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House reconciliation package would bring farm bill split to reality
The director of the Gardner Agricultural Policy Program at the University of Illinois says the budget reconciliation plan making its way through the U.S. House could bring a long talked about hypothetical into reality.
Jonathan Coppess tells Brownfield it essentially decouples food assistance from farm assistance.
“This pretty much changes what we consider to be a farm bill, if not effectively ending that long running 50-year kind of coalitional process.” He says, “What comes after it, I don’t know, but I think we have to understand that what the House bill does is effectively split those apart.”
He says proposed increases to commodity reference prices are being offset by billions of dollars in planned cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“It’s kind of one of those cardinal rules of a farm bill that you never take from one mandatory area and cover costs in another, and they’ve done that, and they’ve done it at the heart of that coalition of interests that really have struggled to keep things together,” he says.
Coppess says damaging that relationship likely makes full adaptation of the House’s plan more difficult.
“It just makes the whole thing politically problematic,” he says.
Coppess says it’s still early in the process, but House leadership wants to pass the legislation ahead of the Memorial Day weekend. It would then head to the U.S. Senate.
AUDIO: Jonathan Coppess – University of Illinois
It will come back to bite us all in the butt!