Agriculture - Obama vs McCain
"Farm Policy"10/13/2008
What's At Stake: Agriculture
by Jerry Hagstrom
(National Journal Magazine - 10/3/2008)
http://www.smallgrains.org/article.aspx?id=7618
The war in Iraq aside, there may be no other issue on which McCain and Obama differ so starkly as they do on agricultural policy. McCain has opposed farm bill after farm bill; following Bush's veto of the 2008 version of the five-year legislation, McCain said he also would have vetoed it. Obama supported the bill, which Congress passed over Bush's veto with more than 300 votes in the House and 82 votes in the Senate.
Obama says that proper implementation of the new farm bill would be a high priority for his administration, and that's where the biggest differences come into play. Most of the law went into effect on Wednesday at the beginning of fiscal 2009, but it's unclear whether the Bush administration will finish writing the regulations on several new programs or whether those regulations will satisfy Congress. The bill includes an optional new program called "average crop revenue election," or ACRE, that would make payments to farmers if the revenue from a crop declines. Congressional leaders and the Bush administration have been sparring over which years the government should use as the revenue basis for starting the program. The bill also included new aid to farmers who have experienced weather-related disasters; administration officials say they are not sure whether they will complete the regulations for that program by January 20.
Obama would probably implement the farm bill in a generous fashion, given his history as a Democratic senator from Illinois and his backing during the primaries and caucuses from former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and other senators from the Plains states.
McCain's top economics adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, has said that the Arizonan would target farm subsidies as a key part of reducing the federal deficit. High commodity prices in recent years, however, have already cut farm subsidy payments to less than half the $20 billion that was common in the late 1990s. If the high prices continue, the only way that McCain could save much money from agriculture spending would be to cut nutrition programs, which now account for 65 to 70 percent of the Agriculture Department's budget. That would be hard to pull off, particularly since the 2008 legislation took several steps to boost nutrition programs.
The first agriculture battle of the next administration will be over the reauthorization of the child nutrition programs, due next year. Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, has signaled that he wants school lunch and breakfast programs, as well as other USDA spending to emphasize healthy foods; that portends a battle in Congress over what foods are healthy. Harkin and Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., may also try to restrict food advertising to children. Obama might be more sympathetic to Harkin and Durbin's arguments than would McCain.
In his statements to farm groups, McCain says he will support agriculture by opening up markets in foreign countries. Obama says he would promote trade, but he also expresses concern about current trade negotiations, which have not gone well. Leaders of farm groups fear that McCain's opposition to government assistance to ethanol programs might translate into a decline in corn and other commodity prices. On the other hand, they expect that a McCain administration would be friendlier to farmers on such issues as the regulation of "confined animal feeding operations," or CAFOs.
The big battle will come in 2012, when the next farm bill is due. One Republican lobbyist said that the congressional override of Bush's veto set a precedent and that farmers could comfortably vote for McCain with the knowledge that Congress could deliver the next bill over a veto. But Democrats say that 2012 is too far off to count on a repeat of that phenomenon.