From Environment & Energy Daily: Obama admin touts biofuels, proposes cuts in farm conservation and subsidies Amanda Peterka, E&E reporter Published: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 President Obama has proposed cutting farmland conservation funding over the next decade, along with eliminating direct payments to farmers and reducing the amount the government pays to crop insurance companies. The cuts are part of Obama's proposal to reduce the deficit by $3 trillion, by generating $1.5 trillion in revenue through new tax provisions and making up the rest in spending cuts (Greenwire, Sept. 19). They include taking $2 billion over 10 years from farm conservation. Among the agriculture areas left unscathed is support for biofuels, which Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack touted yesterday as a sort of panacea to rural America's economic problems. To Republican agriculture leaders, Obama's proposed cuts take too much from the wrong areas -- crop insurance -- and not enough from others -- conservation and nutrition programs. [emphasis mine] "The president's policy priorities reveal a lack of knowledge of production agriculture and fail to recognize how wholesale changes to farm policy would impact the people who feed us," said House Agriculture Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) and Senate Agriculture ranking member Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) in a joint statement. In their 2012 agriculture appropriations bill, House Republicans proposed drastic cuts in conservation and nutrition programs and doing away with the only farm bill program to give support to farmers for planting feedstock crops for biofuels. In the bill, which they passed along party lines earlier this year, House members also marginally funded another rural energy program that helps farmers make energy-efficiency improvements (E&ENews PM, June 16). Senate appropriators, meanwhile, have proposed to keep the Biomass Crop Assistance Program funded at its current level but would also cut the Rural Energy for America Program by almost 50 percent. Given the proposals from the House and Senate, Vilsack yesterday warned that cuts now in biofuels and energy could have lasting impacts when lawmakers write the 2012 farm bill. "My focus right now is ... on making sure the programs that we think are helpful to this industry in the long-term -- which is the REAP program that helps build out the infrastructure and the BCAP program that provides assistance to producers to produce the alternative feedstocks -- that they remain in existence and that they're supported," Vilsack told reporters. Vilsack pointed to successes in REAP, which will add 50 more ethanol blender pumps to gas stations around the country between now and Oct. 1, he said. There are currently 194 pumps in the country; the goal is to reach 10,000 in the next 10 years, Vilsack said. The funding granted to REAP in the 2012 House budget is "minimal" and "not near the amount of money we need" to continue to fund priorities like the ethanol pumps, Vilsack said. Vilsack's comments came during a keynote address to the group Growth Energy, whose members are in Washington, D.C., promoting biofuels to their congressional representatives. Vilsack urged the group to work with other sectors in agriculture that sometimes have had different views on biofuels to present a unified front to the rest of the country. He also made it clear that he "absolutely" supported extending federal disaster assistance as Obama has proposed. He added that other subsidy programs would be reshaped under the Obama proposal. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which supports conservation and energy programs in the farm bill, yesterday opposed the Obama plan in a letter to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction formed after the debt-ceiling debate. "The Obama proposal holds promise, especially in the call for the end of direct payments," Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the coalition, said in a statement. "The farm bill cuts the president offered, however, are disproportionate to the size of the farm bill budget relative to total federal mandatory spending." Hoefner criticized the proposal for cutting direct payments without offering farms some other type of safety net to supplement farm income. He also said that since the proposal does not limit the size of subsidies given to any one farm, small and mid-size farms will be hurt. In a nine-page document, the coalition asks that the joint committee and Congress make fair cuts to commodity and insurance programs and not take any more from conservation programs. But the Obama administration writes in its proposal that conservation funding has increased 500 percent since 2002, leading to "difficulties in program administration and redundancies among our agricultural conservation programs." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - To unsubscribe from the IOWA-TOPICS list, send any message to: [log in to unmask] Check out our Listserv Lists support site for more information: http://www.sierraclub.org/lists/faq.asp