WASHINGTON,
March 8, 2015 – Lawmakers are bracing for a battle over federal spending as
House and Senate Republican leaders prepare budget blueprints for reducing the
deficit.
This
week is relatively quiet in Congress - the House is in recess. That will
leave just two weeks before the start of the both chambers’ two-week Easter break
for Republicans to move their respective budget resolutions, long-term plans
for spending and taxes.
Farm
organizations andanti-hunger groupshave been worried the resolutions could
include instructions to the Agriculture committees to propose cuts farm and
nutrition programs. Almost 400 groups wrote
the Budget committees last month urging them to reject any cuts to farm bill
programs.
One
potential target for cuts, crop insurance, received strong endorsements from
the likely GOP presidential candidates who attended the historic Iowa Ag Summit
Saturday in Des Moines. The candidates weren’t pressed at the event to oppose
specific cuts in the program. But in a typical remark, former Florida Gov. Jeb
Bushsaid crop insurance “creates a stability that makes it possible in very
volatile kinds of situations for farmers to be able to be successful.”
Meanwhile,
the Farm Credit
Administration is set to get two new permanent board members. The Senate
has voice votes scheduled late Monday on the nominations of two new members of
the FCA board, Jeffery
Hall and Dallas
Tonsager.
Hall,
a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, was state director of
USDA’s Farm Service Agency in Kentucky during the George W. Bush
administration. Tonsager is returning to the board, where he served for more
than four years before becoming USDA’s undersecretary for rural development
during President Obama’s first term.
Tonsager
replaces Jill Long Thompson, the board’s current chair. Hall replaces Leland
Strom.
The
Food and Drug Administration’s lame-duck commissioner, Margaret Hamburg, will
be back on Capitol Hill this week, testifying before the Senate
Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee on Wednesday.
Hamburg,
who is stepping down from FDA this month, appealed
to the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee last weekfor an
increase in spending to implement new regulations on farms, produce packers and
food processors under the Food Safety Modernization Act. The chairman of the
full House committee, Harold Rogers, R-Ky., told Hamburgthat the $150 million
increase would be “tough to swallow.”
Work
on President Obama’s trade agenda is continuing behind the scenes. The United States will host a
meeting of theTrans-Pacific Partnership chief negotiators meeting in
Hawaii all week.
Talks
continue in the Senate on terms for a bill to give the president the fast-track
trade negotiating authority he needs to complete the 12-nation TPP deal and get
an up-or-down on the agreement in Congress.
Senate
Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said last week that work on the
legislation is likely delayed until April because of this month’s budget debate
and his inability so far to wrap up an agreement with Democrats on the terms of
the Trade Promotion Authority legislation.
Rep.
Adrian Smith, a Nebraska Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee,
which handles trade legislation in that chamber, remains
optimistic Congress can pass TPA legislation this spring in order to have
time to consider a TPP agreement yet this year after the required 90-day
review. “We’re still on that track,” he said.
TPP
supporters want to get the agreement ratified before the 2016 campaigns heat
up.
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This Thursday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will be in Raleigh, N.C., to kick off a two-day conference USDA is sponsoring on biotechnology coexistence.
The conference will be part of a wide-ranging review of USDA’s biotech regulatory process that is likely to take several years, the administrator of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Kevin Shea, told Agri-Pulse. APHIS recently withdrew a 2008 proposed rule, developing during the Bush administration, that would have overhauled USDA’s regulatory process. “We’re looking at everything, fresh look,” Shea said.
Both
days of the conference will be webcast.
Also
on Thursday, Oxfam
America rolls out a report on the Obama administration’s $1 billion-a-year
Feed the Future agricultural development initiative. The group is hosting a
forum headlined by former Nebraska Sen. Mike Johanns, the former agriculture
secretary who championed Feed the Future in the Senate.
(Editor’s Sara
Wyant’s note: Agri-Pulse’s senior editor, Philip Brasher, will moderate a panel
that will include Tjada McKenna, who coordinates Feed the Future implementation forthe U.S. Agency for
International Development; Raymond Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America; and
the former president of a Tanzanian farmer group.)
The
Oxfam report, based on a series of case studies in six of the 19 Feed the
Future countries, will say that USAID has made “substantial, real and important
improvements” in the way it delivers aid. But the reportwill warn about an
“overreliance on a market-led investment approach” that could leave many women
and other smallholder farmers behind.
Here’s
a list of agriculture- or rural-related events scheduled for this week in
Washington and elsewhere:
Monday, March 9
The
U.S. Trade Representative’s agricultural trade negotiator, Darci Vetter, briefs
the American Farm Bureau Federation’s trade advisory committee.
11
a.m. – The Congressional Budget Office
releases updated baseline projections.
3
p.m. – USDA releases Latest
U.S. Agricultural Trade Data.
Tuesday, March 10
Noon
– USDA releases World
Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates and Crop
Production reports.
Wednesday, March
11
9
a.m. – Farm
Foundation forum, “The Nexus of Technology, Agricultural Productivity and the
Environment,” National Press Club.
10 a.m. – Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on state
perspectives on the Obama administration’s proposed limits to greenhouse gas
emissions from power plants, 406 Dirksen.
1 p.m. International
technical conference, sponsored by Farm Foundation, on “Agricultural
Productivity and the Environment,” USDA Economic Research Service, 355 E
St.
Thursday, March 12
All
day - Farm Foundation conference on “Agricultural Productivity and the
Environment.”
All day – USDA
Stakeholder Workshop on Coexistence in Raleigh, N.C. Agriculture
Secretary Tom Vilsack is the opening speaker.
8:30 a.m. – USDA releases Weekly
Export Sales report.
9:30 a.m.- Oxfam
America forum on the “promise and potential” of Feed the Future, Rotunda
Reception, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
10 a.m. – Senate Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on the Food and
Drug Commissioner, with FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, 138 Dirksen.
10 a.m. – Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the
Bipartisan Sportsmen’s Act of 2015 (S
556g), 366 Dirksen.
Friday, March 13
All
day - USDA Stakeholder Workshop on
Coexistence.
#30
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