No immediate disaster assistance for Louisiana

Sep 30, 2008      Agweek

Jerry Hagstrom

Sep. 30, 2008 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- WASHINGTON -- The Agriculture Department cannot use the new farm disaster program in the 2008 farm bill to provide immediate assistance to farmers in Louisiana, Deputy Agriculture Secretary Chuck Conner said Sept. 24.

At a hearing, Conner came under pressure from Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Ad Hoc Disaster Recovery Subcommittee Chairman Mary Landrieu, D-La., to provide assistance to Louisiana farmers whose operations have been damaged by hurricanes Fay, Gustav and Ike. "There is an economic crisis unfolding throughout Louisiana," Landrieu told Conner at a hearing she jointly chaired with Senate Agriculture Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.

"Gustav and Ike caused more damage to agriculture than (Hurricane) Katrina," added Sen. David Vitter, R-La.

Landrieu said damage to agriculture in Louisiana totaled more than $700 million, with soybean, corn, rice and sugar cane crops devastated.

Landrieu held up bags of quality corn and soybeans and bags of damaged corn and soybeans that she said neither grain elevators nor banks know how to handle.

Harkin also emphasized the impact of disasters on rural areas, noting that the impact of flooding on Cedar Rapids, Iowa, had gotten more attention than the devastation in rural areas.

Indecision But Conner said that even though the 2008 farm bill contained a new permanent disaster program known as SURE (the supplemental revenue assistance payment program), USDA is not close to issuing the rules for it and that because the new rules require that it be based on income losses the agency will not make payments until it has data on incomes from the 2008 crop marketing year.

"I don't want to leave you with the impression (the rules) are imminent," Conner said.

He noted that the program is based on losses from "whole farm revenue" and that USDA has to develop crop histories on more than 400 crops in order to keep track of prices and revenues.

Conner added that Congress did not provide USDA with power to speed up the rule making process and that it will involve a 60-day comment period. Qualifying farmers with losses in 2008 eventually will be eligible for assistance and receive checks next fall, Conner added.

"Next fall is too late," Landrieu says. "The department has the responsibility to come up with some suggestions to avoid an economic collapse."

Conner noted that Louisiana farmers would receive crop insurance payments for losses and direct payments that are already in the pipeline. He also promised that Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer would act as soon as possible to issue a secretarial declaration that there is a farm disaster in Louisiana so that Louisiana farmers can get other kinds of assistance.

Help may be too late Louisiana farm leaders raised issues that could pose problems for the SURE program even after rules are written. They said in prepared statements that some farmers would not be able to receive assistance under SURE because they had not signed up for crop insurance or bought too low a level of crop insurance. They said the program's payments would come too late to help because USDA needs to know the farm's revenue before establishing the payment level.

"If the goal is to provide a hand up to farmers when they most need it, before the natural disaster becomes a full-fledged economic one, the SURE program's linkage to whole farm revenue is problematic," Louisiana sugar farmer Wallace Ellender IV testified. "For sugar cane farmers this requirement would mean that any SURE payment would come approximately a year after the disaster occurs. Based on the experience of many of our farmers who were hit hard in 2005, the assistance can arrive too late to save the farm, even if it does ameliorate some of the debt load after the fact."

Newstex ID: KRTB-0012-28469167

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