A group of more than a dozen congressional Democrats is urging the Trump administration to impose safeguards on farm aid payments to prevent the money from further driving consolidation in U.S. agriculture and take steps to ensure a transparent process.
“It is critically important that USDA administer the relief payments in a way that results in the most aid going directly to the most impacted farmers,” the 14 lawmakers led by Connecticut’s Rosa DeLauro wrote to President Donald Trump on Monday.
The lawmakers complained that during Trump’s first term, assistance paid out under the Market Facilitation Program (MFP) disproportionately benefited larger farms and those in specific geographic areas. The program also had limited controls to prevent fraud, they charge.
The administration has announced it will provide $12 billion to U.S. farmers as a “bridge payment” to tide them over until further aid lands next year, with $11 billion going to row crop producers as soon as February.
“As your administration proceeds unilaterally with a relief package,” the lawmakers wrote, “it is imperative you incorporate provisions to ensure that taxpayer funds do not only go to bail out giant agribusinesses, perpetuating the consolidation of the agriculture sector, but go to farmers who actually need them.”
Accordingly, the lawmakers recommend guardrails like introducing a “Grow American” requirement to prevent foreign conglomerates from taking a large share of the available funding, reviving cancelled competition initiatives and consulting with the Department of Justice’s antitrust division and the Federal Trade Commission on additional guardrails.
The group of Democrats, which included multiple House Agriculture Committee members among the signatories, also called for the administration publish the methodology it will use to determine the size of relief payments and collect public feedback. They note that the MFP methodology was developed behind closed doors and resulted in the administration overestimating the damage producers faced from tariff retaliation.
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“Publicly posting the methodology and soliciting public comment will allow farmers and the organizations that represent them … to provide valuable feedback to ensure money is being spent as intended and will actually go to address harm where it has occurred,” they argue.
Further, the lawmakers pushed for a publicly accessible database to track payments made under the Farmer Bridge Assistance (FBA) program – as the $11 billion program has been dubbed. Such a database should include aggregate amounts, they say, but also details on the types of crops that have received payments, their location – down to the congressional district – and the proportion of payments that went to smaller farms.
“[W]e urge you, in the strongest terms possible, to incorporate the recommendations in this letter into your tariff relief package for farmers to address the failures of the 2018-2019 MFP,” the lawmakers conclude.
The letter is only the latest effort from lawmakers to shape the administration’s relief efforts. A broader, bipartisan initiative last week from more than 100 House lawmakers sought to convince congressional leadership to back a program for specialty crops that resembles the Marketing Assistance for Specialty Crops (MASC) or the second round of Coronavirus Food Assistance Program.
Lawmakers are also facing calls from industry to do more, particularly from representatives in the specialty crop sector, who are concerned that they may face significant delays to accessing relief after they were not included in the initial FBA program.
Producers need "speed,” Casey Creamer, president and CEO of California Citrus Mutual told Agri-Pulse last week. He said he supports lawmakers pushing the administration to revive the tried-and-tested MASC model.
"If you try to wholesale change it you're just going to delay the process," Creamer said. “Why try to reinvent the wheel? Let's look at the programs that have been successful."
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