Expanded former ag leaders group urges hearings on farm policy
A group of former agricultural leaders will send a letter to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate agriculture committees today, urging them to hold hearings and develop policies to reverse what they see as the decline in American agriculture.
The group, now numbering 45, noted that “many of us” wrote a letter in February, but the problems facing farmers have worsened.
“The limited response by Congress does not match the extent and severity of the difficulties farmers are encountering every day,” the group wrote. “The February 3 letter asked that you hold hearings on the farm crisis. This has not happened. More than ever before, Congress needs to seek out and listen to the hardships American farmers are facing, seriously engage with farmers on the causes and solutions, and exercise bipartisan oversight and legislative authority to reverse the decline and restore our nation’s agricultural economy.”
The letter writers make clear that they think policy changes – rather than short-term aid – are needed.
The letter says, “The administration’s ill-conceived war in Iran with its shifting objectives is costing American lives, depleting our military arsenal, and raising the cost of critical fuel and fertilizer inputs for farmers.” The administration’s tariff policies, it says, have “been and continue to be a disaster for American agriculture, resulting in export value losses, significant loss of market share, increased input costs and creation of new, competing global trading alliances by other countries.”
“Notably missing in the last five months has been anything from Congress that resembles a systematic, thorough, bipartisan engagement with farmers about what is really happening to their livelihoods and the farm economy and an extensive, candid assessment about policies that can reverse this crisis,” the letter says. “While the administration and Congress are fixated on ballrooms, taxpayer-funded monuments and bailouts for insurrectionists, the agricultural crisis in our country continues to affect real people – farmers and ranchers, their families and their communities.
“Short-term, inadequate (less than the administration paid to support Argentina’s beef industry) and poorly distributed handouts won’t fix the problems that we now face. The bailouts are simply an acknowledgement of the damaging impacts from lack of effective policies. American farmers want and need the long-term stable markets that they worked hard to create – not after-the-fact bailouts that fail to fully address the real problems and create their own damaging consequences.”
While most of the signatories are retired, the list includes Jonathan Coppess, a former Democratic Senate Agriculture Committee aide and administrator of the Farm Service Agency who is now Gardner associate professor of agricultural policy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Otto Doering, a Purdue University professor and Nobel prize winner.
The group has established a website address: info@restoreamericanag.com
-The Hagstrom Report
