Washington,
April 9, 2013-Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., introduced
legislation Tuesday that would eliminate direct payments to farmers and use the
savings to pay for federal crop insurance.
“Overall, the
legislation will strengthen the farm safety net while at the same time saving
taxpayers billions of dollars and preventing costly ad hoc agriculture disaster
programs,” Roberts said. “Time after time, we are told by producers that crop
insurance is the single most important program that helps them when disasters
strike.”
The
legislation would reauthorize the federal crop insurance program and expand
coverage options for producers through a Supplemental Coverage Option based on
an area yield and loss basis. It would
also amend the Federal Crop Insurance Act to make available separate enterprise
units for irrigated and non-irrigated acreages of crops in counties. The
legislation includes a provision to increase the county transitional yield to
address a declining Actual Production History yield issue.
The
legislation also continues the Stacked Income Protection Plan, known as STAX,
for producers of upland cotton.
In order to
help pay down the debt and reduce the deficit, Roberts said, the legislation is
fully paid for by the elimination of direct payments, saving taxpayers $5
billion over ten years, according to a preliminary score by the Congressional
Budget Office.
Roberts noted
that similar legislative language was included in last year’s Senate-passed
farm bill. He expects it to be included in the upcoming new farm bill, but
offered it as a stand-alone bill in case a farm bill is not agreed upon.
“Basically
that is because farmers are now planting their crop despite three years of
drought and all sorts of hardship and all sorts of uncertainty about a farm
bill that we’ve extended the 2008 act,” Roberts said. “That’s not what we
wanted to do in the Senate, but that’s what happened. So we hope that that
doesn’t happen again. And we hope that we can work again in a bipartisan way to
produce a product.”
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