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Crop insurance reform likely this year By Tracy Sayler
Some sort of crop insurance reform is likely in 2000, and it could very well be a hybrid of
three bills (one in the house, two in the Senate) being considered by federal lawmakers. The House already passed a bill (HR 2559, The Agricultural Risk Protection Act of 1999) in the last Congress last October,
without a single no-vote, says Wayne Hammon, vice president of government affairs for the National Association of Wheat Growers. The bill was sponsored by House Ag Committee Chair Larry Combest (R-TX) and Thomas
Ewing (R-IL), chair of the House Risk Management and Specialty Crops Subcommittee. Among its features, the bill would offer improved coverage at better rates, offer risk management tools to livestock producers,
and limit reductions in insurable yields due to crop losses from a natural disaster. (Under this bill, 60% of the county's average yield would be the lowest yield assigned to a farmer for a crop year when actual
production history is calculated to arrive at insurable yields.) Text of the bill may be found online at: http://www.house.gov/agriculture/cropins.htm. The bill now awaits conference with a plan in the
Senate, where there are two leading proposals: The Risk Management for the 21st Century (
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d106:SN001580:)
sponsored by Sens. Pat Roberts (R-KS) and Robert Kerrey (D-NE) and the Farmers' Risk Management Act of 1999 (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d106:SN001666:)
sponsored by Senate Ag Committee Chair Richard Lugar (R-IN).Hammon says the Roberts/Kerrey bill is similar to Combest's House bill, but would include more administrative changes to the federal crop insurance system
itself, as well as more pilot programs to test new ideas, such as coverage for livestock, specialty crop, and low-risk producers. The Lugar plan would offer producers direct payments in exchange for implementing
certain risk management practices.Hammon says the NAWG supports the Roberts/Kerrey plan, as it offers the best coverage to wheat growers nationwide. Last year, the NAWG sent a letter supported by other farm
groups as well, urging the Senate Ag Committee to advance a bill. That letter sparked Lugar to at least commit to a date, March 12, to do so. Hammon expects crop insurance legislation to be taken up in
earnest late spring or early summer. A melding of the similar Combest and Roberts/Kerrey plans would move faster in Congress than a marriage of the Combest and Lugar plans. One possibility in the Senate is
that Lugar's plan could be included in the Roberts/Kerry bill as a pilot program. Any legislation would likely begin in the 2001 crop year. Along with keeping crop insurance reform efforts moving
along, Hammon says another key NAWG objective is to keep the budget resolution that earmarks $6 billion to reform intact. |
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