pass a farm bill this year,” he said.
The Congressional Budget Office says that at the current spending pace, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, would spend about $400 billion over the five-year life of a farm bill enacted this year. Crop insurance subsidies would average about $9 billion a year, commodity subsidies $6.6 billion and farm conservation programs $6.5 billion.
Last fall, when the congressional supercommittee was making its futile attempt on a long-term deficit reduction plan, Senate agriculture committee chairman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and her Republican colleague in the House, Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, came up with a plan on which the agriculture committee based its draft of the massive bill.
