Wednesday, April 9, 2008
First Farm Bill Conference Meeting
Statement of Chairman Tom Harkin
Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), Chairman of the Senate-House Conference Committee on the farm bill, today held the first meeting for all Senate and House farm bill conferees. Harkin’s introductory remarks as prepared for delivery are as follows:
"Thank you very much Chairman Peterson. To begin, I want to wish a good morning to all who are assembled. The long awaited time has come for us to finish the farm bill. Spring is here, farmers are in the field in many parts of the country, other parts of the country up north are getting ready. So we need to finish this bill and we need to finish it before next Friday. I am certain that we can do that.
"I commend the Speaker for appointing House conferees last night so we could move quickly this morning. In particular, I want to recognize and thank Chairman Peterson for his hard work, his leadership and cooperation on this legislation – and likewise, my thanks, to Ranking Member Chambliss for his guidance of this committee and for his help in laying the groundwork for this farm bill through many hearings around the country. I also want to thank Ranking Member Goodlatte on the House side for his diligent work. And of course all conferees. On a task as large as a farm bill, there is a great deal of shared work, and a lot of shared leadership.
"Naturally, we are here in conference to resolve and reconcile the differences between the House and Senate versions of this legislation. There are significant differences and disagreements, to be sure, yet we also have a lot of shared goals, objectives and interests. And these differences can be resolved and reconciled – and in fact many of them already have been in the hundreds of hours of informal staff discussions over the past weeks. I especially would thank all of the staff who have really worked hard on this. Mark Halverson on our side, Martha Scott Poindexter also on our side. Rob Larew and Bill O’Connor on the House side and all of the staff.
"Both versions of the bill continue and strengthen our system of farm income protection, a crucial component to this legislation. Both bills address additional national priorities: filling the gaps in nutrition assistance, investing in farm-based renewable energy, helping farmers and ranchers conserve our natural resources, devoting substantial new funding to initiatives for growers of fruits, vegetables and horticultural crops – this is the first farm bill to ever really do that.
"The bills update and improve policies in rural development, trade, food aid, research, credit and forestry. Let me be clear about one other thing in addition, the Senate bill includes and funds a key initiative to help compensate farmers and ranchers for disaster losses in a wide range of crops and livestock. The program is one to build upon and strengthen the assistance we have previously enacted in crop insurance, crop loss and livestock compensation programs. Including a disaster program in this farm bill is of course a signal priority for the Senate.
"As we know so well, Pay-Go budget rules, which we reinstated in this Congress, have made completing this bill very challenging. To meet Pay-Go, the House included in its version of the bill certain revenue provisions as budget offsets, as we did in our bill. But since, under the Constitution, we in the Senate cannot originate revenue measures in the Senate, when we do receive one from the House it is to be expected that the Senate will apply its views and judgments to the measure. These tax provisions added by the Senate are, naturally, an important part of the bill.
"In sum, I am proud of what we did in the Senate bill. We reported it out of our Committee in just a day and a half on a voice vote. But our bill passed the Senate by a large bipartisan majority – 79-14 – the largest Senate majority for a farm bill since 1948.
"So I believe that we can bridge these differences, we can reach our objectives. We have come too far to fail to carry through and finish this job. There has been a lot of talk in the press about extending the bill and about doing a baseline bill. We’ve come too far for that. We’ve got too much good stuff in this bill in all those areas I just mentioned.
"However, this morning we are not really here to debate the merits of the Senate’s version of the farm bill versus the House’s version. We have gone a substantial distance beyond that in reconciling and resolving our differences. For over a month, we have been working on the assumption that we will have available $10 billion in addition to our 10 year budget baseline. Based on that assumption, we have come to a basic agreement on a House-Senate budget framework for allocating funding among the various titles of the bill.
"This framework is the result of a lot of hard work and negotiations between the Senate and House – it is bipartisan, it involved consultations with all of the conferees and their staff. Using this budget framework of $10 billion above baseline, we have made a good deal of progress toward crafting a bill and working towards our deadline of next Friday. We’re now close at finalizing an agreement that can be broadly supported using this $10 billion along with $9 we have shifted around within the baseline. A lot of effort has gone into producing this budget framework and a lot of effort has gone into working within it to construct the new bill.
"We’ve had to make some very tough choices in balancing out demands and expectations. Yet we can write a good bill that meets our obligations in our shared priorities - farm income protection, specialty crops, and nutrition assistance. We will also be able to devote a good deal of new funding to conservation and environmental programs, create a new disaster program and invest in farm and rural renewable energy and energy efficiency initiatives.
"It is true that none of us will get everything we want in this bill. I can assure you as this Chairman, I will not get everything I want and neither will anybody else. But I think we are all going to have something that we can be proud of. Frankly, to get that part of our job done, we must see a lot more cooperation, reasonableness and flexibility from the White House. After we passed our bill, 79-14, within two days the White House said they would veto it. Well, when you get 79 votes you don’t expect that kind of a response. It is time for the White House to come to the table and deal with us in good faith to get this critical bill enacted.
"We also need to reach agreement on the tax provisions that will be included in the bill going beyond the core farm bill provisions. Now that will be up to of course the Finance and Ways and Means Committees, not the Agriculture Committee, and so we will look to them to come up with that funding and agree with that so we can move ahead on this bill.
"So we should move ahead using the $10 billion budget framework we have worked so hard to achieve. Let’s not move backward. I am committed to keep right on meeting for as many hours and days as needed to write a strong forward looking farm bill to meet our nations’ needs.
"Our farmers, our ranchers, people all over this country that maybe are not on farms or ranches who want clean water who need nutrition assistance, people in our schools, all over, they’re all counting on us to do our job.
"I’m convinced with the relationship we’ve now built with the House, with the great working relationship we’ve had with Chairman Peterson and Ranking Member Goodlatte, that we can get this done. And so I would now thank everyone for being here for all of their help and input on this bill and I would recognize my good friend and the Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee who has carried the ball so far, Chairman Peterson."
