Hemp research gets $400 million | A subsidy for blending biofuel has been nixed, and a new Christmas tree tax added
(Reuters) — The new U.S. farm bill will cost an estimated $956 billion over 10 years, a saving of $16.6 billion compared with current funding, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The following are some provisions of the wide-ranging legislation, which comprises everything from food stamps and farm subsidies to meat labelling and crop insurance.
Funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, was cut by $900 million a year.
The legislation ends a nearly two-decade-old program of direct payments to farmers, which cost $5 billion a year and went to farmers and landowners no matter how much money they made or even whether they farmed their land.
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The plan had become politically untenable at a time of rising farm income. Lawmakers have instead expanded and revised crop insurance programs, which could put the government on the hook for bigger payouts in times of poor harvests.
This provision, which has been around since the 2002 farm bill, requires meat sold in the United States to be labelled as to where animals are born, raised and processed.
It remained in the 2014 bill despite heavy lobbying from the meat industry, which said it was a bookkeeping nightmare for meatpackers.
Mexico and Canada, two of the largest exporters of beef to the U.S., have challenged COOL at the World Trade Organization, while U.S. ranchers and consumer groups largely support COOL, arguing consumers deserve to know where their meat comes from.
The final bill excluded supply management proposals, which would have cut production in the event of lower demand and lower prices, but made changes to the insurance plan.
This amendment, intended to block a California law requiring that all eggs sold in the state come from chickens kept in non-confining cages, was included in the bill passed by the House of Representatives but was dropped from the final legislation.
Critics said the provision, pushed by Republican representative Steve King of Iowa, could have invalidated hundreds of state laws on animal protection and food safety.
King, supported by egg growers in Iowa and other states, said the California law violated the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Rural counties in the West breathed a sigh of relief after the farm bill included a payment in lieu of taxes program, which pays local governments for the tax revenue they cannot collect on federal land.
The $400 million a year program was a late addition to the farm bill.
With marijuana laws loosening, supporters of industrial hemp saw an opening and pushed through a provision that allows colleges and state agencies to grow and conduct re-search on the crop in the nine states where it is legal.
A provision removes subsidies for fuel pumps in rural areas that blend gasoline with higher concentrations of biofuel.
Ending the subsidies was a blow to president Barack Obama’s administration, which in 2010 set a goal of helping gas station owners install blender pumps over the next five years to promote consumption of higher ethanol gasoline.
Fiscal conservatives are particularly incensed by a provision in the bill that imposes a 15 cent fee on every fresh cut Christmas tree sold in the United States, with the money being used to promote demand for trees. Critics call it a tax and say it will be passed on to consumers but growers argue it is a fee similar to other commodity check-off programs.
