| TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) -- To farmers and agricultural groups
watching the 2000 presidential and congressional races, Republicans and
Democrats seem a world apart. The groups say a lot is at stake -- the next
Congress likely will work on a new farm bill, and the fate of the
"freedom to farm" policy, enacted four years ago, will depend
upon who gets elected both to Congress and the White House this November.
Current Republican and Democratic leaders offer dramatically different
views on the policy -- the national Republican Party platform defends
freedom to farm, while Democrats, including President Clinton, consider it
a failure.
"It's crucial," said Jamie Clover Adams, the Kansas
agriculture secretary, said of the Nov. 7 election. "The bulk of the
policy is hashed out in Congress, but it's going to take the cooperation
of the USDA."
The freedom to farm law was designed to ease farmers' long-term
dependence on the government by ending a Depression-era system of
production controls and lowering federal price supports.
In turn, farmers were guaranteed payments that would decline through
2002, but allowed to plant whatever they liked, without the threat of
losing government subsidies.
The measure has come under increasing criticism since 1998, when
commodity prices collapsed. Since then, Congress has approved billions of
dollars in emergency aid to help the nation's troubled farm economy.
Republicans have a long list of reasons the law hasn't worked: Export
polices that aren't aggressive enough, Clinton vetoes of favored tax
relief legislation and the late-1990s' dip in foreign economies known as
"the Asian flu."
Most Republicans view the underlying policy of freedom to farm --
phasing out both government control and government support -- as sound.
"The big question is: Should freedom to farm be fixed or
replaced?" said Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican who helped
write the policy in 1996 as then-chairman of the U.S. House Agriculture
Committee.
President Clinton labeled the law the "Failure to Farm Act"
during recent remarks at a campaign fund-raiser for Democratic Rep. Dennis
Moore.
"If those Republicans would have listened to Dan and me back in
1995, we wouldn't have had to have all these bailouts the last three years
with the farmers because of their Failure to Farm Act that I warned about
back then," Clinton said.
Clinton was referring to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman and
emergency relief for farmers. Glickman said a flood of payments from
Washington had kept agriculture policy from becoming an issue in the
presidential race.
"The amount of dollars going out have shielded people from feeling
compelled to storm the gates of Washington," Glickman said.
Republicans blame the Clinton administration for not doing enough to
open foreign markets for farm products. Roberts also argues that if
Democrats drive the farm policy debate, it will mean imposing government
control over decisions in rural communities.
"I don't think most farmers want to go back to what I call
'command and control' agriculture, where the decisions in agriculture are
made from Washington," Roberts said. |