May 13, 2002
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email:CGalen@nmpf.org
The Farm Bill contains “a portfolio of policies that will benefit all of America's dairy farmers,” according to NMPF President and CEO Jerry Kozak, who represented the dairy producer community at the White House event Monday morning. “The bill signing ceremony today is the culmination of nearly two years of hard but rewarding work by local and regional dairy producer organizations, without whose cooperation and foresight it would have been very difficult to reach a consensus on this bill's dairy provisions.”
Kozak was referring to the Dairy Producer Conclave, initiated in the spring of 2000 by the nation's dairy cooperative organizations, through which a series of consensus policy positions was developed to guide NMPF's efforts as it worked with Congress and the Bush Administration in drafting the 2002 Farm Bill. Most of the items identified by the Conclave process were included in the six-year, $180 billion Farm Bill, including conservation assistance, animal health and food safety programs, and trade enhancement – in addition to the establishment of an economic safety net.
The 2002 Farm Bill contains NMPF's number-one economic priority, reauthorization of the dairy price support program. Kozak said that the extension of the price support program in this bill “stands in sharp contrast to the outcome of the 1996 Farm Bill, which actually eliminated the program. What a difference six years can make.”
The new Farm Bill also contains a new multi-year countercyclical payment program for dairy farmers, which NMPF worked hard to ensure would be a national program paying all farmers a uniform rate of disbursement.
The 2002 Farm Bill also contains several other programs critical to the future of the dairy industry, including:
- Authorizing a new national Johne's disease control program;
- Requiring dairy importers to pay their fair share into the National Dairy Board for promotion and research projects;
- Increasing funding for dairy and other livestock producers through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), and raising the eligibility caps for the program;
- Extending the Dairy Export Incentive Program (DEIP);
- Increasing Market Access Program (MAP) funds, and;
- Fixing the statutory mandatory inventory and price reporting language to prevent further costly reporting errors by the USDA.
“When NMPF began working in 2000 to pull people together behind a common set of goals, we recognized that we needed to take a multi-faceted approach to maintaining the economic health of the U.S. dairy producer sector. We knew an economic safety net would be important, but there are so many other areas critical to the success of our industry, and I'm very proud to see those areas addressed by this new Farm Bill,” he said.
Kozak praised House and Senate leaders, including the chairmen and ranking members of the chambers' respective Agriculture Committees, for listening to farm organizations and crafting a final version that the industry could support.
“This measure represents both good policy as well as good politics, and that is a tribute to its shepherds in Congress and also in the Bush Administration,” Kozak said.
The National Milk Producers Federation, headquartered in Arlington, VA, develops and carries out policies that advance the well-being of U.S. dairy producers and the cooperatives they collectively own. The members of NMPF's 30 cooperatives produce the majority of the U.S. milk supply, making NMPF the voice of 60,000 dairy producers on Capitol Hill and with government agencies.