Farm cuts worry Palouse

Jerry Snyder’s family has deep roots in the Palouse and a long history with one of wheat country’s most popular government programs, Food for Peace.

So the fourth-generation wheat and cattle farmer was disappointed, al- though not terribly surprised and not yet overly worried, when the Bush administration proposed cuts to that program, also known by its government designation of PL 480 Title II.

“It’s an excellent program. It boggles my mind that we don’t use it for the tsunami victims,” he said.

Snyder’s father worked with the Grange and the late Sen. Henry Jackson to help pass PL 480 some 50 years ago, when the focus was food aid to starving people in South Korea. Under the law, sometimes the federal government gives foreign countries low-interest loans to buy American grain and give to their people; other times, the government buys the grain and donates it to a country to avert starvation.

The program is not strictly altruistic. High-quality American grains get a marketing boost, and government purchases can take the pressure off bulging elevators in surplus years. Big sacks of grain stamped “USA” showing up in the far corners of a hostile world can be good for the nation’s overseas image.

Under the Bush proposal, the 2006 budget for Food for Peace would be cut $300 million compared with this year, down to $885 million. The $300 million would be added to the U.S. Agency for International Development, a shift the U.S. Department of Agriculture says would allow the agency to buy food commodities in markets closer to a disaster, and get them delivered more quickly. But that also means AID could use federal money to buy foreign grain, helping foreign farmers rather than American farmers.

“That would be a double whammy,” said Tom Mick, CEO of the Washington Wheat Commission. “Using U.S. dollars to buy French wheat or wheat from India – that wouldn’t sit well around here.”

A full 15 percent of all the soft white wheat grown in Eastern Washington is exported for famine and disaster relief, Mick said. “It’s one of our major markets,” he said, “part of our identity.”

Indeed, any effort to dismantle 50 years of sending food grown by American farmers to the hungry would eat into the sense of pride in wheat country.

The Food for Peace program has “brought hope and nourishment to the hungry corners of this earth,” according to the U.S. Agency of International Development’s Web site. Since it was created in the Eisenhower era, some 3 billion people in 150 countries have received American-grown food from the program.

The Bush farm budget also proposes a 5 percent cut to direct payments, cuts to conservation programs and a lower cap on support payments, setting the limit at $250,000 per farmer instead of the current $360,000.

Gretchen Borck, of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers, described the budget as a “shot across the bow” but said many aspects are so new that most people are still studying them.

“Every year, (administration budget writers) come up with a farm program and cut it all to pieces,” Snyder said Friday.

Democratic and Republican presidents alike have proposed cuts to farm programs for decades, said Jeff Emtman, the vice president of the state wheat growers. Even though rural America voted heavily for Bush’s re-election, “this administration’s no different.”

The response from farm country will also be no different. They’ll lobby heavily in Washington, D.C., hoping to change the Bush proposals that will likely face tough hearings in Congress.

Emtman, a wheat and bluegrass farmer in Valleyford, said that the government’s need to shrink the deficit has him nervous that warding off cuts to the farm programs will be more difficult this year. The proposed 5 percent cut in direct payments may not sound like much, but it follows recent jumps in fertilizer prices, which followed last year’s jump in fuel prices.

“All of rural America voted for Bush,” Emtman said. “We didn’t think he’d be hitting us this hard.”

Bruce Nelson, of Farmington, who was in Washington, D.C., when the budget was announced, said his discussions with the congressional delegation suggest the Senate is unlikely to go along with the Bush proposals. The House is harder to predict, but one thing in the farmers’ favor, he said, was that the Agriculture committees are largely nonpartisan in their approach to farm policy.

“So it’s not a done deal” that Bush’s proposals will get through Congress, Nelson said.

The wheat growers will have a farm bill task force to fight for programs they consider vital, Borck said. Congressional budgets will be out in mid-April, and they’ll be in Washington, D.C., in mid-March.

Although much of the national attention to the agriculture budget centered on the new limits on subsidy payments, that change would primarily affect large corporate operations for rice, cotton and sugar. It’s not the overriding concern in the Northwest.

While wheat farmers receive subsidy payments, the vast majority are not even close to approaching the cap.

According to a subsidy database maintained by the Environmental Working Group, just 15 out of 19,735 farm subsidy recipients in Washington collected payments in 2003 that would have been in excess of the proposed $250,000 ceiling.

Deduct conservation payments, and the database shows just five farms would have collected crop subsidies exceeding the proposed cap.

The largest recipient of federal agriculture dollars, and among those above the crop payment cap, is the Washington state Department of Natural Resources, which collected $1.1 million in overall subsidies, including $387,000 in crop payments in 2003.

Jim Fitzgerald, who as state executive director of the Farm Service Agency oversees federal subsidy payments made in Washington, said the database is consistent with his understanding of regional farm payments.

Farmers in this region aren’t chafing from the cap, he said.

“In the years I’ve been here I haven’t once had a producer comment that the cap is too low,” Fitzgerald said. “I’ll be interested if a lower cap would raise concern, but I doubt it would.”

A Bush appointee, Fitzgerald said the three priorities he took from the report were stepped-up efforts to combat bovine spongiform encephalopathy – commonly called mad-cow disease; reorganizing the USDA; and increasing trade opportunities.

“And I think that’s welcome news,” he said.