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American Soybean Association, others oppose White House ag budget cuts

 

Leading ag groups oppose the White House budget proposal.  One of them is the American Soybean Association, which says the deep cuts would hurt agriculture.

ASA Communications Director Patrick Delaney says, “These are programs that really help farmers in the form of reducing their risk, in the form of helping to create markets overseas.”

Delaney tells Brownfield the 36% or 28-and-a-half billion dollar cut to crop insurance would be huge and believes the program has become a victim of misunderstanding and misinformation.  “It’s not a profit center.  Farmers are not getting a check.  This is something that if you have to draw an indemnity under crop insurance, you’re having a career-altering bad year, you’re not just having a down year.”

And, he says the White House budget would be detrimental to foreign trade.  “You take a program like the Market Access Program and the Foreign Market Development Program, these are two of the real cornerstone trade expansion programs at USDA and they are really fundamental to our work within the soybean industry through ASA and through the U.S. Soybean Export Council to expanding markets in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and around the world.”

Delaney says farmers will have to reach out to their Members of Congress to educate them about the importance of the farm programs, “letting them know what they see in things like the Crop Insurance Program, in things like Title I programs or MAP (Market Access Program) and FMD (Foreign Market Development), or other programs like Agricultural Research and Conservation.”

ASA leaders also oppose the 9-billion dollar cut to Title I commodity supports including the Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) programs, and the elimination of the 70-million acre Conservation Stewardship Program and the Regional Conservation Partnership Program.

The American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Farmers Union are among the ag groups that oppose the USDA budget cuts.

 

 

 

 

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