Mar 15, 2018Farm bill negotiations heat up
As the first quarter of 2018 moves along, House and Senate negotiators continue to push for a rewritten Farm Bill this year and the National Potato Council said discussions have ramped up between committee staff, member offices and the industry in the hopes that the committees can begin marking up their bills soon.
“We’re starting to get the outlines of what various pieces of the bill will look like,” said Kam Quarles, vice president of public policy for NPC. “We’re particularly focused on where the spending levels for the research title and the trade title will end up.”
Last week, the Specialty Crop Farm Bill Alliance and the citrus industry sent a letter to both the House and Senate Agriculture Committees outlining the need for increased funding for the Specialty Crop Research Initiative. This program is slated to provide $80 million for all specialty crops beginning Oct. 1, but ongoing concerns over funding research to combat a disease in the citrus industry may stall that increase, the NPC said.
“We strongly believe that additional resources are justified under any circumstances but are especially reasonable given that today over 30 percent of program funding benefits only one specialty crop commodity,” the alliance wrote in a March 7 letter.
