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Congressional Testimony
July 17, 2001, Tuesday
SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING TESTIMONY
LENGTH: 3152 words
COMMITTEE:
SENATE AGRICULTURE, NUTRITION AND FORESTRY
HEADLINE: 2002
FARM BILL
TESTIMONY-BY: BARBARA DETERMAN, PRESIDENT
AFFILIATION: NATIONAL PORK PRODUCERS COUNCIL
BODY: July 17, 2001
Testimony of Barbara
Determan President National Pork Producers Council
Before the Committee
on Agriculture U.S. House of Representatives
Concerning: Draft
Farm Bill Concept Paper Proposal
Mr. Chairman and
Members of the Committee,
I am Barbara Determan, a hog producer and
grain farmer from Early, Iowa. I am also the President of the National Pork
Producers Council (NPPC). Pork producers are pleased to testify today on the
draft
farm bill concept paper and want to expressly thank this
Committee for moving forward expeditiously toward the development and passage of
the next
farm bill. The U.S. pork industry represents a
major value-added activity in the agricultural economy and a major contributor
to the overall U.S. economy. The $8.7 billion of gross receipts from hog
marketings in 1999 represent only a portion of the economic activity supported
by the industry. Although the U.S. hog industry has under-one changes in recent
years, over 575,595 US residents are involved in various aspects of the industry
ranging from input suppliers to producers, to processors and handlers as well as
mainstreet businesses that benefit from purchases by people in these industries.
Overall, the U.S. hog industry uses fully 16 percent of the soybeans and 12
percent of the corn raised in America. Changing Pork Industry Trends
Global competition, new technologies, and consumer demands are but a few
of the factors that are rapidly changing the U.S. pork industry. Hoc's are
raised differently today than even just 220 years ago. Hog farms are managed in
new and innovative ways. Hogs are marketed on a carcass weight-carcass merit
basis verses the traditional live weight selling in the past. Both producers and
the packing industry are vastly more efficient but much less flexible than in
the past.
Consumer attitudes will determine the future face of the U.S.
pork industry. Consumers are generally more demanding about what they eat, its
nutritional content and taste. They are more cognizant of and more accepting of
familiar brands than ever before which is leading producers into new and
exciting marketing and production alliance opportunities and market segmentation
and differentiation. Coordination of the production and processing chain with
consumer demands is more and more critical to the success of all industry
participants, but perhaps most critical to the future of producers.
The
pork industry is becoming increasing global and more competitive than ever
before. Because of the internet and the nature of or global communications,
information and technology are extremely mobile and instantaneous. Canada, the
EU, Brazil and Argentina are becoming worldwide competitors as their industries
grow and mature.
Food Safety and environmental protection will play an
ever- greater role in the decisions made on the farm. Consumers expect meat to
have zero risk of food borne pathogens, while also demanding a reduction in the
amount of antibiotics involved in livestock production. Environmentally,
agriculture is moving inexorably from an unregulated to a regulated industry,
driven again by consumer desire for food produced with little adverse
environmental impact. Nutrients in rivers and streams caused by farm runoff will
no longer be an acceptable byproduct of productive modem American agriculture in
the future.
Conservation Provisions
Mr. Chairman, the $15.05
billion increase you have proposed for conservation spending over 10 years has
the potential to make your
farm bill one of the important
milestones in federal conservation policy. You are to be commended for your
proposal, and we welcome and appreciate this opportunity to provide you with our
views and observations as you craft the details of these provisions for your
farm bill package. We would also like to commend Subcommittee
Chairman Lucas for the conservation bill he submitted last week, which makes a
tremendous, similar commitment to meeting agriculture's conservation needs. Both
your efforts have given great impetus to the goal of keeping producers working
their lands profitably, while elevating every farmer's commitment to preserving
our natural resources.
Your draft concept will be particularly helpful
to our efforts. A $1.21 billion a year increase for the Environmental Quality
Incentives Pro-ram (EQIP), 50 percent of which would go to livestock and poultry
producers, will help us meet our ongoing livestock nutrient management -oafs.
Unfortunately, we know that the needs of the livestock sector far exceed
these planned increases. For example, since 1997, EQfP has not been able to fund
196,000 contract applications for $1.4 billion in environmental practices. Of
that, $800 million came from livestock producers alone. As we have stated in
previous testimony on this topic, livestock and poultry producers face, or will
soon face, costly environmental regulations as a result of state or federal law
designed to protect water and air quality. In addition to state requirements,
the regulations will come from the Clean Water Act TNIIDL program, the proposed
CAFO permit requirements, and the Clean Air Act.
The following table
summarizes the conservation funding needs of livestock operations with 50 animal
units or more.
10 Year Costs, By Cate2ory-and Species for operations
with more than 50 animal units (in million dollars)
found on hard copy
We commend you for the increases you have proposed to help meet these
needs. The above analysis leads us to respectfully request that the committee
take full advantage of any opportunity that may exist to expand EQIP funding
further in order to come as close as possible to the $1.2 billion a year level
of assistance needed by the livestock and poultry sectors.
There are
several specific issues that we would like to address as you know prepare final
legislative language for the conservation title of your
farm
bill. We have stated many of the following comments and positions in
previous testimony before this Committee, but they bear repeating and need to be
placed in the context of the existing statute.
We feel very strongly
that livestock and poultry producers must be eligible for conservation cost
share or incentives assistance regardless of the size of their operations. We
understand that the legislation to be drafted from your
farm
bill concept paper will not exclude any operation, based on size, from
receiving EQIP assistance and we thank you for that.
The public clearly
wants improved environmental performance and greater environmental benefits from
our operations, large and small, and we are anxious to meet these goals. The
environmental regulations and expectations we face do not distinguish among
operations on the basis of size and we see no reason why assistance to livestock
operations to meet these environmental objectives should discriminate on that
basis. Family owned or operated livestock operations come in all sizes, and all
of these will need cost share assistance if they are to remain economically
viable while providing the public with the environmental benefits they obviously
seek.
It is our view that a payment limitation schedule comparable in
overall size to that used in row crops is far more appropriate, except that
payments should not be limited by year but by the needs of the overall EQIP
contract. We believe a minimum of $200,000 per contract is needed for this work,
and even that will be too low in many cases. We welcome the opportunity to work
cooperatively with you as you finalize this provision in your bill.
We
feel that protecting water and air quality as it relates to livestock and
poultry manure management must be national priorities for EQIP. We encourage
your final bill to ensure the program has both of these among its top
priorities. We also believe that while the installation of EQIP conservation
practices can and will provide benefits to wildlife, the goal of wildlife
habitat preservation should not be a purpose of EQIP. In our view, the Wildlife
Habitat Incentives Program (WHIP) is the best programmatic home for helping
producers practice wildlife conservation on working agricultural lands. We
encourage you to remove wildlife as an explicit purpose of EQIP, and support
your effort to substantially increase funds for WHIP to meet the worthy goals of
protecting habitat.
Explicit provisions must be enacted that structure
and support the joint effort that will be needed from federal and non-federal
technical assistance providers to ensure that EQIP financial assistance will
achieve it intended purpose. We commend you for the $850 million over 10 years
that your concept paper has proposed for federal and non-federal technical
assistance, and support inclusion of these funds in the final bill. We note that
in addition to these funds, we continue to support the use of EQIP funds for the
provision of technical assistance, as under current law.
Our cost
analysis referenced above incorporates technical assistance costs explicitly. We
believe it is very important that this bill not adopt any limitation on the
amount of technical assistance to be provided under EQIP that is arbitrary and
otherwise not based on what it really costs to help producers design, install
and manage conservation practices.
Financial assistance is essential,
but without full and qualified technical support. the financial assistance will
fail. We want EQIP to succeed, and feel the old adage. "penny wise and pound
foolish" definitely applies to this situation.
We feel that particular
attention must be paid in the legislative language to ensuring that the program
allows for the participation of third party private sector experts to supplement
the technical assistance to be provided by USDA. A voucher system is one way
that could be used to meet this need, but there are several others, and we are
prepared to offer, immediately, detailed suggestions regarding how this can be
accomplished.
We request that your bill address the issue of how EQEP
will meet many of the nation's top conservation priorities that are not properly
delineated on the basis of small geographic areas, like a watershed. The ability
of the program to place emphasis on watershed-based assistance must be retained.
But there is a substantial number of critical, high value, high priority
conservation practices providing valuable environmental benefits that producers
across broad parts of the country need assistance to implement. EQIP must place
considerable and major emphasis on helping producers adopt these latter
conservation practices that are not defined on the basis of a geographic area.
We also ask that your bill examine certain existing provisions of EQIP that add
considerable administrative burden with little associated environmental benefit.
In particular, we believe EQIP must retain its emphasis on producing significant
and valuable environmental benefits, but that it should do so without the
impractical and impossible condition of truly "maximizing" such benefits. The
term maximization implies being able to compare accurately and equitably tens of
thousands of EQIP conservation practices being implemented under entirely
different field conditions and often for very different conservation purposes.
Maximization under these conditions is unfeasible and not an appropriate
objective. Instead, the pro-ram should emphasize securing substantial
environmental benefits per dollar expended.
We also believe that changes
are needed to clarify that an EQIP plan, while necessary to secure a contract
for EQIP payments, is not needed to apply for be accepted into the program. The
pro-ram should have proper procedures to govern application and acceptance into
the program, but an EQIP plan is far too detailed and costly a requirement for
this purpose. We also believe that the legislation must make clear that an EQEP
plan can be designed to address only one conservation objective and involve only
one eligible practice, and that contracts can be for one year to 10 years,
depending on the conservation practices involved.
Mr. Chairman, we also
note that your proposal would increase the acreage cap of the Conservation
Reserve Pro-ram (CRP) to 40 million acres. We can support this increase as long
as the final legislative language makes it clear that enrollment of these new
acres is to be guided by the goal of keeping productive working lands working.
When an entire farm field is enrolled into the CRP, agricultural use of the
field is lost for the term of the contract. In our view, this means that that
emphasis must be placed on enrolling buffers and portions of field. The number
of whole fields enrolled in the CRP program should be substantially limited. We
are prepared to work with you to define the appropriate purposes for these new
acres.
Research
In previous testimony, NPPC urged the Committee
to double agriculture research funding over the next five years. Funding in
agriculture research has remained flat for the last 15 years while other federal
research has significantly increased. This trend is no longer acceptable.
Additional money is needed to enable producers to continue to produce safe and
better food. While this goal is not reflected in the draft bill concept paper,
we would hope that the Committee can revisit this issue.
NPPC believes
that future animal research should be built around the goals of the Food Animal
Integrated Research (FAIR) 2002. Those goals are:
1 .Strengthen Global
Competitiveness
2.Enhance Human Nutrition
3.Protect Animal
Health
4.Improve Food Safety and Public Health
5.Ensure
Environmental Quality
6.Promote Animal Well-Being
Trade Issues
Market Access Program (MAP) Authorization
NPPC has long
supported increasing the authorization of the Market Access Program (MAP) and
thanks the Committee for doubling its authorization level from $90 to $180
million per year. MAP and the Cooperator Program, which is also reauthorized in
this draft concept paper, has been instrumental in helping boost U.S. pork
exports.
Unlike other sectors of the global economy, the agricultural
sector is still rife with subsidized exports. While programs such as MAP have
been reduced in recent years, our foreign competitors have continued to heavily
subsidize and aggressively promote their products in an effort to capture an
increasing share of the world market at the expense of U.S. producers. In fact,
a recent USDA study shows foreign competitor nations outspending the U.S. by as
much as 20 to 1. These nations are spending over $100 million just to promote
their products into the United States - more than what the U.S. currently spends
under MAP to help promote exports of all American grown and produced commodities
world-wide.
The MAP is a cost-share program through which farmers and
other participants are required to contribute as much as 50 percent of their own
resources to be eligible. Indeed, funding for pork export initiatives and
foreign market development are largely supplied by the pork checkoff, which
represents a percentage of the hog price received by the producer. The USDA
Market Access Program and Foreign Market Development Program funds complement
the pork checkoff expenditures in markets around the world.
It has been
and continues to be an excellent example of an effective public-private
partnership.
Global Food Assistance
NPPC continues to support
the creation of a new international school lunch pro-ram designed to help feed
hungry children, improve nutritional standards and provide an outlet for surplus
U.S. agricultural products. We feel that this pro-ram, the Global Food for
Education and Child Nutrition Act, presents a promising opportunity for American
producers to assist children in struggling areas of the world. NPPC cautions,
however, that it is important for meat and dairy products to be fully
represented to the greatest extent possible as this program goes forward.
Trade Promotion Authority Should Be Renewed
U.S. pork producers
are major beneficiaries of the Uruguay Round Agreement and NAFrA. While a few
bilateral trade agreernents are theoretically possible without the passage of
Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), the -greatest benefits to American agriculture
will come from the launch of a new multilateral round of negotiations, and that
cannot happen without TPA. It is vitally important, both substantively, and
symbolically, for the president to have TPA when ministers gather in November in
Qatar in an attempt to launch a new round.
Since 1995, when the Uruguay
Round Agreement went into effect, U.S. pork exports to the world have increased
55 percent in volume terms and 40 percent in value terms. In 2000 the U.S.
exported a record 566,900 metric tons of pork valued at $1.316 billion. Pork
exports from the U.S. to Mexico exploded 1994 when NAFrA went into effect. Even
with the devaluation of the peso U.S. pork increased market share in Mexico --
this never would have happened without NAFTA. Mexico is now the pork industry's
second most important market behind Japan.
The United States is uniquely
positioned to reap the benefits of liberalized world pork trade. U.S. pork
producers are the lowest cost producers of the safest, highest quality pork in
the world. But without the renewal of trade negotiating authority for the
Executive branch by Congress, U.S. pork producers and the rest of U.S.
agriculture will be forced to remain on the sidelines while other countries
continue to negotiate new trade agreements at a staggering pace.
The
rapidly expanding Brazilian pork industry -- a key competitor to the U.S.
industry -- now has preferential access into many markets to the detriment of
U.S. producers. Canada, another significant competitor, has gained preferential
access into Chile and other Western Hemisphere nations through free trade
agreements. While the United States sits idly by, Chile, Mexico, and Canada have
wrestled away from the United States the mantle of the Western Hemisphere's
trade leader. These countries along with the European Union are gaining the
benefits of trade for their citizens while the U.S. engages in an over-hyped
dialogue about the benefits of trade.
Rural Development
Finally,
Mr. Chairman, NPPC commends your efforts to add significantly to a modest
program begun a few years ago to provide grants for start-up farmer-owned value
added processing facilities. During the past few years, economists of all
stripes have pointed to the need for farmers to become more than commodity
producers and to find ways to capture more of the consumer food dollar. Value
added enterprises are the wave of the future and we commend your commitment
toward expanding this opportunity by increasing funding, to $370 million over 10
years.
LOAD-DATE: July 18, 2001