The commodity group infighting that surfaced during the drafting of a farm bill proposal for the now-defunct “Super Committee” will make it more difficult to write the legislation in regular order. That’s according to veteran ag policy-watcher Jim Wiesemeyer, who looks for many of the features of the draft bill to ultimately find their way into law.
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Wiesemeyer, senior vice president of policy and trade issues at Informa Economics, says the most significant policy change in the draft farm bill was the re-coupling of government payments to production.
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Wiesemeyer predicts budget-cutters will go after crop insurance premium subsidies after they whack the Commodity Title. He says that’s because producer subsidies account for 60 percent of the nearly 9-billion federal dollars spent annually on crop insurance.