Conaway: Farm Bill Won’t Have Relief For Tariff Retaliation

The proposed 2018 farm bill is unlikely to provide producer relief from tariff retaliation from China or others—the money’s just not there.  House Ag Chair Mike Conaway says he’s working with a ‘bare-bones’ budget to write a farm bill, and argues there’s already money available in an earlier-passed bill.

“Those near term emergency protections were revitalized with the supplemental under section 32 for Sonny Perdue our Secretary of Ag to be able to be more nimble with respect to that and that’s already in place.

There’s also the recently-passed omnibus budget bill that eased restrictions on the Secretary’s Commodity Credit Corporation borrowing authority, though the existing $30 billion ceiling would be reduced by other commodity spending.  Chairman Conaway added the farm bill meantime, extends current programs to promote ag sales abroad.

“Market Access Program, the Foreign Market Development Programs, those really important programs sell American products around the world.  The French spend more on peddling French wine then we spend on our entire program.”

Farm groups argue they’d rather have markets than government payments, but cannot afford to lose a massive market like China, if there’s a trade war.

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