In a January 17th Dear Colleague letter, Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, outlined her proposal for strengthening the farm safety net in the 2024 Farm Bill (found here). The proposal centered around five key principles:
- programs must be targeted to active farmers;
- we need to provide farmers choices and flexibility;
- assistance should be timely;
- we need to expand the reach of programs to help more farmers; and
- we need to address the emerging risks farmers face.
Since the letter was released, considerable attention has been paid to the comments she offered about crop insurance and providing producers expanded safety net choices. Part of the proposal reads as follows:
“The 2018 Farm Bill provided cotton farmers with a choice between the traditional base acre programs and a highly-subsidized and streamlined area-based crop insurance policy. The next Farm Bill should give a similar option to all commodities.”
There is a considerable amount of detail about the evolution of the cotton program – from removing lint as a covered commodity to adding seed cotton as a covered commodity – that is not contained in the letter. In this article, I walk through the history to provide more context.
First, to resolve the decade-long WTO Brazil cotton dispute (which involved, among other things, the U.S. Government having to pay the Brazilians $147 million per year in cash to fend off retaliation), cotton industry leadership suggested removing cotton as a covered commodity for Title I commodity programs (PLC and ARC) and modifying the marketing assistance loan. Second, in lieu of ARC/PLC, the 2014 Farm Bill provided cotton producers an industry-proposed area-wide insurance program, the Stacked Income Protection Plan (STAX). The premium subsidy for STAX was 80%, higher than the 65% subsidy authorized for the Supplemental Coverage Option (SCO) that is available for all crops. Third, upland cotton producers were provided Cotton Transition Assistance Payments (CTAP) for 2014 to aid in the transition to STAX. [READ MORE]