May 2002
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I wrote those words 13 months ago, in the April 2001 CEO's Corner, in an attempt to describe the consensus-building process that led to the development of NMPF's positions on the 2002 Farm Bill. NMPF had spent the better part of a year at that point trying to garner input from farmers across the country about what they would like to see included in the new Farm Bill.
Here we are now, a year later, and the 2002 Farm Bill has finally been finished. As of early May, it still needs to be approved by the House and Senate, and signed into law by President Bush, but it appears safe to say those things will happen predictably and quickly.
Rather than rehash the specifics of what's in the 2002 Farm Bill (you can find that elsewhere on this website), what I prefer to write about now is how and why it contains the dairy-related items in it. Because while we were always interested in achieving our policy goals, the process we followed was also directed by that familiar phrase that athletes old and young often hear from their coaches: It's not whether your win or lose, it's how you play the game.
After the vicious infighting the dairy producer community experienced during the 1996 Farm Bill, it became apparent that our community couldn't withstand another such debacle in the next Farm Bill. That's why NMPF sponsored a series of regional grass roots listening sessions, the Dairy Producer Conclaves, in the spring of 2000. By inviting dairy farmers to review and discuss issues of most importance to them, we believed we could find areas of consensus, and attempt to build a policy framework for a successful farm bill.
The Conclave process proved crucial not just to building unity among farmers, but also in helping make our lobbying efforts in Congress more effective. We were able to take the results of the Conclave consensus document and present it to leaders in the House and Senate as they devised the dairy title of the 2002 Farm Bill. On more than one occasion in the past year we heard from congressional staff, and the legislators themselves, that having a common set of goals made their job much easier.
We were always quick to point out to our elected representatives that we didn't see the new Farm Bill as merely an economic tool for dairy farmers. We were interested in an economic safety net, of course, but also in assistance with conservation, animal health, trade enhancement, food safety, and other areas critical to the success of dairy farming. What resulted from that process speaks very well for our efforts: maintenance of the dairy price support program; a new countercyclical payment program; a new national Johne's disease control program; reauthorization of the Dairy Export Incentive Program; requiring importers to pay their fair share into the checkoff program; more money for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program; and the list goes on.
As the House, and then the Senate, debated draft versions of the Farm Bill, we always made a concerted effort to remind everyone where we stood. When the dairy payment program was first proposed as a two-tier system with different regional payment formulas, we let our lawmakers know that any such program should be national, not regional, in scope. Living by the principles we espoused: unity, equitability, consistency and fairness was, in the end, more important that just taking the money any money and running. And in the end, we were rewarded with a national program that pays all farmers the same rate.
So, by focusing our testimony and recommendations on ideas and policies that are not regional in nature, we are greatly reducing the possibilities for conflict and tension that permeated the creation and implementation of the dairy title of the last Farm Bill.
Again, those are words from my column from April 2001, describing the forces behind the congressional testimony we presented to the House Agriculture Committee last spring. I truly believe these words, in hindsight, speak volumes about the value of playing the Farm Bill game by rules that treat everyone as equitably as possible. This is not a perfect measure, by any means, but all human ventures (particularly political ones) are going to have some shortcomings.
The 2002 Farm Bill has something for just about everyone, and most importantly, its dairy provisions reflect an open, honest and inclusive process that focused not just on the end result, but also on the means we used to reach that end. And we all benefited from that process.
