Nethercutt Seeks Deal On Farm Bill Lawmakers Likely To Override Plan To Protect Some Farmers

Republican leaders likely will override Southern legislators’ attempts to protect peanut, cotton and sugar farmers in the 1995 farm bill, U.S. Rep. George Nethercutt of Spokane said.

And Nethercutt, who was appointed earlier this year by House Speaker Newt Gingrich to chair a task force on agriculture, may be the one to deliver the message.

Nethercutt said Tuesday in a telephone interview that he has been called in by Republican leaders to be a mediator in the debate. The first-year congressman is not a member of the House Agriculture Committee, but became a favorite among party leaders last year after defeating former Speaker Tom Foley.

Nethercutt said he hopes to help legislators this week pound out a compromise on the seven-year national farm bill to satisfy both members of the ag committee and House Budget Committee.

Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., last week failed to gather enough votes for his “Freedom to Farm Act,” a program that would phase out payments to farmers by 2002 and force them to survive in a free market. Nethercutt supports the Roberts bill.

Failure to pass the bill out of the committee means the Budget Committee now has authority to write the national farm program, which has spent from $8 billion to $26 billion each year during the past decade. The new program, however, must slash $13.4 billion out of the budget in seven years.

Roberts was thwarted by Southern Republicans who broke ranks and voted with Democrats who were concerned that sugar, peanut and cotton farmers would not survive the transition to a free market. Current programs protect farmers of those crops from cheap imports.

“We can’t stay with the same programs and survive a House vote in this climate of budget reductions, where we are turning away from subsidies and to the free market,” Nethercutt said. “Time is running short here, but my expectation is that we will reach a consensus this week or next.”

Nethercutt said Gingrich supports Roberts’ plan and likely will seek to modify it to satisfy the Southern bloc.

The Senate Agriculture Committee has approved an alternative plan that saves money by decreasing the amount of acres that can collect subsidies. While the government does not make payments on these acres, it permits farmers to grow any crop on the land to generate extra income.

The flexible program works well in the South, where soybeans and other crops earn a decent return. But it is little help, Nethercutt said, for dryland Inland Northwest wheat farmers, who fallow half their farm to produce a crop on as little as 6 inches of annual rainfall. Alternative crops for these growers often are limited to barley and weeds.

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